A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it’s funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.
Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton’s publication Platformer, Molly White’s newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.
. . .
If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don’t have to do anything to continue paying you.
Is there no FOSS alternative we can promote?
Ghost is FOSS, that’s part of the whole point.
Ah my bad, I saw $9 on the site and figured it was a paid service things
Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. It’s a pretty good system I think.
I don’t think the software matters much tbh. It’s about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some “prestige” substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.