Substack keeps saying "eventually" on using your own, but with no clear timeline or real justification for not launching with it. Same reason I won't touch Hey.
That said, it’s a fair point, and I understand wanting to wait until we support it.
The same with happen with Substack. They need to grow, just like every other VC-funded startup. An inevitable decline in quality will result.
Granted, I do think Substack is more of a platform than an aggregator compared to Facebook. But people that want to hop on Substack just need to know that you are (as of now) going to be sharing your brand with Substack and also that you will be at the whim of their feature development and what their roadmap looks like. They raised their Series A a year ago but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming.
As is Patreon, as well. Their website is slow and a pain to use. They just stopped publishing direct, hard links to S3 in subscription RSS feeds late last year or early this year (I forget which). They don't support generating per-user or per-timeframe affiliate/coupon URLs, despite suggesting that to their users as a paid content option.
Ghost made a big deal in comments on this site awhile back about "how much work" was put into integrating with Patreon in regard to generating password-less links, but really... Patreon generates password-less links already, as do a hundred email marketing apps, not rocket science. It'd take someone about 5 seconds to find a Django tutorial explaining how to generate one-time links on youtube, I would wager.
All of these platforms suffer more from their founders trying to be what they're not to some degree, in my opinion. A marketing platform run by people who aren't experienced in marketing isn't going to do well. Why do we expect that a publishing platform run by a journalist or an artist is going to do well?
I fully expect one day for Substack to end up like Medium, but having spoken to quite a few of the people there on all kinds of matters, they're fighting against it really hard.
When the inevitable does happen, I'll take Tales From The Dork Web elsewhere. Until then, It's the first non self-hosted platform I've used for writing that I'm actually ok with, and I'm pretty functionally paranoid.