Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack

An interesting read. I hadn't heard of the competitors popping up.

> And it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.

Surely those who got contracts have obligations to stay.

> One of Substack’s biggest newsletters, The Browser, with 11,000 paid subscribers, left for Ghost last August. Nathan Tankus, an economics writer who is leaving Substack over trans issues, has also moved to Ghost.

> But Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers.

> “The technology is designed to be decentralized, and there’s no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK,”

I'm guessing if you left a centralised platform over others opinions you are in for a really rough time on a decentralised one where anyone can host their servers under the same brand. Not sure if they've thought this through, Mastadon failed hilariously to keep Gab away, who now run the largest fediverse node out there.