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Comment by famahar | Hacker News Reader

Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.

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I think one problem people have is payment processing. There really needs to be a federal program to allow people to easily transfer money as payment. There are too many extractive middlemen with rentier economies and ethics.

There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.

Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.

I wonder how accessible would it be to put article source on Patreon and make a static site that fetches and displays them via Javascript?

I believe that this is where someone like Supertab [1] could really pop off. I don’t honestly don’t think having this as a country-specific service would be useful/beneficial. Not affiliated with ST, just have a friend who works there. I’m yet to encounter a website that offers them, though.

[1]: https://www.supertab.co/

If only there was some kind of Internet money, that would not need to rely on governments.

> Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters?

What Substack provides for its users:

- Webpage

- CMS

- WYSIWYG editor

- Email newsletters / notifications

- Payment processing / Subscription handling

I'm going to go with yes.

I think you can get the first ones with any blog engine.

It's the payment bit that's the key here.

You could do all of those on Typepad in 2008 except sending some posts only to paying subscribers https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/feedburner-typep... You had to wait until 2017 for that https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-money-wit...

People have made money on the Internet for decades before Substack. Ask your customers to mail you a cheque, or send them a Paypal/Venmo/Cashapp payment and manually process their subscription. People will understand that you're not Amazon and waiting a day or two to get access to your content won't be a dealbreaker for them. This way, you control the pricing and spare your customer the hassle of another monthly subscription.

If your newsletter is a side gig, sure, use Substack. But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over. Worse still when it's not a self-sustaining business whose primary obligations are to venture capitalist growthbros rather than paying customers.

Yes. I think it is too hard for the average person. It is one reason why some of these other became popular

I think the difficulty isn't so much in the making of the blog, but the hosting it. I think a non-technical person could probably Google their way through getting Hugo to render with one of the default templates, but it's still kind of hard to understand how to deploy stuff to a place to host the

Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.

DigitalOcean has one-click WordPress.

But if you’re clicking around in the DO control panel, you’ve already conquered a significant amount of technophobia.

You still need a domain, though.

Which makes me recall that many domain registrars have complementary web hosting.

I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.

Email deliverability is a nightmare. You need mega reputation to not end up in spam filters.

ghost + stripe + mailgun = ez mode

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