• jackalope@lemmy.ml
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    13 days ago

    Good, though more of a WordPress alternative. I’d like to see actual substack alternative in the fediverse, with the ability for users to pay authors for their work, via subscription, as substack does.

    I know people are worried about monetization in the fediverse but authors need payment for their work. Subscriptions don’t have the same perverse incentives as advertising.

    Flipboard ceo has mentioned he is supportive of the idea.

        • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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          10 days ago

          The docs are super unclear, and written for those not familiar with ActivityPub.

          In future, we hope to develop a deeper integration between your social web profile and followers <> and your public website and registered members. To start with, though, they operate independently from one another.

          Your social web profile and followers are separate to the rest of your site and memberships, so you can think of it as a new, additional distribution channel.

          Emphasis mine. I think the setup is basically federating links in Mastodon style. So if you have a post available as a subscription, it will prompt a login after clicking through.

  • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    Isn’t ghost more of a Wordpress alternative? And calling it a substack alternative is trendy.

    • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
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      13 days ago

      It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.

  • hisao@ani.social
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    13 days ago

    Never used Substack, can someone please explain how this is different from lets say Medium?

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
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      13 days ago

      Medium is proprietary and publicly traded so is on the enshitification train full speed ahead

      • hisao@ani.social
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        13 days ago

        So Medium and Substack are similar? And Ghost is also an open-source alternative to Medium as much as it is alternative to Substack?

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        13 days ago

        Ghost is also a non-profit. It’s kind of a poster child of sustainable software development.

    • Doug Holland@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      Medium has a paywall, which tends to keep me away, but Substack pays Nazis to post there. This makes the Substack platform distasteful for those who dislike fascists.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        Oh, interesting. I knew something was off about the place when I kept seeing anti-“woke” conservative opinion pieces posted there, but I thought it was just a bunch of MAGA morons voluntarily role-playing as “independent” “journalists”.

    • ericjmorey@discuss.online
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      13 days ago

      Substack is newsletter focused, subscriptions are for individual substack writers’ newsletters (you can’t access all substack newsletters with a single subscription) and it has a recommendation feature that writers like because it can help them grow their subscribers and therefore grow their revenue.

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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      13 days ago

      Maybe it’s just their way of restricting the beta, but I really hope they’re not moving towards an enshittified open-source business model, “we’re still technically open source if you use the *retch* community version… but it’s out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we’re only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already.”

      • Valon_Blue@sh.itjust.works
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        13 days ago

        They have stated on their blog that the self-hosted update is in progress. They’re just only rolling out to pro right now as there’s more work to be done on the self-hosted version.

      • jqubed@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        They had a fairly detailed blog post a few days or weeks ago about the rollout. The plan is to bring it to open source but they’re still working on issues with it that are easier to control on their own servers. IIRC the code for it is actually in the open source version but disabled. I think they said if you know what you’re doing you could go into the code to enable it but it’s unusably slow right now, or something like that.