Substack and the risk of disruption

Calls for people to get off Substack pop up regularly on the open social web. People argue against writers using Substack predominantly based on three reasons:

Regarding Nazi content, Substack's co-founder Hamish McKenzie told The Verge that it will not remove or demonetise Nazi content, after which more and more people started calling the place a nazi bar. This viewpoint has fairly widespread on networks like Bluesky and the fediverse, even as many writers on these platforms still depend on Substack. This viewpoint got further entrenched when the Substack app recently send out a push alert to promote a Nazi blog.

A new post by the Beehiiv CEO (another newsletter platform) talks about how Substack is creating further lock-in on the platform. There are multiple aspects to this:

All these arguments present a 'negative' reason for writers to move away from Substack: Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform because you think the platform is bad. The argument is mainly focused on people perceiving Substack to be bad, whether 'bad' here means ethical, financial or other reasons.

But there is another good reason to be very careful with depending on Substack: it is also hard to leave Substack when you think other platforms are good.

One of the main values that people see for using Substack is a combination of:

It is especially the second part that makes Substack appealing. Growing a new blogging platform is incredibly hard, and anything that helps with discoverability and marketing is valuable.

The open social web (which I'm defining here as a combination of the fediverse, atmosphere, nostr and farcaster) consists of multiple different attempts to build an open protocol for social networks. The first step that all these networks start with is with microblogging, since that is the easiest modality to bootstrap. However, the second modality that gets widely experimented with on all these networks is with longform writing and publishing.

All these writing platforms take a slighly different approach, but they do have one thing in common: the recognition that the social graph is valuable for distribution and promotion of your writing. That is why people try to integrate writing platforms on these open protocol. It gives new affordance to its users, as well as promising to connect to a wider network that can be used for distribution and promotion.

I think that none of these platforms have truly cracked the code yet on how to build a next-generation distribution system for long-form writing. The main barrier here is actually on the microblogging side, where nobody seems to have figured out a good UX yet to combine short microblogs together with longform writing into a single destination that users enjoy.

The open social web is effectively a bet made by people, saying that they can create the infrastructure layer on which a new social web can be build. If this bet pays off, it means that we will see a wide variety of social platforms that are able to replace the current social platforms.

This bet is by no means guaranteed to pay off. The future of the open social web is still uncertain. But if it does, it changes the dynamic around Substack as well.

It is realistic, though far from certain, to imagine a situation where a platform on the open social web has managed to:

In that context, the argument for Substack also changes: instead of people not wanting to be on Substack because they feel the platform is bad (for various ethical/financial reasons), people do not want to be on Substack because they think other platforms are better.

One takeaway from Musk, Twitter and people migrating away to other platforms is that only a limited amount of people will move to different platforms because they think the original platform is bad. Providing a platform that does something new that the previous platform could not do is a much more compelling motivation for people to switch.

I do not think we are at a phase yet where the blogging platforms on the open social web provide a radically better experience than Substack can. However, I do think that enough different people and companies are tackling this challenge in a way that makes it likely that at some point someone will crack the code, and build a publishing platform that does provide a major advantage over Substack.

And that becomes a risk for writers who are dependent on Substack. So far, Substack building their walled garden has had relatively minor impact writers building their business on Substack. But if all the people building alternative writing platforms on the open social web have anything to say about it, there might just become a time where being dependent on Substack has some significant opportunity costs.