Substack wants — even more than its general friendliness to Nazi accounts — to lock you into its ecosystem. The longer you linger, the harder they are going to make it for you to leave and take your mailing lists/payment relationships with you. They’re actively fucking with your money
Gotta say, getting real tired of every government and for-profit entity doing everything it can to carve up and wall off the internet
Enclosure of the commons, baybee
I understand people’s reticence to move when the fear is that their paying audience won’t follow them. The thing is, Substack is increasingly trying to engineer it so that your paying audience *can’t* easily follow you, because they’re locked into Substack, not you!
I like Ghost a lot. Buttondown and beehiv are supposed to be pretty good. Hell, start a blog and put up a Ko-Fi. Do not let any newsletter site — especially a Nazi sucking one — control your ability to get paid for your own independent project
fwiw, this particular case is not so much a substack thing, but an Apple thing. it's true of any service that allows people to subscribe in-app, and there are obvious reasons to want to allow that. like if Ghost made an app and wanted in-app subscriptions, the same thing would apply.