Substack and the risk of disruption - Connected Places

There are a lot of reasons to use Substack: apart from doing "all the basic things of a newsletter writing platform well", it's free to get started and - crucially - helps you build an audience. But "Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform", as they're pursuing a classic lock-in strategy.

Any competitor must provide similar discoverability and marketing. And there are plenty on the open social web: from the fediverse's WriteFreely, WordPress and Ghost through to Farcaster's Paragraph, all recognising "that the social graph is valuable for distribution and promotion of your writing".

Laurens echoes my point about ATproto adoption: "Providing a platform that does something new that the previous platform could not do is a much more compelling motivation for people to switch", but doesn't think any have yet "cracked the code... 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."