A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.

Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton's publication Platformer, Molly White's newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.

. . .

If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don't have to do anything to continue paying you.

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[–] quinceyBones@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is there no FOSS alternative we can promote?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ghost is FOSS, that's part of the whole point.

[–] quinceyBones@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah my bad, I saw $9 on the site and figured it was a paid service things

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 7 points 1 day ago

Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. It's a pretty good system I think.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't think the software matters much tbh. It's about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some "prestige" substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.