Considering leaving Substack

The recent fight between Twitter and Substack means my substack newsletter is trashed.

I was using twitter posts to have previews of newsarticles and also the work of artists who would tweet.

Now since Substack decided to compete with Twitter, my efforts are trashed.
And substack doesn’t have notes, artists aren’t going to bother with notes, and they really don’t have support but cheerleading instead.

Who has switched over to Ghost from Substack.

I tried Substack but I like to self-host my websites. Ghost is super fast, modern and easy if you like to go with defaults.

Ghost can handle subscriptions, different tiers and comments with a couple of customizations very well designed from the UI.

That’s the good, now the downsides:

  • Limited comments and members to english.
  • No SSO.
  • Exclusive for Stripe.
  • Handlebars on customizations that will keep almost every designer outside your scope (nobody wants to learn, 99% is pursuing money).
  • Good themes are too over-priced but that seems to be the commercial and/or marketing model of the team and I understand it.

So, if you want to limit your audience to english and change fast and easy, you are OK on Ghost.

But if you want to work into your data or truly customize your website, you probably are looking for Strapi or Directus. They are open-source too.

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