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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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I don't know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there aren't getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying "don't like, don't read" works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesn't make someone into a Nazi.

That said, I don't personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.