Substack writers, you need a website

The strongest consensus was not "ditch Substack." It was "don’t let Substack be your only home." Several people described the same operating model: publish first on your own site, then copy the post into Substack for newsletter distribution and discovery. That approach keeps the archive, URLs, and formatting under your control while still exploiting Substack’s built-in recommendation loops and subscriber flow. People with real subscriber counts said those loops are not imaginary. Others with smaller publications said the internal network effect is overstated and most of their readers still arrive from outside links. Put together, the picture is clear. Substack helps some writers a lot, especially with growth and monetization, but it is not magic and it is not evenly useful. A second theme was that the hard problem is not hosting pages. It is distribution and operations. Running a plain website is cheap and easy now. Running email, handling deliverability, managing subscriptions, processing payments, and dealing with tax and compliance is where platforms earn their cut. That is why even people who distrust Substack still concede its value. The thread treated this as the real tradeoff, not some abstract fight between purity and convenience. The lock-in warnings got more specific than the article did. Commenters pointed out that while Substack lets you export subscriber emails and posts, newer surfaces like Notes are not portable, app-based subscriptions can route through Apple or Google, and Substack has already nudged readers toward its app instead of the web. That made the advice more concrete. Owning a custom domain is helpful, but it does not fully solve lock-in if your audience relationship is happening inside non-exportable product features. There was also a notable side current about quality and reader experience. Some people now treat Substack and Medium URLs as a spam signal because of aggressive subscribe prompts, paywalls, and mediocre content. Others said the opposite, that Substack has become one of the few places where they consistently find good long-form writing. The useful conclusion is less about taste than about brand risk. Publishing on a platform means inheriting some of that platform’s reputation, good and bad. The discussion also widened beyond Substack itself. POSSE, "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere," was the clearest shorthand for the dominant view. Ghost came up repeatedly as the obvious alternative for people who want newsletter tooling without Substack’s politics or tighter ecosystem. A few commenters pushed newer open publishing efforts built on AT Protocol, trying to recreate Substack’s network effects without central lock-in. Interesting idea, but everyone implicitly admitted the same problem: open tooling is easier than open distribution. That remains the gap Substack fills.