My New Newsletter
You can now sign up to get my blog posts in your email inbox by subscribing with this form.
And as an initial test, to ensure that this mic is on (tap tap skreeeEEEEEEE), later today, I’ll send out this blog post to all subscribers.
This email has now been sent!
What?
The content of this newsletter will be my blog posts, more or less as they are here. It’s another option for being alerted to new writing from me. The other options are still: Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, and RSS.
I will send out one email per post, not a digest. For the past six months volume has been an average of 3⅓ posts per month. This has increased a bit lately, hitting a new record of six posts in January.
Why?
I’ve been thinking about how to grow less reliant on corporate (I might cheekily say, “legacy”) social media platforms for connecting with friends, community, and readers. One conclusion I’ve drawn is that I need to diversify the ways I distribute my writing and the ways I hear from people in reply. In the future, if I decide to drop a platform, it won’t feel like I’m losing touch with everyone.
Email strikes me as a particularly good distribution channel:
- It naturally produces a redundant and distributed archive of my writing in the inboxes of subscribers. This archive is not subject to the whims of social media platform owners and content moderators.¹
- Unlike RSS – or my website itself, for that matter – it’s a two-way channel. When I send out a newsletter, a reader can reply right where they’re reading it.²
- It’s a distribution channel that is in my control. I rely on my mailing list provider, of course, but if I become dissatisfied with them, I can take my email list and go elsewhere. This is much harder to do with Facebook friends, Discord servers, or Bluesky followers.
- Almost everyone has an email address.
This isn’t a unique line of thought. It’s not a coincidence that the social media fragmentation era has been met with the Substack newsletter era – though even Substack now does seems to be hard at work increasing lock-in and walling off parts of their garden.
I know lots of people who hate email, though. If that’s you – the newsletter might not be for you. That’s OK! That’s why the other options exist.
How?
I settled on Buttondown as my newsletter provider. I like their indie vibes, their configuration flexibility, and the suite of features I’m likely to grow into in the future. In particular I like that they have RSS-to-email functionality which will let me automatically generate emails from my blog posts from my existing RSS feed. Mailchimp has similar functionality, but in playing with it, I wasn’t able to configure it the way I wanted – email-per-post rather than digest – and, honestly, I was relieved, because using Intuit products leaves a vomitous taste in my mouth.
Though, to start out with, I’m going to draft and send emails by hand. This is partially because I want to get more familiar with how Buttondown works and partially because their RSS-to-email feature is paid – and I’m not ready to pay for this until I know for sure that it’s providing a benefit to me and my readers.³
At least for the moment, I won’t be tracking email open rates. I have mixed feelings on the ethics of web and email analytics generally⁴ and for the moment, it’s easy for me to forego. I may enable them later on⁵ if I really need to assess the value of having a newsletter – but you can also help me assess that value by signing up and replying to my emails to share your thoughts and let me know you’re reading!
It is arguably subject to the whims of email service providers, but there’s not much precedent for, e.g., Gmail deleting emails out of your inbox without your consent. ↩︎
I recognize that this isn’t true of all newsletters, but it will be for mine, at least until I become wildly famous. I don’t anticipate having a subscribership large enough for this to be a chore. I expect my subscribers will mostly be my personal friends who I will be delighted to receive correspondence from. ↩︎
This sort of thing in Product Management is sometimes referred to as a “concierge MVP” – a minimum viable product that is manually operated rather than automated, to test out a feature before investing in building it out. ↩︎
Though I do have some rudimentary analytics enabled on this site – but they’re through my hosting provider, so they only expose data to me that my hosting provider already has anyway. ↩︎
I will make a visible announcement on list if I do so! ↩︎