Really curious about what interesting Substacks people are regularly reading. They don't even have to be political - I'm getting kind of burned out unless someone has something deeply insightful to write. Ones I've followed to varying degrees:
Eugyppius (Best COVID commentary out there) Paul Thacker Disinformation Chronicle (self explanatory) Chris Bray Tell Me How This End (cultural commentary) Matt Taibbi (solid old school journalist who tries too hard to take a middleground stance) Reality's Last Stand (lots of biology/sex/gender stuff from a scientist)
What's the difference between a substack and blog? Never heard of substacks before.
It's Wordpress, except unlike Wordpress where you can host it yourself, is yet another single point of failure that can be taken down at the discretion of Cloudflare and/or their domain registrar.
Your self-hosted Wordpress instance is way more vulnerable to deplatforming via Cloudflare/Registrar/DDoS/Hacking/etc than Substack.
I understand the distrust & everyone should back up their Substack & subscriber info in some way. But there are positives to them too
You're also a smaller target and have a greater number of options if you self host.
If you're on substack then all it takes is someone else attracting attention or gaining enough popularity for the Regime to decide to nuke the entire site and you with it. And you're dependent on the admins' response to that action, as well as the admins' continued benevolence. They have to play nice with some payment processor somewhere. If their payment processor refuses to do business with them unless they nuke your site, how long will they keep your site up if keeping it up means they and the other 999 sites can't get paid?
How often are Jim's Blog or The Z Man in the news? Never, despite them being fairly popular on this side of politics and having far more radical content than anything you'd see on substack. And even then Jim had to temporarily shut his blog down late last year for a couple months, but when it came back under a new domain and hosted in another country it was as though it had never gone down.
Substack is just a pro free speech blogging platform with built in monetization options.