A guy I follow on micro.blog, after having to go through four or five steps just to read a Substack post, posted “Substack? What are you for?” To which I replied: “As near as I can tell, it’s there to monetize the writing of Nazis, with enough non-Nazis to provide some cover for the firm.”
My brother chimed in to point out, “You can subscribe to nazistack blogs with an RSS reader,” which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.
I’ve been avoiding any newsletter on Substack for a couple of years now, because of the “Nazi bar” problem. Even so, I’ve ended up with a couple of subscriptions to Substack newsletters, because a couple of non-Substack newsletters I subscribed to moved there, and Substack let them just subscribe me without asking. And because I wouldn’t have subscribed if I wasn’t interested, I didn’t unsubscribe from every one of those.
Now, though, based on Steven’s good idea, I’ve gone in and added those newsletters to my RSS feed. Now I can unsubscribe from those newsletters, and still see their content—in my feeds, which is the best place to see it anyway!
And for folks that only publish via newsletters, KTN [ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ ] is a pretty decent option to convert them to atom feeds.