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It's time to gradually exit Twitter.

While Substack is great, it's better to set up a paid newsletter at your own domain. You can do this in an hour and maintain it for less than $30 per month.

I wrote up a tutorial here to walk you through it:
balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-…
Why gradually exit Twitter? It's not just the hack. There are many overlapping issues around security, authentication, pseudonymity, distribution, incentives, and culture.

I greatly respect Jack and everything he's built. But we need a change. balajis.com/how-to-gradual…
Feel free to stop after you set up your paid newsletter. It's a useful thing in its own right.

But in terms of what's next, we may be able to knit these newsletters together into a decentralized media community, with individual sites as the new profiles.
balajis.com/how-to-gradual…
Come for the newsletter, stay for the network?

One approach to replacing Twitter is as follows: given enough newsletters at their own domains, we can experiment with decentralized web tech for linking them together, starting with a joint paid RSS feed.
balajis.com/how-to-gradual…
Also, if you're an employee of a media corp, you may not realize this but I really do want you to be CEO of your own publication!

So consider this a general amnesty for all past flamewars. Specifically if you have issues with setting up your paid newsletter, DM and I'll help. 💻
By the way, I have no stake in Ghost. It's open source. cc @JohnONolan ghost.org/about/
By the way, you can make all posts free and just build up a mailing list. Making posts paid is wholly optional.
Good piece by @jerrybrito in response to @micsolana’s great question the other day on the “freedom stack”.

Substack is great but self-hostable is better in long run. Also, you can export emails from Substack, but I'm not sure about subscriptions. sometimesright.com/2020/07/18/sub…
Again to be clear, I think Substack is a great company and fills an important niche. You can get started with a paid newsletter quickly. They have executed well and deserve massive success. And you can cross promote there.

BUT: own domain plus self-hosting option = max freedom.
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