Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best

Substack Writers Concerned as Subscriptions ‘Plummet’ Due to Follow Feature

Substack writers are expressing their concerns about the platform’s following feature on social media, which some argue is suppressing their subscription growth.

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter

The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.

Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”

Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]

Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Substack Doesn't Want You to Leave - Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog

Substack's business model is unsustainable—unless they lock all their writers in.

The promise of ATproto is social media without corporate overlords | The Web Dev Podcast Series 1

Developers building apps on ATproto, the technology behind social media apps like Bluesky and Leaflet, are promising us a future where we own our content and aren’t at the whims of a tiny handful of companies. Software engineer Zeu Capua talks to host Jason Lengstorf about the promise of social media where we can actually own our own data.

A Tweet Before Dying

The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.