yes
Discussion
Do you have any specific features/requirements for "email newsletters"? How would you use it?
so I have two Substacks, and the keys would be (1) ease of importing the email list such that you just tell your subscribers I’m switching, and they really don’t know the difference; (2) ease of composing/editing — make it as easy as Substack; (3) ease of payment — use nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9 or whatever to convert fiat payments into sats (probably a harder one); (4) podcasts and video —I upload my podcasts to Substack, and it sends out the feed to ITunes, Spotify, Fountain, etc.
If you could do (1) and (2) I would mirror my posts here — I actually already do with Highligher, though it lacks email, but all four would obsolete Substack entirely.
Substack takes a substantial chunk of the subscription revenue, BTW, and I think most people here would be happy to do the equivalent in sats. I know I would.
Imagine the biggest challenge for paid newsletters is most people built their audience via credit card subscribers, and getting those credit cards into sats for normies might be tough. That and hosting all the larger files like video and audio.
But maybe if it were just (1) and (2) I could do a Substack post announcing the Nostr newsletter, get some of the people to sign up and post different written content for those who were interested too.
Sorry, this is long, but bottom line the more avenues to escape centralized platforms, the better.
Wow that's a ton of input, thank you!
1. There will definitely be a way to import emails (not credit cards, just email addresses), so if you started sending emails from npub.pro people wouldn't necessarily need to be notified - they'd just receive your emails from a different provider. I guess you'd only need to notify people if they're active Substack users who prefer commenting etc on Substack. If there are many active Substack users among subscribers then it would make sense to not import the full list but invite people to re-subscribe on npub.pro. Could you please help me figure out the logic here?
2. Good editor is actually pretty hard to do. Would it work if you just composed a long-form post on Highlighter and then used npub.pro to turn the post into a newsletter issue and send to the email subs?
3. Paid subsciptions are a much bigger deal, especially fiat-related. There's a lot to explore there, so we're leaving it for later now.
4. Video/audio can already be uploaded via any nostr app and then you'd post with a link to that file, and then publish that post on npub.pro site and you'd get an RSS feed that's suitable for submission the podcasting ecosystem. We haven't polished the RSS/podcasting features bcs there are no active users of it yet, but the bones are already there. Example podcast https://cd-demo.npub.pro/
Please let me know if the above points make sense and if you have more feedback.
Thanks a lot!
1. If you have people in the Substack ecosystem with credit cards, and they’re getting everything — videos, podcasts, letters — unless it’s mirrored completely, it’s better for them not to be switched. But there is a minority that would probably volunteer their emails for new/extra content that went out via nostr. If the entire ecosystem were in place here, I would just import the entire list in that case. But if it’s only newsletters (and no payments), I would make it opt-in, and do different content for those users.
2. Yes, Highlighter is good, and that’s a good point. No need to re-invent the wheel — could just compose there, send via npub.pro.
4. I’ll look into it — some of the video files are 2GB or whatever though.
And no problem — thanks for building these tools!
Ok makes sense!
Big videos might be a problem indeed, you'd need a premium account on some media server like nostr.build or primal, but primal max file size is 1Gb, and both have total storage limit of 10Gb. As I said, podcasts aren't ready for prime-time yet, but with your help we could start figuring things out.
Thanks!