Notices by Eric Matthes (ehmatthes@fosstodon.org)

@kattni It's so nice to go without any intention to talk sometimes!

@buttondown This is fantastic! Will you support ranges? ie

hl_lines="3 5-7 10"

@buttondown PS now do filenames!

@buttondown BTW I'd love to see you implement this as well. It's no more difficult than syntax highlighting, adds little weight to emails, should be broadly supported by clients, and makes a world of difference when writing about code.

@buttondown Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it's that simple. Most platforms just haven't seemed to prioritize technical writing.

When I dug into the internals of emails that were actually sent by a variety of platforms, I found plenty of CSS to support other features. It didn't take much more to support highlighting.

If you don't mind my asking, did you find a few clients that don't handle it well? I don't have access to good email client testing tools.

@buttondown BTW I really hope you see some technical writers migrate from Substack for this feature alone. I shared this update in a technical writers group I'm part of.

I haven't heard any complaints from my own subscribers, but I have heard from a number of people that highlighted code blocks really do make posts more readable. I included support for highlighted lines and filenames, which is really helpful for writing about code as well.

@buttondown Yes yes yes! I'd love to hear more about how you went about implementing this.

We've heard for so long that code blocks in emails can't be highlighted because email clients are limited. That has seemed unfounded, and I've implemented it for my own newsletter on Ghost.

How did you decide to make this happen when other platforms say email clients can't support it?

It's good to see people reconsidering #Substack for hosting newsletters.

If you're looking to start a newsletter, or migrate to a different platform, it can be hard to make sense of the different pricing schemes that each platform uses.

I made a tool to make it easier to compare how much it might cost to host *your* newsletter on each platform:

https://nl-compare.streamlit.app

@buttondown, does this look accurate for your platform?

That chart is interesting; for people who have more than 25k subscribers, Ghost Pro (the hosted version) is cheaper than Substack.

But that lower left quadrant is where most newsletters exist, and it's worth a closer look.

All right, for anyone wondering I am definitely planning to move off of #Substack quite soon. I want to take a moment to share some specifics about why it's hard for a lot of people to move off the platform, even though you "own your list".

I think most of the stories people are seeing about migrating away from Substack are from prominent writers. If you have a large subscriber base, it is cheaper to use a different platform:

Substack pulls people in by letting them export their data, but they're also subsidizing a bunch of writers with VC money.

That is a really effective form of lock-in, that's probably pushing a bunch of people to just put up with Substack's increasingly bad policies.

Here's that same chart, focusing on 0-5k subscribers. For all those people with under 5,000 subscribers, Ghost is significantly more expensive.

It's $100/ year just to get started. If you make it to the magical 1,000 subscriber mark, your reward is...doubled hosting costs. If you make it to 3k you're pushing $500/year, and at 5k subscribers you're bumping up against $1k/year.

This is exactly the range where people struggle to monetize a growing newsletter.

Note: I'm calculating Substack's fees with a broad assumption of $40/year revenue per paid user, and a paid ratio of 2%.

For newsletters doing better numbers than that, Substack's take is even higher than what's shown on these charts.

I believe the trends hold true for other platforms as well. Here's the 0-100k chart for Substack, Ghost Pro, @buttondown and beehiiv: