substack also does wonderful things like preserve weird bullet points, lack code block displays, and make it impossible to customize the landing page of your site beyond the 2 formats they give you.

generally think that Substack has done a good thing for its core audience of longform newsletter writer creators who want to be Ben Thompson. however its experience for technical people, for podcasters, for people who want to start multi-channel media brands, and for people who write for reach over revenue (but with optional revenue) has been really poor. (all 4 of these are us with Latent.Space). I've aired all these complaints with them and theyve done nothing, which is their prerogative.

i'd love for "new Substack" to emerge. or "Substack for developers".

Ben Thompson is working on Passport, which seems to be a self-hosted (WordPress-based) Substack: https://stratechery.com/2021/passport/

He gave a talk on it at WordCamp Asia at the start of last year, although I haven’t heard of any progress recently on it.