The problem with that is discoverability. I'd love to do a blog without making money off it but if nobody ever reads it there's no point.

This is what they want you to believe, sure, it will help in the short-term. But when switching, losing most of them, and losing your content (if not moved with you), but all the domain ranking, is much bigger. And the real discovery happens on social media or through writing high-quality content that will always be shared or discovered. But all of this applies to blogging, newsletters only, like sending your thoughts via email, is OK, but a real blog, I'd want on my own domain/website.

IMO, not too many people are being discovered by substack. Twitter and other social media is where you have to have conversations to slowly build up your subscriber base.

Webrings were so valuable they were used to train the PageRank AI decades ago. No time like the present to bring back what works!

I used to be able to find personal and small blogs on google. Blogosphere died when google changed algorithms and it ceased to be possible. They stopped coming out in searches even when I was able to quote the title and parts of the content.

Blame google enshittification for this one.