https://www.beehiiv.com/ is another one.

Substack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most

boosty.to is a Substack alternative, outside of both the US and the EU.

https://ghost.org — Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore.

From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.

Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.

I don't think a $10 budget will suffice.

If Proton is too expensive, you can use zoho. I switched from Google and I'm missing nothing.

Try reading more books, eg autobiographies or fiction. Understanding other people’s perspectives is a skill like any other.

It’s far from impossible, you just have to prioritize your privacy at more than a few bucks a month.

> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...

so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.

assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.

It sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.

And platform B is basically a worse version of everything than platform A.

I admire the motivation though

They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

That's a big deal to some of us.

Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.