newsletter

From IndieWeb

A newsletter is a regularly scheduled email that is sent out on a specific topic to an email list. In the IndieWeb they are used to delivery posts from a person's site to another person's email.

See also:

Why

Many people don't have RSS or IndieWeb readers but want to follow the content posted on someone's IndieWeb site. Almost everyone on the internet uses email, so it's a common use case that is approachable for many people to use.

How

The two most common ways of sending out newsletters in the IndieWeb are either using a CMS plugin or using an RSS to Email service.

IndieWeb Examples

Examples in the wild of newsletters being used in the IndieWeb, beyond the obvious community example:

Examples are ordered in the date that newsletters started getting sent out. Add yourself!

Eddie Hinkle

  • Eddie Hinkle has been sending out monthly newsletters since May 30, 2018. After deciding to leave Facebook as of August 2018, He decided the easiest way to generation 4 family members and friends can keep in-touch is by receiving regular email newsletters.
  • Someone can subscribe to three different "topics" that Eddie posts about: Family, Personal and Tech. Eddie generates 7 different RSS feeds from his site (every permutation of the three topics: All Topics, Family, Personal, Tech, Family and Personal, Family and Tech, Personal and Tech). He used Mailchimp to set up 7 "campaigns" that each send to a filtered audience based on the topics they selected when signing up. All campaigns currently send out monthly on the 2nd of each month.
  • Example Newsletter

Jonathan LaCour

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill has a weekly and monthly newsletter of new posts on his site that you can subscribe to. Details are on https://gregorlove.com/follow/. The first weekly email was sent 2023-01-07. The first monthly email should go out 2023-02-01, for January posts.

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Organization Examples

W3C

W3C has a weekly newsletter:

Services

Services for sending out newsletters, typically by email, sometimes also hosted on a silo domain:

MailChimp

MailChimp is a great option to help power newsletters because they have an RSS to Email service that will take an RSS feed and put those items into a single email and send it out to an email list on a regular basis.

Substack

substack is a silo service set up to make sending out newsletters with free or paid subscriptions simple and easy. It can also function as a CMS. When used for paid subscriptions Substack takes a 10% fee after transaction fees.

Buttondown

Buttondown is a simple silo service for composing and managing newsletters with free (up to 1000 people) and paid subscriptions. Justin Duke, also an engineer at Stripe, publishes the running costs of the platform for those interested.

Revue

Revue (getrevue.co) was an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers. It was used by several new media journalistic organizations including The Markup. It was purchased in January 2021 by Twitter and then shut down 2023-01-18.

Criticism

Articles

  • 2021-03-19 Ernie Smith: Newsletter, Untethered (archived)
    • an IndieWeb centric article with an overview of a variety of self-hosted and SaaS solutions for building/maintaining a newsletter.

See Also