newsletter

📫 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.

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:

This Week in the IndieWeb

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

Jonathan LaCour has a daily newsletter options on his subscribe page that uses Mailchimp's RSS to email functionality.
Jonathan's primary target for his newsletter are his family/friends that felt like they'd be missing out on his updates after he departed Facebook in March of 2018.

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.

Includes sections for Blog Articles, Stars, Books, and general notes.

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Organization Examples

W3C

W3C has a weekly newsletter:

https://www.w3.org/News/Public/
email archive: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-announce/

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, founded by Justin Duke, formerly an engineer at Stripe. The platform's tech stack and running costs can be seen at https://buttondown.com/stack.

Beehiiv

https://www.beehiiv.com/ is a silo service with a free option (up to 2500 subscribers as of 2024-11-29)

Previously

Newsletter services that used to be documented on this page but subsequently shut down.

Revue

Criticism

https://twitter.com/jgmac1106/status/1057701093059293184
- "f**k Newsletters. I get enough email. Be a rebel. Go back to your blog. They are still there. Fans can be intentional and add you to a reader if they wish. (http://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/s/gTY1X)" @jgmac1106 October 31, 2018

Articles

2019-02 Craig Mod: Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters (archived)
- Discussion of the good and bad of newsletters, some services, longevity, examples, links to his own self-hosted ones on his own website.

2021-03-19 Jared Newman: Writers who crave independence should skip Substack—and do this instead: Instead of hopping on Substack’s bandwagon, I’ve rolled my own newsletter platform that’s under my control. And I love it. (archived)

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.

Why

How