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.

See also:
 * The IndieWeb’s newsletter: This Week in the IndieWeb

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

 * 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

 * 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
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.

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.

TinyLetter
TinyLetter is a message silo and service to organize email newsletters, with an optional blog-like web archive, that was acquired by MailChimp in 2011. Sometimes used as a simple blog with restricted viewership.

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 is an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers. It is used by several new media journalistic organizations including The Markup. It was purchased in January 2021 by Twitter.

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

 * Discussion of the good and bad of newsletters, some services, longevity, examples, links to his own self-hosted ones on his own website.
 * Discussion of the good and bad of newsletters, some services, longevity, examples, links to his own self-hosted ones on his own website.




 * an IndieWeb centric article with an overview of a variety of self-hosted and SaaS solutions for building/maintaining a newsletter.
 * an IndieWeb centric article with an overview of a variety of self-hosted and SaaS solutions for building/maintaining a newsletter.