Blogging & RSS are the next phase of creator culture
I tried writing something for my newsletter about the power of newsletters and ethical options for those not wanting to support ones that, say, platform or are funded by far-right zealots. Halfway through I got bored and then started questioning why I was energized by this topic. (I still posted a short version of it.)
Truth is, the idea of committing myself to a weekly (or even monthly) newsletter stresses me out. I don’t want to get stuck on a hamster wheel. I also don’t feel great about asking fans of mine to subscribe monthly to a newsletter with a specific commitment — that starts to put a price tag on my writing. I’d much rather feel free to share ideas when I have them, and encourage readers & fans of mine to patronize me entirely at their discretion, on a one-off or recurring basis. If you happen to send me a recurring donation, that’s great and I am super grateful! But I don’t want you to feel like you’re paying for a specific number of emails from me each month.
So I’m back to old-school blogging mentality, and it’s quite liberating. Functionally it’s probably similar to a newsletter, but the framing is different: Instead of committing to a specific cadence of writing, I’m just posting stuff when I want and then compile links to everything I wrote into a newsletter each week I have something.
I don’t think enough people realize the true power of a simple blog. Yes, newsletter culture took over because of the wildly successful engagement hack of email and Substack’s rise – but a Substack is really just a blog that also sends out emails anytime you post. It’s quite easy to set this exact same thing up with a Wordpress site, Medium blog, or really any ol’ blogging service1.
Almost every blog — like my own — have an RSS feed built in. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a standard almost as old as the Internet itself. I actually love RSS because it’s a way to read the newsletters and blogs I love, but without the stress of notifications or the frustration of a cluttered email inbox. (My RSS app of choice is Reeder Classic, for those who care!) If you find yourself overwhelmed by social networks and notifications, I highly recommend getting one. Many are free or quite cheap.
Pretty much anything can be set up as an RSS feed. You know what else is based on RSS? Podcasts. Your Bluesky profile. You can even make an RSS feed out of someone’s Instagram posts. The musician in me really wants an RSS feed that updates anytime I release new music; Bandcamp doesn’t have this built in, but (1) I could simply post a blog post anytime I release something or (2) explore Faircamp – the self-hosted, ethical alternative to Bandcamp – which has RSS built in2.
How does this relate to newsletter? Well, so Buttondown, my newsletter service of choice, has a (paid, $90/year) feature that “listens” to any RSS feed you want it to, and automatically preps a newsletter email based on the content from the feed. You can either send an email with each new post, or aggregate them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. You can also automate this entirely, or create drafts of those emails and make final tweaks before you send.
I’ve now set up my newsletter to do exactly this. It’s kind of amazing! I don’t have to specifically write a newsletter each week or month – instead, I can simply post to my blog whenever I feel like it (including when I release new music) and my audience can still get it however they like: in their email inboxes, or in an RSS reader app of their choice. I could even build audio blogs (or podcast episodes?) into this framework.
This could be very important (or very fun) for creators struggling with keeping up: You don’t need to make these fancy newsletters, or feel burdened with the idea of keeping up with one, or pay for an expensive or questionably ethical service for one. Just write a blog and people can subscribe to that in any number of ways, one of which is email.
One downside is that it’s not totally free to do – Buttondown’s cheapest plan with this feature is $90/year after all, and while other email marketing apps offer this, they also don’t for free (Mailerlite and Mailchimp both have a similar RSS-to-email feature on their paid plans.)
Well, it gets more interesting: I recently found a service called Feedmail. This isn’t a proper newsletter service, but rather a service that takes an RSS feed — yes, like your blog’s RSS feed — and sends an email out anytime there’s a new entry in the feed.
It’s quite elegant, for both creators and their audiences. And it’s also (basically) free! There are two ways where it becomes not free:
- Your reader can choose to pay after receiving 400 emails worth of updates to your RSS feed. After the 400th email, they can pay $10 to get 10,000 more emails sent to you.. This is a little weird – but the idea here is that the reader is paying for an email service that aggregates feeds they want to hear from in their email, so it does so (at a very low cost). A reader can also use Feedmail for any other blog feed, not just yours.
- Alternatively, as a “feed owner” (ie. creator), you can choose to pay on behalf of your readers, which means you can send out up to 400 emails for free (or, say, 10 emails to 40 subscribers), and then you pay 0.1¢ per email after that. With this math, if you have 500 people “subscribed” to your feed via email, you pay 50¢ for each email send. Send a weekly recap, and that’s $2/month.
It’s a little bit too minimal for my taste, but it’s an important option to have in your toolkit if you, like me, want to write more freely without the burden of a specific newsletter cadence.
I don’t expect any of these options to be the “right” way to do things; what’s more important to me is that folks in my audience know that there’s more out there than a TikTok profile and a hundred “newsletter services”, most of which are run by venture capital. You can communicate to an audience so easily on the internet in 2025 with technology that’s been around since 1999. And it’s kinda fun to tinker with too.
