Name one thing private equity investment hasn't ruint for everyone.
The following are off the table.
Housing - ruined Healthcare - ruintttttt Retirement - ruinedTTT Trailer parks - busted Nursing homes - ruinTTT Restaurant chains - yuck Dental care - grrrr Toys R Us - fuck Drinking water - RUINT Prisons - well, they were terrible in the first place; now they're MOAR ruint
I'm really starting to wonder how much longer the WordPress project is going to last. Of course, it can be forked, but I'm wondering about the actual project, itself. Mullenweg is pushing, in droves, users/developers away from using WordPress
Reminder that #Substack has been pro-fascist and Nazi since its inception, as they have refused to ban accounts for such rhetoric. “Marketplaces of ideas” and all that malarkey.
In a (real) market when your product quality is in freefall you would be expected to a) improve the product pretty quickly; b) reduce the price to tempt customers back.
In the (so-called) water market; service continues to get worse despite complaints & prices (controlled by OFWAT) are about to rise well above inflation for the next five years.
To say privatisation imposed 'market discipline' would be completely wrong;
to say it imposed exploitative monopoly pricing is more like it!
If Starmer wanted to get some plus points with the Public and try to salvage something from his collapsing polling he could punish the Water Companies.
But he won't. Nor will Farage, but he'll be picking up the disgruntled and betrayed votes the 'Establishment Man' doesn't want.
If columnists in The Guardian are saying Starmer is handing it all to Farage, they must know within the Labour Party.
Give the Public some meat or prove to us the Labour Party is corrupt.
Public ownership of water! It seems so obvious to me, and likely popular with voters. I fear that the general public are not at the centre of these considerations 😟
Approximately 1/3 of UK orgs say they would be unlikely to hire a trans person, and 43% "unsure" they would employ a trans person. crosslandsolicitors.com/site/h…
And 45% of IT teams in the UK say it is "unlikely" they would hire a transgender person
Our shocking new report reveals a strong prejudice among UK employers towards transgender workers with 1 in 3 employers admitting they are less likely to hire a...
lol, the guys who run online casinos who gamble digital items in games with real money behave like mafia bosses, harassing each other in real life with paid protesters and flyers and sabotaging each others events
Several months ago I got offered a "bounty" and "$20k" to expose a casino in the Counter Strike Industry. I was both insulted and intrigued. After investigat...
Still wearing an N95 everywhere I’m indoors with other people, except my partner and some close friends/family members who have similar approaches.
Still haven’t had any kind of illness since 2019. Just haven’t been sick. I actually don’t have enough free time to go “back to normal” and get sick 1-3 times a year. So I plan to keep masking indefinitely.
Still haven’t had a single person say anything to me about it. Tall/masc privilege.
Men, next time somebody in our orbit tells a really creepy and sexist joke......get thrills by ripping into that creep, it's justified. Make them feel shame and disgust. It's for the good of Society.
There's a rapist in the White House ffs, something needs to be done.
@Dave_Goldsmith True. We need to not only confiscate a significant amount of wealth that has been generated in the past, but also tax all future income equally. By that I mean capital gain, made on investment gets taxed like regular income. No income of any sort created by an imaginative accountant should be exempt. Any method used to "cash out" of an investment, like borrowing money against the value of an investment, should also be taxed. All that will add up.
Absolutely. Rich people's money should be taxed like poor people's money. And we should return to (rock-ribbed Republican) Eisenhower's-era top tax rates for the richest Americans (90% +.)
Tax the wealth not just of Elon Musk, but also Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett (the only one on this list who will not complain) and everyone else with a net worth of over a few million dollars.
I'm not saying it's the case, but just so folks answering the poll know I'm leaving this here. People often have a hard time dealing with large numbers and their relative weights. If you split Musk's trillions among all Americans, for instance, that'd be under 1300 dollars each. Folks tend to be surprised by that, thinking it'd be a LOT more.
So first of all, the main reason for confiscating his money is to eliminate Musk as a threat to our society. Secondly, a $1,300 bonus for each American sounds like a wonderful idea to me!
Hey, I'm not saying it's a bad idea. The least power that guy has, the better off we'd all be, IMO. A bankrupt Musk can no longer buy politicians as he's been doing lately.
I'm just putting this stuff into perspective. I like doing these calculations, as my own first impressions on these kinds of values tend to be way, way off.
Freedom of religion is enjoyed by individuals, not businesses (as should be the case), which I think is why the conservative movement invented the "religious freedom" branding for an adjacent-but-not-the-same cause.
“A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy–a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper–has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.”–Malcolm Gladwell (2005)
“I can’t leave Substack, the alternatives charge monthly fees!”
For a mid-sized paid newsletter, you will pay: Ghost Pro: $149–$269/month Beehiiv: $131–$218/month Buttondown: $239/month Mailchimp: $285/month Substack: $700/month
when you say you self-host ghost and 70% of your cost is for bulk email, do you mean that you use another paid external service for e-mail sending? and if so, id be curious which one
ty for these stats, this is very interesting
personally, im not at all up for the personal task of trying to self-host an email server and stay out of spam folders, so curious what you are using for bulk email sending.
A static blog can also be hosted for free through tools like Cloudflare Pages if you're comfortable using a little bit of code and common static site generators.
My first own mail server came up in the late 80s (modem and UUCP). Stopped in the 2010s as it was made too cumbersome by the big email providers (mainly Microsoft and Google).
Today you spend most of the time to find out why you were blocked by X and trying get unblocked. The more emails you send, the higher the block probability.
I remember proposals, from many years ago, to reduce spam by charging a fee for each email sent. This has effectively been implemented in such a subtle and gradual way that I think it happened without many people realizing it.
People at the time were upset about the fees being upfront, so now instead, we have something opaque and indirect like the banking system. Sure, individuals can technically still run their own SMTP… but, y’know, good luck with that.
This whole thread(s) has been really interesting. Missing majordomo and listserv (even ezmlm, which was annoying)… I saw somewhere that Ghost could do straight SMTP, but that is old and not clearly documented now.
@usul from a tech stack perspective, distribution sure would be a lot easier if authenticated RSS was a thing (besides clear text feed tokens). Any other solutions on the horizon?
Hello friends, I’m Khal. I’m reaching out for support as my friends and I are starving and in desperate need of food. We’re also trying to build a shelter where we can stay. Life in the refugee camp has been incredibly hard—we’re surviving on nothing.
Anything you can donate would truly be a lifesaver, and if you have unused clothes, shoes, blankets, or anything else, I’d be grateful to receive them.
My name is PD Khal, a disabled person and a leader of my communit… Presley Stoyanova needs your support for Urgent Appeal to Support LGBTIQ Community in Sudan
The well known liberal and progressive names on substack can afford it. They don't want to lose readers who may not bother following them to their new platform.
@Methylcobalamin It’s scary to shake things up if it’s your income, and there is certainly non-zero effort on the writer’s end in moving. Plus Substack really likes to talk up its network effects, to try to instill concern that people will see their growth flatline if they leave.
running a business critical email server sounds like a living hell. You couldn't pay me enough to even run 1 where I had to guarantee emails wouldn't get black holed. Although I'm sure it's slightly easier at scale when you're a well known newsletter service provider.
@GuillaumeRossolini @ineiti oh, my apologies. Molly alluded to this: anywhere you're hosting from is almost certain to block outgoing emails, so you have to use a separate email delivery service like Mailgun. That's probably the vast majority of her expense.
stupid question, but isn't that cost offset by payment for the subs? if I have 20000 subs how much is that bringing in? (if self-hosting, I assume 20000 "subs" is no income at all)
@net_run @huxley using the parameters upthread, a newsletter of this size would be bringing in $7,000/mo. a lot of people are pretty happy to pay $200 to get $6,800.
@jarekkopec Substack has always boasted of portability, but they seem to be rapidly building walls with things like their “follow” feature. Ghost is excellent. Not personally super familiar with the others.
I was thinking about mail senders. I think I am going for seting up a WordPress site integrated with mass mailing service. I imagine the user data would be stored on the sender's side.
@huxley I don't get why you'd want to pay to have subscribers on your website when you can just make a website for free, host it for like 20 bucks, and then setup a kofi or a patreon
I guess there is of course the technical barrier, but paying hundreds so that people can pay YOU?
@AnachronistJohn having worked for a company that did bulk mailsending, it’s not something i ever want to try to DIY. well worth the $75/mo for me to not have to think about it
uh ok I'm on some big mailing lists and those have no issues but yeah there are hardware costs.
I guess having access to a free Sympa or similar is a luxury requiring some people to spent 100s of dollars. But it's true mailing lists don't have the bells & whistles like time-zone based sending, a/b testing and analytics
Are they all confirmed-opt-in? I've never had any issues hosting mailing lists that people wanted to be on.
Once you get to a certain number of subscribers, it may be worthwhile to self-host email. Sure, it's a PITA, but with "Run Your Own Mail Server" from @mwl and a bit of work, you won't be at the mercy of others and you'll be able to see everything that happens in logs that you own.
I'm a fan of self hosting email and worry about what can happen if too many people stop self hosting email. We need diversity and some balance to the whims of megacorporations.
@huxley and a lot of other people are working day jobs making fractions of that while people who are lucky enough to write things online being functionally rich talk about how they can't figure out simple HTML
@flo kit is more expensive at my size. not sure about brevo because i’m apparently “enterprise” and would have to request a quote.
that aside, self-hosted Ghost currently doesn’t support mailsending services besides Mailgun, though I hope they will build out support for it in the not too distant future
at 100k emails/month brevo says 107€ for me (you can adjust the nr of mails in the bottom). Self-hosting email is quite a pain, there's a good talk by Dylan Beattie about email, which touches on his experience of running a large mail-sending service youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4…)
We're not quite sure exactly when email was invented. Sometime around 1971. We do know exactly when spam was invented: May 3rd, 1978, when Gary Thuerk emaile...
@usul I once applied at a startup that was convinced it made sense for them to self host mailing operations. Except I made a joke that no one hosts their own DNS or mail sending unless they hate themselves before discovering that. I was applying to be a sysadmin. Shockingly, they didn’t hire me. (Oddly, I ended up doing almost the same work for Private Internet Access’s VPN service, for crypto investor Andrew Lee, claimant to Freenode & the Korean crown)
@kenny113 @truh Feel free to ignore if this isn’t helpful, but I’m a pretty heavy RSS user who also prefers to read newsletters in my feed reader and not in my inbox.
404 Media actually has built out something like authenticated RSS: 404media.co/404-media-now-has-… I’m a paid subscriber to 404 and I just turn off all emails and use the feed. Works great.
I also subscribe to a lot of newsletters via RSS. For paid ones, I usually pay, turn off emails, and add the feed to my feedreader.
We paid for the development of full text RSS feeds for Ghost-based publishers. Now we can offer them to our paid subscribers, and other Ghost sites can use the service too.
@truh @usul strange how many replies I get from people I didn’t ask on mastodon. but since we’re here… certainly there are two sides to that coin. likewise, there are consumers who would be interested in subscribing but would never pay to get more email either. paid email newsletters don’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people. and clearly there are huge distribution issues with email (as we’re discussing here) which can be overcome with different distribution channels. For example, @404mediaco offers a public RSS feed for all articles, but you simply can’t read full articles for members-only content. I would be interested to hear from someone who offers subscription content about why they chose the distribution channel they chose and if they see any “universal solutions” on the horizon.
I saw that, and saved it for the unlikely day at which I reach the limit of my free version of MailChimp Thanks, it is a very nicely done and informative table
That pricing is fascinaing. Sending out email and makingg sure it gets sent reasonably and delivered into inboxes is a pain, and substack gives you free subscriber delivery, and all they ask for is your soul/////////a huge chunk of subscriber income.
@GuillaumeRossolini @simrob just about all cloud providers will allow it upon request. I have several mail servers running in Hetzner without an issue. Following the rules is super important, both in terms of DNS records and in terms of things like unsubscribe links and whatnot.
@simrob I’ve always been able to send some emails, mostly infrastructure related, low volume and to really trusted recipients, but it’s tough… the mere spam report will be tough to recover from
@GuillaumeRossolini in my limited experience it’s basically not possible to get a cloud provider that will let you send emails (they block those ports at their firewall) so unless you’re friendly with someone with a datacenter I think low cost self hosted email sending is effectively impossible
@GuillaumeRossolini yeah I understand your question now, sorry for reply-guying. there was also a nonlinear jump in ghost pro, it just wasn't anywhere near so dramatic. If it wasn't a mistake I suspect it's a corresponding nonlinear jump in the service's pricing — mailgun triples in price from 50k to 100k, but that's not enough to account for the difference
@GuillaumeRossolini @simrob i do see a lot of online guides that talk about “warming up” IP addresses. Maybe that it needed for things like newsletters, but I’ve not found it necessary for my use cases (sending emails related to the various instances people sign up for), which is not an email blast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, so I just may not have run into that issue.
this is my experience too. I had a podcast/blog and the cost of sending the newsletter to supplement it (through Mailchimp) was more than every other expense combined. And we had only a small circulation of a few thousand. Needless to say I no longer send that newsletter
I think the issues are more about discovery and taking subscribers with you.
*starting* a newsletter on other platforms and gaining traction is the hardest part I think. It's hard to beat the free initial startup on Substack and Patreon.
To be clear, I don't financially support Substack.
I quite like Beehiiv, but I ended up using Ghost Pro (not self hosted).
Aspiring Despot Turkish pseudo-dictator Tayip Erdogan Continues Murder of Kurds
17 minutes ago Turkish drone targets SDF positions at the 17th Division headquarters in the vicinity of Raqqa @potus
36 minutes ago Local Syrian sources: Turkish aircraft target SDF sites north of Raqqa city, northeastern Syria, with an airstrike
While russia's overstretch due to its failed invasion of Ukraine is viewed as an opportunity by opportunistic actors, US isolationism (especially with the arrival of Trump) is perceived as a weakness, prompting many to see it as a chance to take action
I must admit that I dearly hope the people who love LinkedIn... stay there, so I can continue to be blissfully oblivious to their existences.
I will, however, welcome with open arms those who realise how insipid & fake the entire platform is (due, in large part, to the nature & cultural influence of its owner).
"Only Sith deal in absolutes," to quote my daughter quoting Star Wars.
No one making 7 figures a year works as hard as someone trying to live on minimum wage jobs. Anytime you read a profile of some rich person talking about how hard they work, you are being played.
The internet was doomed the moment some fool in Japan created the first imageboard. It was all downhill from there. LLMs just are the final nail.
I once had hope. This communication network, The Internet, is easily one of the greatest and most culturally and socially impactful inventions. I suppose its demise is fitting, given the nationalistic age we are entering. The Internet brought the world together, now borders tear it apart while capital feasts on the remains. It has been my primary means of reaching out and connecting with the world. Perhaps my negative predictions will turn out wrong
I think, at 35 years of age, it may be high time I ended that, gradually. If all goes well I will be living in physical community with other queer people within 5 years.
Not exactly the autistic neighborhoods I have been toying with, but it will do. Still, it is fun to imagine a neighborhood inhabited by autistics, general tone determined by them. Though my ideal one will always be a refuge for the discarded and forgotten in general. But it would be shaped by people like me, from elders to young runaways.
Every morning those obsessed with metallurgy wake up early. The neighborhood is near the docks. One of the warehouses has been squatted and converted to a great makeshift forge. The sounds of hammers pounding upon the anvils, from a distance, serve the same as church bells in older times, rousing all to to wake if alarm clocks haven't. Most us, myself included, work for our living. But a determining number of various support needs do not work. Some survive on welfare of varying degrees of generosity. Others on the inheritance or trusts of their families. But here there are no selfish heirs or listless and dejected dependents. They are the town fathers and mothers, who busy themselves about with things. Some are the reason this poor neighborhood at least has swept streets and sidewalks. Others help in the community garden that has grown to comprise more than one empty lot. The harvest is looking good this fall. Others are the anonymous patrons and matrons, using some of their wealth, who are the reason struggling churches, temples, mosques, etc in the community never shutter their doors; or why the communuty center is still able to run their after school programs. Nevertheless they exercise no control...anonymity and an oath taken at the local madfellows lodge to always serve the community. At night, the streets come alive and...
@greycat in my more despairing teen years I imagined a collection of group homes organized like monasteries, all organized around a particular obsession and special interest. Some secular, others organized around a faith. We turn away from a world that wants nothing to do with us. Providing each other emotional comfort to carry on. Each house linked. Lower support needs look out for those with higher. Some of us even have morning and evening chants. I was hung up on Gregorian then.
Now...now I imagine us building veritable "Danny the Streets"-unearthly refuges for the abandoned, the lost, the forgotten, the hated. A magical place where the wizards really stay up late, but with no thought of profit
Well if you don't want a website, only email, then you don't need to host the domain. I know a lot of hosts offer "email only hosting using your own domain".
So DNS (usually via the place you bought the domain) and email hosting is all you'd need.
I used to use A2Hosting, but moved to a Norwegian email/domain registrar somr years back.
So are you looking for an email host or something more? :)
Our help: https://SeniorSavingsNetwork.org1-800-729-9590Links from the video:HHS Warning on Medicare Advantage:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQEPszbprwY On...
Things dipped in gold can’t growThings dipped in gold can’t grow, is dedicated to situations that we consider mistakes or failures, letters that we write but never send, sketches, doodles, and writ…
One of the many things I particularly dislike about #enshittification of services and sellers is the clingy, neediness for engagement. Land on a shop site for something I might actually want to buy, and before anything, pop-up "sign up for our newsletter to get 10% off!" Net promoter scores "would you recommend this piece of business software to your friends and family??!" Heck no!
Every auto subscribed email that takes 7-10 business days to cancel.
If mstdn.social falls off the #fediverse all of the sudden, we'll know what happened: #hetzner. Here's hoping Hetzner is not going to react in a knee-jerk fashion.
A judge had previously ruled that it was rape as the word is commonly used. Seems that ABC folded a winning hand in an act of anticipatory compliance. #trump #fascism #media apnews.com/article/abc-trump-l…
ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E.
If you are on traditional Medicare, how do you currently obtain Dental Care? - add a rider for dental coverage to your Medicare Supplemental? - purchase standalone dental insurance? - go to dental schools to be worked on by dental students? - pay entirely out of pocket? - do without?
Save original #Medicare and add dental/vision/hearing/long-term-care benefits to it.
in my state standalone dental insurance is a scam, not really a service that covers anything close to the cost of the work so i do what i have done throughout my life-- i pay for dental work out of pocket just as i did before i reached Medicare age
Out of pocket. The available private insurance is crap. Long waits to cover anything costly and then it's at best 50% up to a rather small cap. If you don't have a reasonable financial buffer in your savings account(s) or don't live within driving distance of a dental school you're SOL.
Quad9 is facing a new legal challenge in France regarding DNS censorship from Canal. This situation highlights the ongoing battle for internet freedom and privacy. 🌐⚖️ Stay informed about the implications for users and the digital landscape! Read more here: quad9.net/news/press/quad9-fac… #DNS #InternetFreedom #PrivacyProtection #privacy #cybersecurity #newz
It is worth noting that Canal+ is owned by a bilionnaire from the alt-right. This guy, Bolloré, owns a huge chunk of our media, and he is a major threat to democracy in France. He needs to be stopped. @rgacogne
@x_cli All those alt-right and neoliberal people who try to orchestrate a global coup are very dangerous and should be confronted. Thank you very much for confirming my suspicion. People think I'm mad, while I believe people are not informed. ❤ @rgacogne
SCOOP: Amazon workers in NYC are going on strike right before Christmas — the company's busiest time. The first unionized Amazon warehouse is going to shut d...
Jess👾
in reply to Diligence Jones • • •