Like in many other languages and frameworks, like Go and Ruby on Rails, this is so second nature. GoRoutines and Sidekiq workers are pretty damn easy to spin up. Mostly scalable too.

Why doesn’t JavaScript have a similar semi-native solution? Been thinking about this a ton lately.

Why would someone do this?!

Glad to have you, man! ❤️

I spent the first half of 2024 totally flat growth wise, but after about six months of cycling through the cruft of passive readers Substack funneled at me I saw real tangible growth unlike anything I ever saw on Substack. Other writers I've spoken to said they went through a similar transition.

I went with Beehiiv because they were cheaper and easier than Ghost and I wanted to use their metrics to really drill down into who my readers were and what they wanted. Beehiiv has since rolled out some basic community features that, in my opinion, are more powerful than Substack's.

And, once again, the growth you're seeing on Substack is not real. Many writers are terrified to lose access to Substack's recommendation system, but it's just numbers. It's totally passive. If you want a real audience, go get a real publishing platform and find it.

If you want to be part of a conservative social network fine, but you're not building anything real. You're giving them 10% of your revenue to fund their culture war and they're going to keep locking your audience behind their walled garden. There are many alternatives and they're all fine.

Substack juices your numbers in several ways:

-Their signup page is purposely confusing. Many readers don't realize they've automatically signed up
-There are waves of [firstname][lastname][zipcode] emails that come in and mysteriously vanish.
-And the Substack app converts readers into "followers"

If you wanna chat beehiiv, happy to. I was a part of Substack Pro during my journalism days and left after my grant ended because I hated the platform and moved to beehiiv.

Now I work here helping journalists and others onboard!

S/o to @oliverdarcy.bsky.social and @katz.theracket.news for vocalizing this one.

Yeah, I prefer the Prettier class sorter anyway, but think we’re just at a point where if we’re gonna move to another tool, we’d like it to do everything we want it to.

This is what’s keeping us from switching off ESLint and Prettier to Biome at beehiiv too.

We have four workspaces in a monorepo — two Remix, one RR, and one vanilla JS — and it’d be great to rip out disjointed ESLint and Prettier configs for one common Biome setup.

We’ll be taking applications from other journalists in the next few months and providing them with:

- Legal support & media liability insurance
- Health insurance stipends
- Access to Getty Images & Perplexity Pro
- Accounting support
- A growth budget on our Boosts network
- Business strategy