Ernie Smith

Just tried self-hosting this. Pretty painless—looks like it has a lot of potential. And given that not many things support Bluesky right now, that support is clutch. Great work thus far!

I wish you best of luck here, but it doesn’t feel there for me yet. There are a lot of tools in the curated email space that are much more mature than this, including Curated (https://curated.co) and Goodbits (https://goodbits.io). Both of these tools have been around for a decade or longer. While they cost money, the experience on both of these tools clearly earns your money. I think that your...

Not going to lie: I have zero regrets about using a profanity in the tagline, which ties into the bigger issues with the “enshittification” of products by large companies. (It says “disenshittification” upon the suggestion of Cory Doctorow, coiner of the term, BTW.) I did concede to people who may not want to share that line with their parents or their coworkers and created a safe-for-work...

Hey there, I recently did a pretty decent intro to self-hosted tools on my website Tedium (https://tedium.co/2023/03/04/sel...), and of the tools I tried, ActivePieces was easily one of the best. I also found that when I ran into issues, they were one of the most responsive when it came to support. They reached out for clarification on my issue and were able to offer useful advice. At a time...

I’ve been using this on my two newsletters for a while now and I’ve particularly found it a great way to give my secondary newsletter, MidRange, a boost. That has only 530ish subscribers these days and is intended as a low-stakes affair. For that audience it has given me a great way to monetize a smaller, but super passionate audience for my writing. I also use this on Tedium, which has around...

I’ve been using the Paved Ad Network for a couple of years; I was able to integrate it into my custom template setup easily, and even before they got the recent ad-designer tool, it was awesome to have a template that matched my custom design. The team is really doing something great. (And now they have @kampheyapproved on board, who is also pretty great as well.)

Swapstack rocks! They’re innovating in some important ways in the newsletter space, and this is just one of them. Looking forward to giving this a try!

Hey all, this has perhaps been a long time coming, but I’ve been very active in the newsletter space for many years and have many hundreds of issues of Tedium to my name. This has been a deep-dive focus of mine for nearly 7 years, and I hope to keep it going a lot longer. Tedium relies on sponsorships to keep going, as well as advertising (our partner is BuySellAds), and we sort of treat the...

Hi all, I’ve been a frequent user of EmailOctopus (I use them with my newsletter Tedium, located at https://tedium.co/, which has more than 12,000 subscribers) and have been regularly working with them since late 2016—when it was literally just two people on the team. I figured out early that their value proposition was significantly better than MailChimp. It’s been impressive to see them grow,...

I’ve taken part in one of these and found the process interesting. They’re also super-responsive. Really hope it catches on.

As the editor of Tedium (https://tedium.co) I’ve been using Swapstack for a little while and I have found the Jakes to be incredibly easy to work with, and their work is such a great alternative to the subscription model, which doesn’t necessarily fit with everyone’s needs. This is the right model for the creator economy and I look forward to seeing where they take it next.

As a journalist, if you use this product to send me a message, I will throw your message in the spam folder and possibly tweet about it.

This product should not exist. These guys make email worse.

@matt_kiser has been doing killer stuff with WTFJHT and his newsletter-driven sensibility has really been a major asset to that space. The fact that he's extending his empire is really awesome. I'm excited to see what he does next.

Interesting idea. I look forward to trying.

So this thing doesn't call the police or a security dispatcher if something goes wrong? I get the cost effectiveness angle but neighbors aren't always the best option. It feels like this would complement a home security system rather than being one on its own. An Alexa integration might be one way to improve this in the future.

Hi guys, love what you've done with the tool over the years. I've long used Ghost for Tedium, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. One question I have for you: Now that 1.0 is out, is formal support for an app/plugin system coming soon? I feel like some of the tweaks I've made to my own self-hosted platform over the years would would have been better handled with a pluggable tool...

I think I reached out to you guys a while ago about the This shutdown. I don't know if it was intentional, but this is a good replacement for that. (Side note: You guys should consider an Opera version of the Refind New Tab plugin. I switched from Chrome to Opera due to battery life concerns, and I had to sadly give that up even though I really liked that.)