Substack is your corner of the internet

TL;DR: Custom themes are finally coming to the apps! Starting today on iOS, you’ll see this when you tap on Substacks you subscribe to from a new row atop the feed that makes it easy to keep up with your favorites. Soon, themed views will be everywhere in the apps, and this is just the beginning of a major effort to make Substacks richer and more customizable.

For years, anyone writing or creating online has faced a choice:

1. Build your own website or app, reflecting your taste and featuring your aesthetics and branding, and apply your rules for commenters and community members, but watch it fail to get much attention or traffic, especially over time, without costly marketing efforts on other platforms.¹

2. Share your work directly on those other platforms to meet audiences where they are, but compromise on style and branding, cede some or all ownership of the relationships you build, and accept the rules of the platform owners, which can change dramatically and upend your livelihood overnight.

It’s a little like owning your own small shop versus operating in a mall. Your unique store might be laid out and managed exactly as you—and your customers—want, but if you cannot attract enough people, if too many customers prefer the convenience and centrality of a mall, you’ll struggle to remain afloat. The mall’s scale advantage often wins with audiences, even when they admit that your unique vision on its own is superior, even when it’s common to hear people lament: “I hate the mall.”

Online, audiences flock to massive social media or content platforms, ignoring even the most beautiful and well-run individual sites and apps. Writers, journalists, artists, musicians, chefs, critics, and creators of all kinds need to reach people at scale in order to earn sustainable livings, and so they wind up going where the audiences are, abandoning any hope of control or customization. And once they’ve built an audience on a platform, they’re locked in: they cannot take their audience with them if they leave.

Substack has long worked to offer a different model: one where the benefits of scale accrue to creators, not just to platform owners, while as much of the value of independence is preserved as is possible. You might say that our vision is that of a thriving commercial district within a city: the benefits of density and connection without the homogenizing pressures of a mall. Much of our work over the past few years has been to make Substack a place large numbers of people like to visit, while never changing that it’s a place any creative can choose to leave without loss. Here, you own your relationships. You also get growth through scale and network effects, through our ranked home feed, our recommendations system, and features like live video and chat, which together help people discover you and your work, often signing up to become paid subscribers.²

Now, we’re taking a small first step on a big effort to make this balance even better.

Starting today on iOS, you’ll see a row of Substacks you’re subscribed to right at the top of the app, with priority given to those with new posts. Tapping one brings subscribers into that Substack’s world, with its custom colors, typefaces, logos, and the newest post right at the top. Below that top post is a feed of notes and posts from that Substack, so subscribers can easily dive deeper into its world. It’s more like visiting a unique place, less like “consuming content” in a generic platform view.

But this is just a first step. Soon, we’ll be introducing features that will dramatically enrich what Substacks can be.

In the future, a Substack feed will be able to include not only its creator’s own work but also that of their community of subscribers, and even of other Substacks they recommend. All of this will be fully optional and controllable; some creators will want to curate a space with many contributors, while others will be happy to keep their Substack’s feed focused solely on their own work or that of a small set. For those who include others in their feeds, we’ll make it extremely easy to set moderation rules and apply them to their communities.

Whether your Substack is a solo effort, a salon, or a whole scene will be entirely up to you. For Substacks where the community is a significant part of the value, we think this can be a game changer. Your ability to customize how your space appears within the Substack app, combined with optional community feeds and the flexible moderation tools that support and guide them, will make Substack uniquely balanced in a way that works for creators and subscribers alike.

Together, these features will let writers, journalists, artists, musicians, and everyone else build their own inimitable and authentic spaces, with unique moderation dynamics and whatever level of community involvement they want. Subscribers can get an even closer look at how a creator thinks, what they’re interested in, and the community they’ve built on Substack. And everyone will still benefit from the Substack network; indeed, curated Substack spaces should lead to more cross-pollination and subscriber growth than ever, as audiences will see more from around the network and indeed around the Internet in every space.

With these features, your space can be distinct and personal —with your vision, your branding, your rules—while still living inside a platform where people are already spending their time. At Substack, creators can carve out their own corners of the internet without sacrificing the network effects that make platforms powerful.

The old choice was between independence and scale. Now you can have both.

We’ve turned off comments for this post. As always, feel free to share your perspective in a Note, in a post, or by restacking.