Substation: how an open source alternative to Substack could help us rediscover a more independent and adventurous culture

“If I get really excited about licensing schemes, kill me,” software developer Jesse von Doom says. We’re talking about open source, the subscription boom, and how the platform he’s built – Substation – offers an open alternative to digital media’s new favourite thing: Substack.

Jesse’s resistance to being an evangelist for open source, and the doctrine of ‘open’ in general, is understandable when you understand that what he’s really interested in is enabling artists to express themselves and connect with audiences in a way that’s on their terms. In other words, his work in software isn’t so much about an obsession with software for its own sake, but more about what it allows people to do.

However, von Doom concedes that he might be being a little dramatic. “I say I don’t care about open source, but somehow I’ve spent the last – shit – 20 years doing nothing but working on making open source better. So maybe I don’t care about open source is a big fat lie I keep telling myself.”

Von Doom, and more specifically his Substation project, exemplify the virtues of wearing your philosophy lightly, of rejecting the all-in of a single idea (or indeed, a type of license) in the same way that we should reject the lock-in of proprietary platforms. In essence, von Doom’s philosophy is people and creativity first, technology second.

Who is Jesse von Doom?

Jesse von Doom is a software developer that has been behind a number of projects that attempt to give artists – from writers to musicians – more control and power over their work.

Perhaps the best known project he was involved with is CASH music, an organization he founded with Kirsten Hersh of Throwing Muses, and Donita Sparks of L7, that helped artists use open source tools in the way they produce and distribute their music. (It sadly shut down in June 2020.) CASH Music was “a non profit open source platform for musicians to use to sell their stuff online… like Patreon does today, except it was 2007” von Doom explains. The fact that this work was being done more than a decade before it started to gain broader visibility is treated with a wry laugh.

Although von Doom left CASH Music some time before it shut down, he says there is a “direct line” between his earlier work and his work on Substation. “For the longest time I’ve been making weird and bizarre open shit for people” he explains. “As somebody who is… ostensibly an engineer – which can be such a dirty word sometimes – it seems pretty stupid that the internet is basically only usable by engineers – or by platforms that were built by engineers that will exploit all kinds of folks.”

Moving to Glitch

With a career that includes a fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation, today von Doom is now the Head of Product Manager at coding platform Glitch. The job was, he says, one offered because of Substation, as Substation is built on Glitch. “Apparently I used glitch in a way they really liked.”

There’s a real affinity between von Doom’s worldview and the work that Glitch does. “The whole point of glitch, and the reason I was excited about it at the time,” von Doom explains, “is that it was meant to empower people that aren’t necessarily developers to use developer stacks that are really hard for them… It’s not just about learn to code, but rather you can come and see code as creativity, and build and shape things the way you want.”

What is Substation?

Substation is, at a basic level, a newsletter platform that allows writers to build a subscription for their work. Viewed this way it’s an alternative to Substack. However, simply viewing it in this way would be to overlook the open nature of Substation. While Substack forces you into a certain way of delivering subscriptions and locks you into its infrastructure, Substation gives you a significant degree of freedom in a number of ways.

Financial independence

The first is it gives you financial independence. “One of the problems with a platform of any kind is, for the most part, you can’t take those payment relationships with you and leave,” von Doom explains. “So you’ve got a thousand subscribers and they’re actually paying your bills to some degree – that’s an exciting place to be – but at the same time you can’t just take that subscription and leave and move to something else. You don’t own the payment relationship, the platform does.”

This was particularly important to von Doom’s friends Liz and Jenn Pelly, writers that were well aware of Substack’s increasing profile. They wanted, von Doom says, “ownership and control of their own thing.”

Liz and Jenn Pelly’s newsletter – Cryptophasia – runs on Braintree, but von Doom makes it clear this is more of a pragmatic choice than any specific preference for that specific online payment platform. (“I don’t really have any loyalty to any payment service, they’re all bastards of the credit card network no matter what.”) Ultimately, what makes Substation unique is that it gives you flexibility that platforms like Substack simply don’t provide.

“They can run this stuff while they own those relationships. They can bring those relationships to wherever they want and suddenly you say, well, this is a much more equitable way to go… Why do you need two layers of abstraction between the money when you could just have – the one relationship to the payment service?”

Artistic independence

The flexibility and financial independence Substation offers writers like Liz and Jenn Pelly expands to other domains. This includes everything from the types of memberships that you might want to set up, to the nature of the works you want to create for your audience.

“Right now Substation looks essentially like a Substack clone,” but, if you wanted, you could do more, like “make a paywall with it, make other things with it,” he says.

This is crucial to the project and von Doom’s way of thinking. “I think there’s lots of potential for… new ideas in business that aren’t based on scarcity but rather abundance and finding and supporting people that you care about and the things that they make.”

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How platforms shape and limit creativity

The way platforms limit and shape creativity is something von Doom is particularly attentive to.

“Right now artists are forced into a situation where essentially the innovation on their models, on what they’re going to do, how they’re going to deliver their art to their fans that piece is shaped really constrictingly [sic] by platforms,” von Doom says. “It’s you’re going to do it this way, you’re going to have three tiers, you’re going to do this times a month. Those exact models work great for some people – congratulations, that’s awesome – but I really believe in the creativity of artists not just to make art, but also to how they want to bring art to people.”

Von Doom cites David Bowie’s “Bowie Bonds” as an example of how artists need to be able to dictate independence on their own terms, often in ways as innovative as their work. “It’s like what? That’s bonkers. Why would you do that? [But it] actually made all the sense in the world for David Bowie.”

His enthusiasm for this sort of thing is clear. “That kind of thing is super exciting to me… Give artists more control over the businesses that they run so they can make money how they see fit and it actually kind of works for people.”

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The challenges of open source and open platforms

This doesn’t mean to say openness is easy. Indeed, simplicity is one of the reasons that platforms like Substack are able to gain so much traction.

That might be obvious, but von Doom is also able to provide a software developers perspective. “That little bit about how platforms lead the shape of the art, or lead the shape of the content – the problem with that is, if you want to free people from that burden and come out with open stuff that says we want you to be able to do the thing that is shaped in your world, for you – part of what you’re also saying is I’ll build a thing but I don’t want to control it. And that’s a really hard urge to fight against.”

Von Doom continues, “it’s a really hard way to build something, frankly. Because you build opinionated things; and if you don’t, you build really big things.”

He’s also honest about what this has meant for Substation. “No matter how much you refine it, no matter how much you do… The reality of the situation is that’s as good as I could produce as one person.”

Supporting new users on Substation

This means that Substation is never going to scale in the way that a platform like Substack has done. Getting started, for example, isn’t as simple as just entering an email and setting up an account.

“One person… who I was speaking to, they got to a point where they managed to remix the Glitch thing” but now “[they] need to have API keys for braintree, and you need to have API keys for Mailgun, and your domain stuff – and it was like, can you help? this is too hard.”

But von Doom is only too happy to help new users find their way through Substation. In fact, it helps him to learn more about his project. “The nice thing when you start with writers is, it turns out, you can get people to write the ‘Getting Started’ docs. I’ve had my head up my own ass for so long with this thing that I’m like: Oh, that’s hard – yeah that is really hard, I don’t remember how I did that even, let’s figure that out.”

To a certain extent, these adoption challenges underline what von Doom calls a “curse” of open source. “No matter how nice you make it it’s never going to be as easy to use as something that’s a slick produced platform that has the money behind it that has the time, the thought, all that kind of stuff.

”Maybe a thousand small and opinionated things is better than one really big thing that can do a thousand things generally.”

Looking to the future

Ultimately, von Doom wants to give people more freedom to do what they want. “It’s not really that I think platforms are bad per se; I just think they’re a little bit outmoded,” he says. “The idea of being on a big monolith of a platform that will serve you in every way shape or form and just not let you leave, I don’t think it’s inherently evil or anything, I don’t think those are designed because people are trying to maximise their grip over you… that’s not what’s going on, but it’s also not necessarily the next way of thinking for artists.”

Instead, von Doom would “like to see a cautious approach towards a kinder sort of smaller open future.”

He believes the future is bright. “I’m optimistic about a future for open and open source” he says. He’s starting to “realise maybe a thousand small and opinionated things is better than one really big thing that can do a thousand things generally.”

If there is a general malaise across culture and the industry it’s because “people have gotten burned so many times.” The recent controversy about the types of writers being courted by Substack with huge advances highlights how something that looks to be built on the principles of access and democratization is often anything but. As journalist Jude Ellison Sady Doyle recently wrote, “Substack isn’t a self-publishing platform… It curates its writers. It pays them, sometimes massively, and it makes choices as to who gets paid well and who doesn’t.”

The only way to stop this is by shifting how we think. We need to embrace an ethos that rejects scale and speed in favour of something that might require more effort but which will ultimately be more rewarding. It could also help us recover our creativity, sidestepping the identikit aesthetics and models of large platforms, and forging a more independent future.

“Let’s at least start framing these problems with not how do I make money but how do we help people just get enough – and that’s the thing we need to figure out.”

Follow Jesse von Doom on Twitter: @jessevondoom

Learn more about Substation: substation.glitch.me/