Own your publishing platform, use Substack as a pipe

A post arguing Substack writers need a personal website sparked a real discussion around the POSSE principle: Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Several commenters described exactly this approach in practice, treating Substack purely as a distribution channel while keeping canonical content on a domain they control. The Hamburg newsletter example (alsterrunde.com) is the concrete case study.

This is not a new argument, but it keeps coming back because the incentives keep pushing the other way. Substack makes it easy to skip the owned-domain step, and most writers do. The people in this thread who have kept their own sites report being glad they did, mostly for reasons of continuity and link stability.

The broader pattern: platform dependency anxiety is a recurring theme on HN, and it surfaces most visibly in publishing, but the same logic applies to any creator or product built on top of a third-party platform. The distribution is borrowed; the audience relationship should not be.