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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Same reason anyone would use a hosted service vs setting it up themselves, they don't want to deal with the hassle. For many of us, it's trivial, sometimes because we've done it before, but for others, it's a huge hill to climb, which seems unnecessary if all they want to do is publish some content.

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This makes sense for people who don’t code, but I see plenty of developer oriented bloggers who use Substack, which is puzzling to me. I also don’t know why Substack doesn’t get with the program and just support MathJax and colored syntax highlighting already.

> This makes sense for people who don’t code, but I see plenty of developer oriented bloggers who use Substack, which is puzzling to me

No, it makes sense for any person with any skill set. Just because you are a developer doesn't mean you want to setup everything yourself. We use plenty of tools to make our own experience better and more focused, based on what we want to do.

If I'm a programmer, and I want to publish blog posts, sometimes I don't want to care about the setup that makes me able to publish blog posts, I just want to post something.

> why Substack doesn’t get with the program and just support MathJax and colored syntax highlighting already

This, I don't know. Should have been done ages ago.

(author here) i have spent years setting up my own blogstack (google swyxkit) so i know how to do it. but comments like this miss that Substack is an *email social network*, and as a newsletter author that is the one currency that loosely/poorly tracks my success and distribution (right down to ability to book quality guests). Substack is the best email network period right now (it is not a very good podcast host but I deal with its many annoyances because it does one thing all the other hosts cannot - auto email my subscribers when a new episode is out). The moment Hashnode improves I'll switch to it.

Yes Substack excels at being an email social network. So I’ve settled on the following workflow:

1. Make my blog using mkdocs material plus GitHub pages so it has all the nice code and math rendering features (plus things like admonitions and all the other nice things in mkdocs material).

2. On each post have a Substack signup button.

3. When I make a new post I want to send to subscribers, I manually create a short text-only teaser post on Substack (paragraph or two), with a link to my main blog that says “read more here”.

I know this doesn’t auto-push new posts to subscribers but I am ok with that given that I won’t be writing more than once a week at most.

I can do it myself and it's not a huge hill to climb, but I don't necessarily have the time to do it. There is also the time that needs to be dedicated towards maintenance (upgrades etc.).

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