2021-03-15 Update: unfortunately, because of choices that Substack’s leadership made, I can no longer endorse them. However, other newsletter services are supporting subscribing via RSS.

tl;dr: Use https://username.substack.com/feed to follow a Substack newsletter in your feed reader.

In 2016 writers suggested that email newsletters were the new blogs, the subscription model is straightforward, and email supports HTML so you apply some minimal typography and layout to make one readable.

But email isn’t necessarily where you go to read an essay or a blog post.

I’m glad that the developers and designers at Substack understand this, and you can subscribe to a newsletter like an RSS feed.

For example, you can subscribe to the Normcore Tech (a great read on tech and culture) newsletter from https://vicky.substack.com/ and if you add feed to that you can add https://vicky.substack.com/feed/ to your feed reader. If it’s a subscriber-only issue of the zine, you’ll get a link to subscribe.

I came to the Web from ‘zines (APAs,) and appreciate how writing for email can spur higher quality conversation than blog comments, but I like the web page view.

If you’re new to web feeds (RSS and Atom) check out About Feeds, for an introduction and enjoy creating a news feed that’s not optimized by someone trying to make you doom scroll.