Substack is opening up to more users with its recent announcement that anyone can now publish content on its platform without setting up a publication. With the change, Substack likely wants to appeal to more types of writers and content creators, not just people interested in producing regularly published long-form copy.
While Substack is best known as a newsletter platform, the company has recently made a big push to transform the service into a social network with the introduction of social features like tweet-like notes and DMs. This latest change takes it a step further, as you no longer need to be connected to a newsletter to publish on the platform.
Now anyone with a Substack account can share their writing, videos, or audio content on the platform. Users can collect free or paid subscriptions directly from their Substack profile. If users decide to create a newsletter on Substack, they can do so while retaining their posts and subscribers.
Substack also said it continues to work on making its platform more mobile-friendly. A few weeks ago, Substack introduced the ability for writers to compose and publish new posts directly from their phone through the iOS app, with Android support coming soon. The company also announced that it has begun testing live video and in-app payments.
The company’s efforts to become more of a social network than a pure newsletter platform can be traced back to when Twitter (now X) was sold to Elon Musk. As Twitter began to change, arguably for the worse, many users began to look for alternative platforms. Substack and platforms like Bluesky and Threads sought to capitalize on Twitter’s upheaval.
