Substack is opening up to more users with its recent announcement that anyone can now publish content on the platform without having to open a publication. With this change, Substack appears to be trying to attract more types of writers and content creators, not just those interested in producing regularly-distributed, long-form writing.
Though Substack is primarily known as a newsletter platform, the company has recently taken big steps to make the service more like a social network with the introduction of social features like tweet-like notes and DMs, and this latest change takes that ambition even further as you no longer need to be involved with newsletters to publish on the platform.
Currently, anyone with a Substack account can share their own written, video, and audio content on the platform. Users can collect free or paid subscriptions from their Substack profile. If users decide to create a newsletter on Substack, they can do so while still maintaining their posts and subscribers.
Substack also revealed that it continues to work on making its platform more mobile-friendly. A few weeks ago, Substack introduced the ability for writers to draft and publish new posts directly from their phones via its 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 a social network, rather than just a newsletter platform, can be traced back to when Twitter (now X) was sold to Elon Musk. When Twitter started to change, arguably for the worse, many users began looking for alternative platforms. Substack, along with other platforms like Bluesky and Threads, aimed to capitalize on the upheaval at Twitter.