What to say to my many friends who seem to be starting substacks these days? I am happy for them, but I am vaguely worried for where substack (the platform) is heading. I wish for us all to cultivate independent websites with syndication via sufficiently decentralised protocols. But: power laws are hard to deny.

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Oh man I just spent 10 minutes making several attempts to. It’s really hard lol. I think I just want for my friends to avoid being locked into a platform, and to have enough of their own thing happening. At least in parallel.

Aye, no vendor lock-in but they have network effects now. The way *you* do it is a great reference point: own website for writing, substack for newsletter. But for friends going all-in on substack, I’m encouraging them to get their writing on their own domain, too. To have some hedge against enshittification.

One gets the emails of everyone on one's Substack list, so there's no vendor lock-in... what exactly is the issue?

I share your concern as I fully expect that enshittification will eventually take over Substack too. 

I just make sure my writer friends know that I'm publishing on Paragraph and love it, I'm willing to help them onboard if they ever decide they want to make the move, and they don't need a crypto wallet to do so.