So. What if Yakread let you write posts instead of just read them? Today's newsletter will discuss some of what I envision that looking like. There could be a "Publish" page where you can write long- or short-form posts. They'd all go onto a public profile page/website (with optional custom domain), which would include a single RSS feed with all your posts. I like the idea of making email sending asynchronous and automatic: you publish your long/short posts whenever, and Yakread bundles them up into a weekly email for you. You can disable it and do manual sending if you want, but for most casual users--the vast majority of which don't yet write newsletters at all--I think automatic sending is the way to go. When people go to your website, they wouldn't necessarily need to even know it was published with Yakread. It just has a standard email signup box + RSS feed. You can subscribe with Yakread of course, but you can also subscribe with any other app. Maybe for free users you get some light Yakread branding and for $5/month or whatever you can remove it + do custom themes, or something. Discussion: I love the structure of this discord server (or "discord forum" as I've taken to calling it). I prefer it to the everything-jumbled-up-into-one-big-feed experience you get on Twitter et. al. A downside of Discord is that it's not designed as a newsletter complement; it's really annoying that subscribers who click on links to this server will get redirected to a login screen if they aren't already members of the server. So I'd make your "Yakread profile" have a section that basically looks like a Discord server that has a forum structure, like this one. You'd get visibility controls so you can make channels public if you want. Authentication would be linked with your newsletter, so people who click on your posts from the newsletter will be signed in automatically.

And... I think that's about it!

Now, to more closely examine whether or not doing this actually makes sense for Yakread--the counter argument would be that fundamentally it would be best for Yakread to stay focused on a certain niche and that expanding into a full social media client in order to get more users is a questionable goal. After all, if you keep trying to target the broadest audience possible, eventually you just turn into tiktok. and imo the essential nature of yakread is that it's meant to help you spend more time reading long-form/meaningful content instead of getting a quick dopamine hit. It seems quite plausible to me that the set of people who are interested in that really won't care much about being able to fire off tweets while they're reading articles. On top of that, since Yakread isn't a closed-loop social network, it doesn't rely on user-generated content in the same way that Twitter or TikTok. both of those services need their users to create posts/videos. but for Yakread, there's no shortage of writing on the open web. So I do like the idea of keeping yakread focused solely on reading and letting other apps handle writing and discussion.