Introducing Creator Newsletters: Your Readers Can Now Get Your Posts by Email

Excited to introduce Creator Newsletters on Ecency and self-hosted instances. Email digests are live on Ecency. Anyone can subscribe to a creator, a community or Ecency itself and get new posts delivered to their inbox, weekly or monthly.

If you write on Hive, you now have a mailing list. You did not have to apply for it, you do not have to pay for it and it works whether you post through Ecency or anywhere else on Hive.

Why email, on a blockchain platform

The audience you build on Hive has always lived inside somebody's feed. That is true here, it is true on every other Hive front end and it is true on every web2 platform you left to come here. A feed decides what your followers see. You do not.

Email is the one channel that skips all of it. A reader who gives you their address hears from you when you publish, in the order you published, with nothing ranking it. If they change apps or an interface changes its sorting, the connection survives, because it was never mediated by an app in the first place.

That is a strange thing for a blockchain platform to be missing, given how much of the pitch is about owning your audience. So we built it.

Isn't this Substack?

That is the shape and it is not an accident. Substack proved that writers want a direct line to their readers more than they want another feed. That is a good idea and it deserves to be taken seriously. What differs is underneath. On a hosted newsletter platform your archive lives in the platform's database and your readers sit in a table beside it, so you can usually export a list, but the writing and the relationship are both held on your behalf. Here the posts are already on the Hive blockchain under keys you hold, so the digest is only a delivery layer over something you own outright. If Ecency stopped existing tomorrow, every one of those posts would still be readable through any other Hive app and the people who followed you could still find them.

One thing we deliberately do not copy is paid subscriptions. Ecency digests are free to send and free to receive, because posts earn from the Hive reward pool instead, which is a different model rather than a cheaper version of the same one.

For readers

Open any profile on Ecency and there is an Email digest button. Pick weekly or monthly, enter your address, done. Community pages have the same button for the community's own digest and the front page of ecency.com carries one for a digest of what is trending across the whole platform.

Three honest promises about your address:

Double opt-in, always. Subscribing sends you a confirmation email. Nothing is delivered until you click the link in it, which means nobody can sign you up for anything using your address.

Every email can end it. Each digest carries an unsubscribe link for that one list, plus a way to stop all Ecency email at once. No hunting through settings, no "manage preferences" maze.

Everything in one place. Every digest you receive is listed under your account settings, with its cadence, so you can change or leave any of them from one screen.

For creators

Your list is already there. If somebody subscribes to you today, then the next time you publish, your posts reach them in your next digest without you doing anything at all. A weekly subscriber gets a week of your posts. A monthly subscriber gets a month.

On your own profile you will see how many subscribers you have, next to a link you can share anywhere. Put it in a bio, at the end of a post, in a Wave, on another platform you are trying to move people away from. Anyone who opens it lands on your profile with the subscribe box already open.

Communities work the same way and their owners and admins can see the same numbers for the community list.

Sending on purpose

Everything above happens on its own. Two things let you take the wheel and they are part of Ecency Pro:

Send one post. Wrote something that should not wait for the weekly? Send that post to your list as its own issue.

Compose an issue. Pick several of your posts, add a short introduction in your own words and send that instead. This is closer to a real newsletter than a digest: your framing, your selection, your voice on top of the posts.

Both of these replace that period's automatic digest rather than adding to it, so your subscribers never get two emails for the same week. Community owners and admins can do the same for a community's list.

If you have an Self hosted blog instance

Blogs hosted on Ecency have the signup form built in. It sits in the sidebar and on your blog's About page and it points at your own list, so a reader who finds you through a search result can subscribe without ever seeing Ecency's interface. Nothing to install, nothing to configure and it is on by default. If you would rather not have it, there is a switch for it in the configuration editor.

What we are not doing

We are not selling your subscribers' addresses, renting them or handing them to an ad network. There is no tracking pixel in these emails. We are not going to email your readers about anything they did not subscribe to and the site digest is a separate list from your list, so subscribing to one is never quietly a subscription to the other.

Try it

Open a profile of someone whose writing you follow and hit Email digest. Then look at your own profile and grab your subscribe link.

Your posts already belong to you. Now the way to reach the people who read them can belong to you too.