just fired an interesting shot across the bows of substack, revue, ghost etc :D. Long-term only good things can come of this, but short term, the menu features some 🍿https://stratechery.com/2021/passport/
Much respect for getting off the commentariat couch and turning all the theorizing on aggregation etc. into a business venture. It's the sort of thing I can never conjure up the ambition or capability to try myself.
This space should see a lot more competition. One of the reasons there isn't is that there is a lot of stickiness (if not outright lock-in) due to payment processing inertia. It is non-trivial to wind down a subscription offering (refunds) or move it to a new platform.
I've done one (wind-down) but have only a hazy idea of how the other might work. You'd have to a) shut down on one platform, including issuing refunds for remaining subscription periods b) import content and email list into new platform c) cue people to subscribe again.
Passport sounds vaguely federated/decentralized but I'm not sure I understand the plumbing yet. It'll be interesting to see once Ben releases some open source stuff.
the most interesting feature is the ability to collaborate through “add on" subscriptions. the problem there seems like it would be getting to decent network effects but i dont even know if that would be all that hard given his... network