Currently pitting semi-self-hosted¹ #Listmonk and #Notifuse against my current newsletter host #Buttondown. Want to know how they fare.
I really like BD but my subscriber base is >1k which means I spend $29 on each monthly mail. Fiscally, that's not a winning proposition right now for me as I'm still not made of money, and all those costs add up.
I need to bring my own mail server for both (or use one of the supported services, like SES or Postmark.)
¹) PikaPods.com FTW! #EU, too
Welcome to this week’s The Programmer’s Fulcrum.
It’s your weekly review of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.
IMHO, the best way to do […]
https://newsletter.mobileatom.net/the-programmers-fulcrum-20-march-2026/ #ActivityPub #Akkoma #ATProto #bluesky #Buttondown #CSS #Drupal #DrupalCMS #fediverse #Friendica #GNOME #Gutenberg #Holos #HTML #HTMX #Hubzilla #Inkwell #javascript #Joplin #Linux #Madblog #Markdown #Mastodon #MicroBlog #NodeBB #nodejs #OMN #OpenProject #PostmarketOS #Sigil #Tangled #Twig #WebComponents #WordPress
This post first appeared on The Fulcrum.
Welcome to this week’s The Programmer’s Fulcrum.
It’s your weekly review of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening […]
https://newsletter.mobileatom.net/the-programmers-fulcrum-06-march-2026/ #ActivityPub #AI #ATProto #Blacksky #bluesky #BuildAwesome #Buttondown #Calibre #CSS #Emissary #FAIR #fediverse #Forgejo #Furilabs #Ghost #GoToSocial #Gutenberg #Holos #HTML #HTMX #Inkscape #javascript #Linux #Mastodon #Modal #NetNetNewswire #Nextcloud #OMN #PostmarketOS #Tuta #Wafrn #WordPress #XMPP
Welcome to this week’s The Programmer’s Fulcrum.
It’s your weekly review of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.
IMHO, the best way to do […]
https://newsletter.mobileatom.net/the-programmers-fulcrum-27-february-2026/ #ActivityPub #AI #ATProto #bluesky #Buttondown #Codeberg #CSS #Emissary #FAIR #fediverse #Ghost #GoToSocial #Gutenberg #Holos #HTML #HTMX #javascript #Linux #Mastodon #Nextcloud #OMN #OrganicMaps #PixelFed #Tuta #WordPress #XMPP #xWiki
Massive thanks to @buttondown for the best customer service ever!
There was a burp with one of my blog posts, where, probably thanks to my botching the publication date, it didn't get picked up by my newsletter. I have a handful of family and friends who don't use RSS and rely on the RSS-to-Email function I get from Buttondown.
When we realized the problem, I could fix the date in future posts, but there seemed to be no way to get my Buttondown account to pick up that one older post and send it out. So some very nice employee named Justin literally coded that option! Probably on a Friday night since I got email about it this morning! So bonkers kind, thank you so much! ❤️
Newsletters and Email Clipping
Buttondown, which powers The Newsletter Leaf Journal, published an informative post explaining how some email hosts clip emails that reach a certain size. It varies based on email provider. Several email apps, like Outlook, Apple Mail, and Proton, won't constrain your emails beyond the limits set by SMTP. Others do, though. Gmail cuts a received email short once it hits 102kb in size (not counting attachments). That tends to work out to around 17,000 words of plain text, or as low as 7,000 […]https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/newsletters-and-email-clipping/
Footnotes in Buttondown
I mailed the 264th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal earlier today. I included 21 links from around the web (the usual). I had one saved link (see how I save links) noting the unfortunate consequences of putting a request for a Court to take one action or another in a footnote. I decided to take that as a challenge and use many footnotes in my newsletter (I wrote the footnotes in markdown by the way). While I do not think I will do the same thing in Newsletter Leaf Journal 265 next week, […]https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/footnotes-in-buttondown-01-24-26/
I haven't seen many users yet on #PlaneScale for #postgres. Nice of #buttondown trying things for the rest of us. 😅
For migrations like this, spinning up a read replica is key. Use it to do what you need. Primary then gets no impact while migrating.
https://buttondown.com/blog/2026-01-14-how-we-migrated-our-database-to-planetscale
Welcome to this week’s The Programmer’s Fulcrum. FYI, this is our first one of 100% TPF curation.
It’s your weekly review of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week.
IMHO, the best way to do that is to use […]
https://newsletter.mobileatom.net/the-programmers-fulcrum-02-january-2026/ #ActivityPub #ATProto #Bonfire #Buttondown #Codeberg #CSS #DarkTable #ddev #Decidim #docker #DrupalCMS #eOS #fediverse #Ghost #GIMP #GravCMS #Holos #HTML #HTMX #Inkscape #javascript #Joplin #Kdenlive #Krita #Mastodon #mBin #OMN #OpenProject #PeerTube #PostmarketOS #Scribus #SelfHosting #Twig #WordPress #xWiki #Zettlr #ZorinOS
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/buttondown-canonical-urls-11-29-25/
I mentioned in my previous post that I could not send our regular weekly newsletter due to a formatting issue in Buttondown. Fortunately, my support request was answered quickly. It turned out that I had an extraneous tag in the header (it had not caused any issues before this week). I sent the email. In so doing, I learned something interesting about Buttondown. Two reasons I like Buttondown is because it has a full searchable archive and an RSS feed. That is, it functions like a blog which supports my making Newsletter Leaf Journal its own publication. For today’s email, I set NLJ copy as the canonical URL since I published that before sending the email. To my surprise, I learned that when you set an external link as the canonical, the archive link for the newsletter takes you to the original instead of the Buttondown version (I assumed that the Buttondown archive version would be accessable but with the canonical tag pointing search engines to the original).
Carlo Zottmann
The Fulcrum (backup)
Hollie
Nicholas A. Ferrell
Alejandro Baez
