An "official" svelte newsletter?

[DreaminDani]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Svelte currently has a blog at svelte.dev/blog.
It also now has monthly posts covering what's new (see #5429 and #5554 )
I've been copy/pasting the post and sending it out via svelte.substack.com so that the 200 or so subscribers get an email when a new post is up.
To help drive traffic to the svelte.dev site AND standardize communication with the community, it'd be nice to have a way to send emails for our new blog posts (or at least the "what's new in svelte" monthly posts, whatever is easier)

Describe the solution you'd like
We've discussed this a bit on the #contributing channel in the discord and came up with the following options:

1. Use a free (or free for small lists) solution, but not controlled by svelte, solution (e.g. keep using substack but hand over the keys, or switch to revue, tinyletter, buttondown, etc.)
2. Use a self-hosted solution like SendPortal or listmonk
3. Build it ourselves! Maybe just a github action integrated with Amazon SES, Sendgrid, or any other email API? We would need a (private) place to store our email list.

Both 1 and 2 would probably require copying the finished text over to a platform or maybe integrating with an API in the CI. Number 3 is probably a CI-only option.

No matter which option we choose, I'm really hoping we can also add a "subscribe" box somewhere on the blog so that folks won't have to go to a completely separate site to get email updates.

How important is this feature to you?
Medium priority. It's totally not a big deal for me to copy/paste to the "unofficial" newsletter every month. I just want to do the right thing by the community and transfer the list over to be "controlled" by the svelte site.

Additional context
Feel free to close this if we think it makes more sense to keep the "email blast" power out of the project and/or prefer that it remains "unofficial". Happy to discuss other options as well :)

[antony]

Given the current schedule of the maintainers, I would suggest that this would start as a community project, vs something that we would be looking to build.

FWIW I'm very opposed to using sendgrid since their free/low-cost solution's email sending reliability is pretty terrible right now as they have a spam and phishing problem, and their documentation is abysmal.

I've started switching over to Mailjet recently, which has the advantages of a decent API and excellent documentation. However one specific reason is that we can use their own language to remove the burden of creating the horrible email HTML required by most mail clients See https://mjml.io/

[kevmodrome]

I can set this up as part of Svelte Society but I feel like it should be an official newsletter (pretty much a copy of the one that goes up on the blog). MJML looks great! It would give much more "street cred" if it was sent from svelte.dev..

[DreaminDani]

@kevmodrome i think this @antony's suggestion for this to start as a community project is a great opportunity to bring svelte society and svelte.dev closer together. By having the blog posts on the svelte.dev website and the email coming from a svelte society handle, it'll make it super clear that the newsletter is community run + maintainer approved :) Plus, it'd make it easier to send non-newsletter emails to the list without it feeling spammy.

Mailjet also has an email capture & storage feature that we would need if we wanted to embed a "sign up for the newsletter" section on the blog itself.

Who would be the right person from Svelte Society to sign up for an account on Mailjet (or another similarly-priced competitor)?

[kevmodrome]

Yes, I know what he's saying, I'm just trying to push it to be from the official Svelte domain because I think it carries more "weight". :)

[DreaminDani]

Bump. @kevmodrome how do you feel about setting this up with me sometime this month, in time for the Jan 1 newsletter?

[DreaminDani]

Alternatively, we could just update the svelte.substack.com branding to be the "official" svelte newsletter... they have an embed: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041759232-Can-I-embed-a-signup-form-for-my-publication-

This would prevent us from having to migrate the email list to a different system. I would be happy to add all the svelte community team admin/members as admins/writers on substack, so anyone could post (if I get hit by a bus, win the lottery, etc.)

[pjebs]

Hey @d3sandoval! I operate the svelte.news newsletter. I've got all the infrastructure built already (including auto-twittering). I've built a nice site, got a nice domain and I'm willing to put a lot of time and effort into curating.

How would you like to join forces?

You can see the newsletter here: https://svelte.news & https://svelte.news/weekly

[DreaminDani]

@pjebs love your newsletter! But i feel like the separate domain is the underlying issue here. Currently, the blog posts are hosted on svelte.dev yet it seems strange that we'd have to send out the newsletter from svelte.news (or svelte.substack.com per my suggestion).

I want to make sure we do everything we can to not fracture our community properties even further. The split between svelte.dev and the community / svelte society site is already confusing for newcomers. So I'd prefer we try to stay consistent whenever possible.

As for joining forces, I do create a PR ~1-2 weeks before a post. I'd love to get your feedback on those PRs before they go out :D

[DreaminDani]

@kevmodrome looks like substack supports custom domains for a one time setup fee of $50: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051222571-How-do-I-set-up-my-custom-domain-

I might have some time this weekend to do a proof of concept for an email collection box on the blog and the svelte community website. That may help visualize what's possible with substack (or really any other newsletter tool)

[DreaminDani]

A conversation in #contributing is making me think about where the email collection form would go. @peopledrivemecrazy brought up this example from the vue newsletter: https://news.vuejs.org/

I really like the main-sidebar style layout for the blog. The sidebar remains present in the upper right as you click through to different blog posts.

[manuel3108]

I just saw this and would propose another thing. We can seperate this into a own issue if you think that is better.

In order to bring this forward we could start by creating a #news channel in the discord server. Everyone in there could change his notification settings to be notified for it, or disable them if he / she wants.
Sure this would not cover everybody possible, but I think a quite a lot of people are on the discord.

As for the implementation: I think this could just be an easy CI / CD step that checks for a new blog post and the sends a short message to the discord server. We could then choose to include the whole post into discord, or provide a link to the official site (personally prefered).

[DreaminDani]

Finally got a chance to make this PR to help folks signup for the newsletter: #6163

Would love some thoughts from the community on how best to approach this. I've heard that folks are confused by the split between the blog and the "unofficial" newsletter. Hoping to close that gap with this (or a similar) PR.

[benmccann]

Closing per discussion on PR. Thanks for the efforts on this!