Today we’re excited to announce a collaboration with sub.club, a brand new platform to help writers sustainably publish on the fediverse! With our new integration, you can offer your most loyal readers a paid subscription, and publish exclusive blog posts that they can subscribe to from their favorite platform.
Since 2018, Write.as has been part of the fediverse, an open social network that enables people to create, share, and socialize seamlessly across a variety of services. Along with WriteFreely, the open source software behind our platform, we’ve helped bring long-form content to the millions of people on this network.
Now with sub.club, your biggest fans can help fund your writing, and read exclusive posts made just for them conveniently in their social web feed. Sub.club’s Anuj Ahooja (@[email protected]) shows how our new integration works here:
Getting Started
Connecting your Write.as blog to sub.club is easy, and works seamlessly to keep your posts in sync across platforms.
To get started on sub.club, you’ll first need an account in the fediverse (for example, on a platform like Mastodon). If you’re already a Write.as Pro subscriber, you can grab a free account on our writing-focused community, Writing Exchange — see your Blogs page for more information.
Next, you’ll create a sub.club account and connect it to Stripe. This will allow you to set a subscription price, and start collecting payments from your subscribers.
With that out of the way, you’re ready to connect your sub.club account to Write.as!
Connecting sub.club
Go to your sub.club dashboard and scroll to find the Post via API section. Click the copy button next to where you see API key.
Now on Write.as, go to your blog’s Customize page, and scroll to the Monetization section. Paste your API key into the “sub.club” section, and save your changes.
Note: For full capabilities, be sure to also enable Federation on this page, if you haven’t already.
Now you can start monetizing your posts!
Premium Posts
Write.as makes it easy to choose which posts are free or exclusive to your sub.club subscribers. To publish a paid post, you’ll insert this special shortcode into your posts where you want the paid content to begin:
<!--paid-->
Once published, this will hide content beyond this marker, and create a link that prompts readers to continue reading on sub.club. Once there, they can also subscribe to future premium posts, if they haven’t already.
Over on the fediverse, your Write.as blog posts will show all content up to the “paid” section, with your full post directly embedded. Thanks to sub.club’s close integration with the fediverse, existing subscribers will be able to read the full post right their in their social feed! And for anyone who hasn’t subscribed yet, they’ll be able to head over to sub.club and subscribe using their fediverse account.
Here is an example of what your Write.as post will look, depending on which client you’re using:
What’s Next
As more people use this new integration on Write.as, we’ll continue refining it and improving the experience for readers and writers alike. As you try this out, please send us your feedback on our forum or in the fediverse by replying to @[email protected]!
Beyond that, we’ll bring this feature to WriteFreely, so even more people can publish premium blog posts across the open social web. We can’t wait to see what everyone creates!