In April 2023, Twitter (now X) which had recently been acquired by Elon Musk started fighting. Most of this has been walked back, but a direct link to a substack no longer provides a rich opengraph/card preview and is likely deboosted by the For You algorithm.
This repository contains the backend code for SubstituteStack.com
SubstituteStack fixes this
replace any substack.com url with substitutestack.com
- my-cool-newsletter.substack.com/p/my-cool-post
+ my-cool-newsletter.substitutestack.com/p/my-cool-postThis works with every substack link, whether to a specific post, an about page or to the homepage.
This behaves as a redirect to all services, except the Twitterbot user-agent, in which case it serves an HTML page with the <head> section pulled from substack, which Twitter/X dutifully turns into a rich twitter card.
X has in its short history had issues with string replacement, so I've avoided 'substack' appearing in the URL at all, in case it has any effect on the algorithm juice.
X deboosts tweets containing links heavily, even when using SubstituteStack. The best way to get around this is by posting a screenshot or a tweet without a link, and then replying to it with a link, which creates a thread without the algorithmic penalty.
SubstituteStack runs on Cloudflare workers which has a generous free tier. Replacing the DEPLOYMENT_URL in src/index.ts and it should all work, however you'll need a domain name.
Adding a custom domain to your substack directly would be a better path, as it allows for rich previews as well as giving you a home on the web that you control.
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