I’ve never really gotten into creating an email newsletter for my blog. Even when it was built into Medium, I seldom used it. Recently however, I’ve been thinking of ways I can offer readers an email experience and how to do it. There's lots of good options out there but there's one caveat. I want to be compliant with GDPR so I can respect reader's privacy while maintaining a nice user experience.
Why not MailChimp?
This is certainly the best option with a generous free tier but the big issue for me is that all information is going to MailChimp as a third party so I would have to include this little disclosure to tell readers who signup. Not ideal.
Choosing self-hosted alternatives
I've had to make this decision before when choosing analytics, Google analytics used to be my go-to tool until I decided to choose Fathom for the same reasons, privacy. I can self-host my own solution, it's a little more setup and some maintenance in the long run but it's something I can call my own and be sure that user data isn't going through third parties when all they wanted to do is read an article on my blog. So I'm setting up listmonk right now and will integrate it with Benevolent Bytes in the coming week.
I'd like to get this platform set up so I can start interacting more directly with readers and give the same experience that I currently enjoy, receiving a a newsletter or full article to my inbox every now and then. It's a nice passive experience that means I can choose to go back and read it whenever or sit down with my morning coffee and see what's happening in the world of web development.