I’m dreaming of a newsletter subscription

Just in time for the holidays, you can now gift Buttondown subscriptions directly from any newsletter’s subscription page. You can give your friends and family subscriptions to your favorite writers on Buttondown, complete with a gift message. It’s the perfect way to make two people’s day: The newsletter author, and the lucky person you gifted a subscription.

And on the backend, Buttondown shows newsletter authors both the gift buyer and recipient, so you can welcome new subscribers and thank those who gifted your newsletter.

Good tidings we bring

The internet and social media, especially, isn’t always a holly, jolly place. Except, that is, when someone mentions your writing, shares your newsletter, and joins in the conversation. Those moments are the best of the internet. And now, you don’t have to wade into a social network to see them.

Buttondown’s new Inbox brings all of your newsletter mentions and notifications together, with comments on your newsletter archives, social media mentions, and webmentions alike in a single page.

From the blog

November was a bit quieter this year without NaNoWriMo, the over-two-decades-long trend that started in 1999 with 21 writers who decided to write a novel in a month. It was a goal wrapped in a looming deadline with a side of peer pressure—and it worked. Here’s the history of NaNoWriMo, the bundle of arbitrary goals that led writers globally to pen over 24 billion words.

Speaking of arbitrary goals and deadlines, how do you keep feature creep from taking over your product (or, your novel or newsletter)? Sometimes it takes a step forwards and another backwards. Sometimes it takes trial and error. Most of all it requires time to edit and refine and reconsider.

“[Buttondown has] made sending my newsletter feel calm and creative again.”
~ Kalina Silverman

We interviewed a bunch of Buttondown users this month. We talked to Igor Ranc about building Berlin’s largest English-language tech newsletter, Handpicked Berlin, and with author Kalina Silverman about building their Big Talk community. Octopus Think told us how they share app updates, and Kieron Gillen talked about marketing comics on his own, after a career of writing for Marvel.

And we answered the question that’s most likely to pop into your head if you see it in the wild: What the hell is ActivityPub?

Other stuff

• Subscribing to Buttondown newsletters in RSS readers like Feedbin and Readwise is now easier with auto-activation.

• You can now add custom icons to your newsletter, preview emails as any subscriber, roll back changes to your templates, and customize your Buttondown homepage with your favorite analytics graphs.

• Buttondown can now manage your DNS, for a simpler way to add custom domains.

• You can filter subscribers by last open or click date, as a final check before cleaning your list.

• And we’ve got an early community holiday gift: We open sourced Sniperl.ink, our free tool to detect which email provider someone uses and give them a magic link that opens to an inbox search. That, and we updated our stack (welcome, Mise and Biome!) and open source funding for 2025.