It Started as a Zine
Someone I know started a zine in 2019. Photocopied, stapled, distributed at shows and coffee shops. Forty copies per issue. She knew every reader by name.
By 2021 it was a newsletter with 3,000 subscribers. By 2023 it was a community platform with a Discord and a Patreon and a merch store. She doesn't know most of her readers anymore.
She's not sure if that's growth or loss. Probably both.
What Scale Does to Intimacy
The zine worked because it was small. The smallness was the point. When you know your readers, you write differently. You're not performing for an audience — you're talking to people. The writing has a different texture.
At 3,000 subscribers, you're writing for a demographic. At 40 readers, you're writing for people. The shift is subtle and enormous.
I've been thinking about this in the context of what indie creator communities are trying to preserve as they grow — the quality of connection that made them worth growing in the first place.
The Discord Problem
Discord is good at many things. It's not good at intimacy. The format rewards volume — the people who post most are the most visible. The people who read carefully and respond thoughtfully get lost in the scroll.
The zine had no scroll. You read it front to back. You held it in your hands. The format enforced a kind of attention that Discord actively discourages.
This isn't an argument against Discord. It's an argument for knowing what you're trading when you move from one format to another. Every platform has a shape, and the shape changes what's possible inside it.
What the Merch Store Did
The merch store was practical — it funded the operation. It also changed the relationship. Readers became customers. The newsletter became a brand. The brand needed to be consistent in ways the zine never had to be.
Consistency is the enemy of surprise. The zine could be weird. The brand has to be recognizable.
There's a conversation happening at calitoy.com about how creative projects navigate the tension between staying weird and staying viable. It's not a new problem but it doesn't get easier.
The Thing That Survived
She still writes the newsletter herself. Every word. That's the thing that survived the scaling. The voice is still hers — still specific, still weird in the right ways, still talking to people rather than at them.
The community formed around that voice. The Discord is noisy and the merch store is fine and the Patreon is what keeps the lights on. But the newsletter is still the thing. The original thing, just bigger.
Maybe that's the answer. Not preserving the format but preserving the voice. The zine was always about the voice. The voice is still there.
The work being done at girlnextup on community building and creative identity is worth reading alongside this — different angle, same questions.