Newsletters at Scale with Sebastian Lorber (This Week in React) | RSS Curation, Paid Acquisition, React Server Components

What does it actually take to run one of the biggest newsletters in the React ecosystem, week after week, for over six years?

In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Sebastian Lorber, creator of This Week in React, the newsletter read by over 45,000 developers every week, and a core maintainer of Docusaurus at Meta. Sebastian has worked with React since late 2013, spent years as an independent consultant, and slowly turned a side project into his full indie hacker income.

Sebastian pulls back the curtain on the entire operation: how a French newsletter aimed at landing consulting gigs became an English curation powerhouse, the exhaustive weekly workflow across 2,000 X profiles and 500+ RSS feeds, and the Gmail size limit that quietly shapes every issue. We get into the unglamorous economics too, why French sponsors couldn't make it sustainable, how he prices and manages four ad slots a week, and why click counts are far more misleading than most sponsors think.

The conversation also covers the human side of curation: walking back mistakes with link proxies, staying friends with maintainers while breaking their unannounced work, the slow decline of social reach, and why he checks React feature flags before telling anyone a feature is "shipped." Plus a candid look at the recent TanStack compromise, trusted publishing, and why it gives a false sense of safety.

Key Topics:

- Starting a French newsletter to attract consulting clients

- Pivoting to English and converting an X audience

- The exhaustive weekly curation workflow (X lists, RSS, InnoReader)

- The Gmail truncation limit and how it shapes each issue

- Why French sponsors couldn't make it sustainable

- Managing four sponsors a week with Sponsy

- Why click metrics are misleading (Apple, corporate security scanners, UTM)

- Paid acquisition on X, Instagram, Reddit and what actually converts

- Treating subscribers like a stream, not a possession

- Checking React flags before announcing features

- React Server Components, the activity component, and Docusaurus

- The TanStack compromise, trusted publishing, and NPM security

GUEST LINKS

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienlorber/

🐦 X: https://x.com/sebastienlorber

🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/slorber

🌐 This Week in React: https://thisweekinreact.com/

FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📨 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

👤 My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

📸 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

This Week in React: https://thisweekinreact.com/

Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/

Sponsy: https://getsponsy.com/

#ThisWeekInReact #Newsletter #ReactJS #Docusaurus #OpenSource #IndieHacker #ContentCuration #SoftwareEngineering #ReactServerComponents #NPMSecurity

💬 Do you still read tech newsletters, or has AI and social changed how you keep up with the ecosystem? Let me know in the comments.