Recently, I looked into Substack, a platform that is free for writers of all genres to post their works.
There is a small, but growing, genealogy community, which is what caught my interest. Ultimately, I decided that the platform isn’t for me and I’ll share my reasons.
First, there are definite positives:
- Substack is free.
- The writing tools are similar to WordPress.
- There is a genealogy community that is active.
- The platform can handle both text and video/podcast formats.
- RSS like feedly can follow posts in Substack.
- it seems to be a good platform for vloggers. I really enjoy Mission:Genealogy.
Free always sounds attractive, but it is necessary to understand what is being offered and how that might change.
Since I blog for fun and don’t run any kind of business, I didn’t spend any time checking out business requirements. I did notice that Substack charges 10% of each money transaction. On the other hand, if the website is otherwise free and the business owner doesn’t have to self host, with the accompanying costs, a small business might come out economically ahead only paying 10%.
What did concern me is that if my blog was totally hosted on Substack and, say, it changed owners who decided to charge fees, would it be difficult to move my posts elsewhere? I’m not a very techy person so that is a huge question for me.
Next, I found the website a bit frustrating to navigate. I actually deleted my “publication” twice and started over a third time before I got two posts up and live.
I also noticed that it took feedly hours and hours to find my posts – even though I did notice that the publish button indicated a 24-hour delay and I changed it each time to publish immediately.
Empty Branches doesn’t have a mailing list for subscribers. My readers either use feedly or some other aggregator to follow my blog or they visit daily. I could have announced that I was blogging on Substack, but otherwise, I had no list of subscribers to let know of the change. I definitely had the feeling of playing in a private, hidden playground.
What really turned me off, though, was the email bombardment. I followed several genealogy websites and links to new posts were emailed to me. I could have handled new genealogy posts, but announcements included posts from an Uber engineer, some cooking person and a political pundit, none of which interested me.
There are a handful of genealogy bloggers who have totally switched over to Substack. Now that I know feedly can find them, I have just updated their links and unsubscribed from the emails, which is an easy option.
Having said that, NOT all the genealogy people there seem to have a set up that allows feedly to find them. I can only link to a particular article to then read in feedly. So, it’s something that I found while browsing, not a new post with a feedly notification.
I’m also not sure if Substack can be browsed without an account (even though it doesn’t require the account holder to actually publish anything). When I deleted my publication, I thought my account would also be deleted, but that hasn’t been the case.
What I do really like is that, for whatever reason, there are very, very few genealogy bloggers who I recognize on Substack. That means lots of excellent new content to follow!
If you are looking for a new platform to begin or continue creating genealogy content, Substack is definitely worth checking it. It wasn’t my cup of tea – I like keeping control of my blog on my self-hosted website – but the genealogy community is active and fun and you’ll have the opportunity to meet new content creators.