Levels of Substack: Part 1 — Leaping from a Platform into a Community
This first in our Substack + Family History series is designed to introduce our Projectkin members to the platform we're using for our community. Learn why Substack's a good fit for family history.
We launched our Projectkin Forum here on Substack as an experiment three weeks ago. We’ve found new audiences on Substack and the platform has made it easier for everyone to draw on the resources and engage in discussions.
Today I am releasing a new section to our publication, Substack+Family History with three new posts:
Part 1 (this post): “Leaping from a Platform into a Community”
This post focuses on the economics of Substack as a platform, and why it is a be a good fit for us and family historians in general.
Part 2: “A Guide to the Elements of the Platform”
I’ll walk through Substack terminology and features as we’ve used them in this community. I’ll also share resources I’ve found helpful.
Part 3: “Designing the Projectkin Forum on Substack”
Finally, I’ll share the design choices I’ve made in the Projectkin publication. Please, questions and make suggestions.
After this post, you’ll see I’m taking votes on the best times to schedule one or more “Tours” for the Projectkin Substack publication. I’ll close the vote on January 1 and schedule the event, notifying everyone. Not subscribed? Join us!
The Platform Leap
In launching Projectkin, I knew I wanted the community to work as a virtual gathering place where project ideas could be shared and members could inspire each other. I wanted Projectkin membership to be free, yet self-sustaining. To make that work, I needed a way to keep operational costs very low and support expenses with contributions or some form of tiered memberships.
I knew I could not afford to build the software myself. My experience in software platforms, however, gave me a good starting point to appreciate business models and algorithms. I was drawn to Substack by new collaborative features. So far, I’ve been impressed.
The Substack platform is designed so that the business model is aligned with that of writers and creatives. No one pays fees to simply read, write, or share a publication. There’s no advertising on the platform either. Substack makes money on a simple 10% transaction fee when subscriptions are paid. Publications can be free or paid.
That gives Substack the incentive to help their writers find subscribers and to create an environment where readers feel like paying for subscriptions. Substack does this with a powerful recommendation engine and a sophisticated way to share work on public social media networks.
Community Forum
Unlike many of the writers who got their start on Substack, I’m focused on YOUR creativity, not just my own. I wanted to build a community that creates a forum for YOU to encourage each other in your family history projects.
It seems to be working.
In the three weeks since I launched the forum on Substack at the end of November, we’ve seen over 30% growth in new members. The platform seems to bring together a wonderful confluence of storytellers and family historians eager to explore new ideas. The recommendations started coming in right away and I’ve received many more in email.
As I see it, this kind of publication has a critical advantage over a Facebook group,1 Memberstack-based site2, or any of dozens of paid community platforms. Plus, saving money on infrastructure allows me to keep the platform free to you, our subscribing members.3
Focused topics attract a focused audience
Substack started in 2017 as a compelling tool for comment-rich blogs and emailed newsletters. Like Blogger, LiveJournal, and other platform variants that date back to the 1990s (and the emailed newsletters that preceded them), blogs made it possible to write for an audience that was too small for a printed publication.
If newsletters allowed “birds of a feather” to flock together, it was blogging and commenting platforms like WordPress and Disqus that made it possible for birds to chat amongst themselves. Robust authentication systems were technology innovations that allowed comments to be attributable and reputations developed without revealing email addresses.
“You KNOW me”— Comments created community
Commenting systems allowed participants to exchange ideas and share agreement — or disagreement. This human behavior became the basis for any number of platforms in the early web days. We saw it on platforms from Facebook and YouTube to Quora and Reddit. Real names and ad tracking techniques turned your responses into part of your profile and fueled a marketing juggernaut with surveillance ad tracking.
The big news was that Substack bundled newsletters with blogging, and commenting features in a way that allowed for a modicum of pseudonymity — then added a payment system. It was both novel and democratizing. Their tools for personal recommendations, topic categories, and a referral engine are designed to create visibility for writers who might otherwise never gain exposure on the open web. In a world of algorithms and polarized politics, this is not without risk, to be sure.4
Combined, these features have lowered barriers to publishing. You no longer need to hire a developer or pay separate fees for hosting, commenting, and emailing platforms. Plus, their marketing and payment systems have meant that writers can get paid for their work without selling their souls and reader profiles to advertisers.
Alternative home for Family History & Genealogy
Long-form writing combined with rich interactions has the potential to create an alternative to text-based social media platforms like X/Twitter for communities of interest like Genealogy and Family History. The topical interests you select on creating an account sort “birds into flocks.”
With open links and custom domains, you’re always welcome to explore sensitive topics, but without ads to drive algorithms, you see much less of the angry diatribes and staged conflicts that fuel other platforms.
Learn more: Substack + Family History
I hope this Part 1 gives you context for what the platform is, and how it’s different from alternatives on the market. In a new section titled Substack + Family History released today, you learn more. In Part 2 we dive into the key features of Substack and how they apply to Projectkin. In Part 3 we explore the design choices made in our Projectkin Forum.
Explore the three pieces in the “Substack+Family History” section you can view any time or selectively subscribe to.
⮕ Have questions? Join me in the Chat Room for a discussion.
Resources ON Substack ABOUT Substack
As you’ll discover in the Search or Explore buttons, there are many, MANY resources about Substack on Substack. This series of posts is by no means intended to replace the Substack Support pages, or their writer support stacks like On.Substack.com.
We can use Comments on this post, comments in Notes, and Threads in the Members’ Chat Room to continue the conversation. I’m looking forward to it!
I’ll be happy to go into more detail about the Facebook model with anyone who might be interested privately. I’m more than happy to share content on Facebook, but I don’t want to relinquish our community members to them.
MemberStack is one of a half-dozen tools I looked at to build a membership platform on my own. Robust all-in-one platforms include Circle.so, Ning, and many others. After exploring these, I realized that any combination would cost me money every month just to accept money. Substack’s payment system is a key advantage of this approach.
I plan a future post about operations. While I’m willing to support Projectkin with my time, I want the organization to become self-sustaining. At some future point, costs will increase and I anticipate adding a contributors’ tier. I want to do that without affecting programming for the majority of our members. For now, this approach has given me the incentive to be creative and keep costs low. I think that’s good for everyone.
As I write this in December 2023, there’s an important debate underway about content moderation as it relates to Nazi content on Substack. This recent article by FastCompany gives current coverage to the arguments as they play out in today’s hyper-political environment. I’ll continue to monitor that and look forward to a clear statement on content moderation from Substack. It’s a reminder that as we grow Projectkin, I’ll need a similar statement for the community as well.