“Private Podcasting,” a new way to keep stories alive—yet private

I've put Substack to work with my existing family history archive to create a new way to engage my family in our stories using the magic of voice and video. Join us at the Recipe event on Sept-12.

The brick wall behind the brick wall

Let me start with a shared struggle:¹ Getting your family to read your stories. It’s like the brick wall behind the brick wall.

From common sense (and research), we know that knowledge of an ancestors’ resilience benefits younger generations with courage, confidence, and connection. Like any amateur family historian, I tried to find creative ways to engage my extended family.

I turned to the two things motivating every other family historian: curiosity and opportunity. Every story needs a hook, and when it’s a family story, you’re already part way there. Add curiosity, and your hook is set. Opportunity can be complicated in family stories because you may have to wade through piles of research to find a good story. It’s also not unusual that the bumpy or inconvenient stories of death, loss, and failure get buried out of deference to vanity.

That’s when I hit upon the idea of a “private podcast.”

Stories about mistreatment, divorce, or abandonment are part of our narratives, even if they’re uncomfortable. Over time, what was once a family secret becomes history, potentially affecting generations. When they finally emerge, these stories can be exaggerated, distorted, or even sensationalized. Exploring and contextualizing family stories can be the key to understanding and learning from history.

Why a “Private” Podcast?

The phrase is curious because it’s a bit of an oxymoron. With modern words like “podcasting,” we think we know what they mean. From its modern use, you’d expect a podcast to be a kind of broadcast for streamed audio. These days, it’s extended to video, but it's still fundamentally public. It’s a little like on-demand radio.

While exploring private podcasting as an option, I thought about the mixtapes we made for far-away loved ones in the 1970s. They featured favorite tunes, narrations, or recorded messages. These tapes were dropped into the mail, creating a private channel for a shared “slow-boat” conversation. I wanted to do THAT in a modern way that would be easier and automatically archive the material.

Creating a Modern Space for Private Conversations

As I’ll share in a Projectkin Project Recipe event on September 12, I experimented with a solution using two general-purpose platforms. My solution borrows from a paid newsletter solution. I used paywall functions in Substack to create an exclusive family-centered space for sharing stories. I’ve combined it with WeAre.xyz to include a structured family history archive for combined cloud storage and a genealogically oriented-database.

The result is a new way for cousins to collaborate, contributing to a narrative arc that might outlast us all.

The details to make this work right are not straightforward, but they’re also not hard, so I thought they’d be perfect for a project recipe format. The idea is to make it easy for others to replicate and introduce to their families.

On September 12, 2024, I shared my “recipe” for this kind of private podcast in this program, now available as a recording that includes a written recipe.

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Audio & Video Are Compelling

There’s no denying the compelling nature of voice and video. Find an old voicemail recording from a lost loved one, and you’ll feel it. I’ve seen the power of video in engaging my extended family in the stories of our ancestors. During the pandemic, organized, scheduled, and recorded storytelling sessions with grandparents over Zoom showed us these kinds of things were feasible. The trick is to find an excuse to keep that going.

Privately Sharing Media is Hard

It’s easy to get a standards-based video file out of Zoom, and creating an audio file from a phone is a cinch using any voice memo app. However, sharing them privately is much more difficult. If you’re reasonably technical (or can rope in a teenager), it’s not hard to set up “unlisted” sharing from public media like YouTube or SoundCloud. You can also use private groups on social media, but once you upload your media, you lose control over backups, archives, and access.²

The Problem Podcasting Solved

The podcast solved this problem at scale and was supported with an advertising business model. It uses specialized platforms to manage subscriptions and distribute episodes and notifications. Innovations in content networks³ made the solution work for seamless listening experiences (streamed or downloaded).

For us as individuals, a podcast form tells your audience it will be recorded (in audio or video form) and that past episodes can be viewed or listened to on-demand and on the go. It also implies that episodes will be released regularly without specifying their frequency.

Photo by AltumCode on Unsplash

Another Reason: Engagement with the Archive

I liked that fundamental expectation of frequency because I wanted to specifically use the form to drive engagement with my family history archive. Like many family historians, I’ve been compiling stories, documents, and records in a centralized digital repository. My challenge was that though my password management system ensured privacy, I wasn’t getting a lot of engagement.

Most people with the same challenge use features in the archive to create public “blog” posts for their stories and then email or social media to drum up attention. That’s a perfectly viable solution, but I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want my stories in the public domain. An audience affects how a story is told. Stories told at home and in private will differ from those shared at a town square. Social media compounds those differences with performative layers.

Email lists are a terrific choice for sharing news privately. To protect private information shared in the email or chat, we add it to links on a private, access-controlled site.

We do this when we share photos or even confidential information in business. These all work, but they’re not particularly good at sharing video or audio streams—even previews. That led me back to my tools.

Tool Time

Substack

For Projectkin, I was already invested in using Substack. I’d learned the subtle details of using it for newsletters and email. It seemed like a good fit for the email portion of this challenge and a better (and cheaper) alternative to email marketing platforms like Mailchimp.

Substack differentiates by combining blogging, email newsletters, and a payment engine. This model gives them a financial incentive to ensure that email is delivered and that unauthorized viewers do not have access to paid content, which was helpful to my objectives.

Over the past year, Substack has added rich media features targeting paid podcasters using the same strategy. It allows podcasters to create advertising-free podcast episodes supported with monthly subscriptions.

My insight was to realize that a paid podcast infrastructure would work perfectly to deliver a private podcast. All I had to do was to invite my cousins and give everyone “forever complimentary” access.⁴

Family History Archive: WeAre.xyz

The next level to this solution was to create what amounts to a family history destination. A “Substack” or newsletter isn’t an archive and is not designed for family history stories.

Instead, I used WeAre.xyz as my family archive. It’s designed perfectly for capturing and structuring family stories since it’s built on top of a sophisticated database designed for the purpose. I started with a standards-based GEDCOM file derived from other platforms where I’d kept my family tree details. I uploaded the file to pre-populate key family details. In my case, I created separate archives for my material and paternal lines. The database system for the WeAre archive allows me to cross-reference ancestors with additional facts I collect about individuals, places, and artifacts.

I’ve chosen the WeAre.xyz platform, but you could just as easily use any other kind of personal family history archive. In this solution, I aimed to get more of my relatives to appreciate the stories I’d learned about our shared ancestors, so a cloud-based solution was vital. I know others who’ve used a general-purpose shared Google Drive to accomplish the same objective. I’ve found that the WeAre archive, with its singular focus on family history, has been a marvelous solution for my purposes.

I think of this archive as my primary means of collecting stories for our family. By inviting my siblings and cousins into the archive, they can contribute to what we collect on an equal footing.

Push & pull

Interestingly, as a practical matter, that’s not what happens. Most people are reluctant to modify the archive. They’re afraid to “mess it up.” This is no failure for the WeAre platform; it replicates a typical behavior between readers and writers. When someone hands you something they’ve written or otherwise created, most people won’t want to suggest changes or add comments out of politeness.

By separating the archive from emailed comments, I was trying to create a conversational layer that might encourage discussion. With the infrastructure in place, I still have ambitions that those interested in specific areas will take over and expand their sections of the archive.

To make the two platforms work together, I created newsletter posts in Substack that would parallel the work in the archive. Each email post would be new, fresh, and topical, including links to the archive for context. The elegance of Substack's video and audio features ensures that I can use video and that it will be delivered — reliably.

Best practices

At a high level, using two platforms to share stories can add complexity. It does. However, I see sharing these stories as having a purpose worth investing effort in for me and my family.

I expect I’ll continue to discover best practices over time, but I have a few to share now:

• Define cohorts and take the time to bring each group in together. For example, when you invite first cousins in, add them as groups of siblings so that they know who else is on the platform.

  • Since everyone would see Substack first, I used a Welcome email to share who else was here. Over on the WeAre archive, my welcome home page to the archive reiterated the phasing and added a page I kept updated with invitations to show who is here based on where they fit in the family tree.

• When you invite your cousins, tell them what’s coming. Use whatever form you think might work best, from a handwritten invitation to a group email.

  • They’re likely to have to hunt for system-issued invitations. That’s not a failure of the platform; it’s an anti-spam protocol all vendors have to follow. I’ll include some tips in my recipe to tell your cousins what to look for. It’s always best to test yourself since platforms update these email subject lines.

• Always be selling. Your competitor is inertia, and your ally is curiosity. Please don’t underestimate the work it takes to get someone to do what they’ve said they want to do.

  • To engage your siblings and cousins, you’ll have to keep encouraging them and celebrating small wins. It’s like encouraging a young athlete to keep practicing.

“Start with Your Goal”

Projectkin members know I often repeat the mantra, “Start with your goal.” Ask yourself why you’re even interested in exploring a private podcast. What problem are you trying to solve?

In my case, I took the compelling power of audio and video as a given. I wanted to use them to encourage my siblings and cousins to explore the incredible stories in our family — without exposing this media to the public.

This combination of a dedicated, private Substack publication and my private WeAre archive has worked.⁵ It feels like an infrastructure is finally in place so that I can focus on the stories. I no longer feel like I’m doing this on my own, — and that’s a huge relief.

1. This article combines my startup product development career with my interest in family history and genealogy. I’m using this piece to explain the idea of a “private podcast” to a general audience while providing enough nerdy details to inspire product managers' development ideas.

2. The web is rife with horror stories of lost media. A friend who was the sole administrator of a group focused on the history of one family line in a small rural town related this story: For her birthday one year, she had added a childhood baby picture to her Facebook feed. The Trust and Safety team quickly banned her for a possible child pornography violation. It took months to restore her account. However, the private group (and all photos and comments) had been deleted.

3. Specifically, this refers to Content Distribution Networks designed in the late 1990s for internet traffic load balancing and later podcasting and video distribution (consider the introduction of the iPod in 2001 and YouTube in 2005).

4. The setup details are simple but not obvious. I’ll walk through the instructions in my separate Project Recipe.

5. I combined two familiar tools, but it’s not the only way to implement this idea. The key here is to focus on the goal and innovate using best-in-class tools. As you’ll know, the Projectkin Community Forum is fiercely platform-independent. (More about that here.)