Middle-aged lady seeks semi-public writing outlet

February 4, 2023 12:01 PM

Substack: good for personal blogging & writing?

Or should I leave it to the established public writers?

Basically I would like to do some non-fiction humor writing about being a Gen-X woman approaching perimenopause, occasional lusty thoughts about Hot Dads Dot Com, and life in general.

This is mostly to scratch an itch, amuse myself and friends, and I have no expectation of fame or audience or any of that. I just want to be more public-facing with my funny self. I have blogged in the past, but I don't really want to set up Wordpress or Blogger again. I want it to be easily linkable via my Instagram if I wanted (which is set to private).

tl;dr: funny middle aged lady wants to use Substack but is Substack the right choice?

posted by Kitteh to Grab Bag (12 answers total)

Substack maybe is not the right choice, it's so professional-feeling and of course there is the monetization built in, whether or not you use it. And then the anti-trans / reactionary writers have also mainly ended up on Substack. I still read Substack, but I don't like the experience.

I know it is 2023, but how about Tumblr? It's super easy, there are Gen X people on Tumblr (I'm a young Gen X approaching or experiencing perimenopause who is still on Tumblr), tags actually can work for people to discover your writing, and it's nice to just be casual and have the option of reblogging.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:18 PM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think substack is a fine choice for this. I use it as such and I am basically you except not into hotdads.com, whatever that is.
posted by shadygrove at 1:07 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

A hosted blogging platform? Does it need to be free? Write.as is a hosted service in the Fediverse (hooks up to Mastodon etc), but you pay for the hosting.
posted by clew at 1:15 PM on February 4, 2023

The primary downside to Substack in my view is the company you'll be in and that some people simply will not give anything on Substack their page hits while people like Jesse Singal make it their home. That may or may not be a big concern, but if it is, the folks I know who left Substack for those reasons mostly ended up at Buttondown.
posted by Stacey at 1:17 PM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Maybe Dreamwidth, e.g. see informal journals there by people like Yoon Ha Lee or James D. Nicoll. As a mild illustration of what they're about, I think Dreamwidth dropped Cloudflare as an ethical stance. Like a large chunk of the Internet, Substack hasn't.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:07 PM on February 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have accounts on both Dreamwidth and Buttondown. Dreamwidth has more of an existing community, so if you wanted to chat with other people doing longform personal writing it might be the way to go. Buttondown has a slicker interface and makes it easier to post images, but it's more of a one-way "sending out a newsletter" experience. If you get over 100 Buttondown subscribers, I believe you need a paid account.
posted by yarntheory at 2:55 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: "Hot dads dot com" = my verbal shorthand for actors who have become super hot as they got older than when they were young, and not an actual website

we apologize for the confusion
posted by Kitteh at 7:09 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Rightly or wrongly, Substack always feels very "I want to grow my engagement metrics for professional influencer reasons" to me, no matter what the person is actually using it for. I also trust the company slightly less than your average internet start-up.

I use Buttondown and it's nice, with good human support.

I haven't used write.as but I'd look at that first for something like this. More like a blog with an optional newsletter attached, rather than a newsletter with posts also hosted on the web (Substack and Buttondown).
posted by fabius at 6:13 AM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you've used Wordpress in the past, wordpress.com is a hosted version by Automattic. Their basic tier is free.
posted by kathrynm at 12:12 PM on February 5, 2023

Another hosted option is Blot. Less (?) fiddly than Wordpress, more fiddly than Tumblr, but once it’s set up, all posting is done by saving a plain text file to your cloud storage solution of choice (iCloud, Dropbox, etc. )
posted by bluloo at 12:49 PM on February 5, 2023

Substack is for transphobes and people whose association with transphobes is totally fine as long as there's a paycheck attached.

I strongly recommend getting a blog of your own, so that you own your content and aren't making money for a company that courts nazis and isn't sorry. There's plenty of basically one-click options out there, but wordpress.com and Dreamhost's one-click Wordpress installs are where I usually put my projects.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:02 PM on February 5, 2023

Substack is great and fine. It's where a lot of the no-paycheck-attached hardcore animal rights and vegan writing lives, and a lot of strategic non-profit management and planning lives, and sharp music writing lives, and queer therapy and counseling and comedy lives. I do consulting for an org that has possibly the best left wing politics-aligned public health voice that's available online at the moment, and they distribute their material to practitioners in the field via Substack.

To the points above, I think a very real takeaway is that you should think on your target audience before committing to a platform. I've never heard Substack called an unapologetic home for nazis before today, but others suggest that some people flat out won't read material of any sort by virtue of it being hosted by Substack. Are your prospective readers active online in a way that you can probe what works best for them? If they're mostly your friends this would be a very respectful question to ask before makign a choice.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 7:32 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]