Leaving Patreon for Substack: a communal story

Image by Dori Tunstall

Six months have passed since I started my Patreon, Living Liberatory Joy. This week, I have decided to end it to focus on my Substack account. Why? Substack better supports community building.

My original intentions for my Patreon were to find a safer platform to build community after leaving Instagram and Facebook in my boycott of Meta. By monitizing my posts, I would take money away from Meta and have community support me directly. In both regards, my intentions have not come to fruition.

Patreon lacked the features to build community. It services the community that you have built elsewhere, mostly on Instagram and Tik Tok. I began to find posting to Patreon lonely with only a bar graph telling me that people might have opened the email. My choice of short videos, which I love making, as my preferred medium increased the labor of posting compared to the single image + text of Instagram. I just couldn’t create community on Patreon. So I have to seek community in a different way.

Taking accountability, I don't think the content that I am producing is particularly compelling to a mass audience. People remember me on Instagram mostly due to my dancing and fashion. In the context of #DeanDrag, people's appreciation for this content was fine because it afforded me control over the hypervisibility of being the first Black dean of design by curating the self image I wanted.

In the context of the current resurgence of patriarchal white supremacy, I don't want to perform fashion nor dance. I am not saying that these are not liberatory acts of expression, but rather they feel like forms of escapism from the everyday horror of the times. Yet, neither do I want to write about the next "shocking" cruelty of the Regime when the "answer" to the next outrageous act is to protect our communities in the best way that we can. We already have had people provide detailed instructions on how we do that, so I don't feel compelled to add my perspective.

More than these issues, it comes down to my natural insularity. In the absence of an extroverted job and an Instagram dopamine addiction, I embrace the opportunity to revert back to my true self as a person who has rarely felt compelled to share my inner world with more than a single handful of people. Or at least, the desire to share is prompted by more reciprocity.

My choices -- to have paid subscription levels and a schedule -- tainted my feelings of gratiitude for the paid followers that I had with an obligation to produce content. As a result of this growing sense of obligation, posting no longer felt libertory for me.

So I am focused on Substack. While the platform’s enshittification is about a year away, it affords me the community to write when I want and what I want while cultivating my true niche of people whose work I embrace and embraces mine.