Our Short History Of FilmStack (so far...)
and yeah, I am sorry that my bias is blatant, but...
The history of FilmStack begins with the launch of Substack. That was 2017. For me, my first awareness of it as a home for cinema discussion came with The Ankler and The Hot Button. The Ankler joined Substack in 2019.
But for me, and I assume for many other early adopters, we only thought of Substack as a newsletter platform initially. When I joined in November 2022, I didn’t think of it as a network, as it has certainly become. It was a truly just a newsletter publishing platform, but even still…
I had been on the platform for only three months when I lamented some of what it had not yet become….
That was really a plea for more to join me here.
Thankfully, things started to change. One month later (April 11, 2023) Substack launched “Notes” — their Twitter-when-it-was-good like social media forum.
It took a year before I (and others) started to use it to organize a bit.
April 24, 2024:
The more casual shorter form channel allowed for the off the cuff sort of discussion that is sometimes needed for communities to drift into action.
I didn’t know it then, but Mikhail Skoptsov had already started to bring all film writers together with his directory.
January 28, 2023:
In October of 2024, Substack began to launch categories in Notes. And Mikhail was again there to point it out.
Let’s give Mikhail Skoptsov a nice shout out for all the work he put into paving this path.
Unfortunately though, our FILM category is a sub-category under “Culture”. It is not yet a stand-alone category. Cinema authors are forced to select a category to go under, with most opting for either “business” or “culture”. Some select “philosophy”. But the problem remains that there is no easy way to exclusively find cinema-related posts. On the ‘stack’s Leaderboards — one of the platform’s discovery tools — authors are listed next to writers who couldn’t be more different in their selection of offerings. Sigh…
Even as I write this right now, we may be losing some of the ‘stack’s functions. Yesterday morning, I woke to find all such categories gone, baby, gone:
But, of course that figures into our history/future, as it currently stands…
FilmStack’s History (so far…)
January 29, 2025: FilmStack is named.
It is in the comments of this post that FilmStack was named.
