Substack is adding new capabilities to its Twitter-like Notes feature, bringing it closer to the social network now known as X. On Tuesday, the company announced that users may now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. Users may also embed notes on external web pages.

The new features launch comes a year after Substack introduced Notes in April, 2023, at a time when companies were keen on attracting users who had fled Twitter after Elon Musk took the reins of the social network at the end of 2022. The Notes feature allows users to share posts, quotes, comments, images, links, and ideas within a tweet-like format, with the short-form content shown in a dedicated Twitter-like feed.

From today, users can actually share videos directly to Notes by either recording a video or selecting one from their phone's camera roll or even from their desktop. According to the company, more writers and creators are using its video tools and starting new shows on the platform, so it wanted to allow them to share their work on Notes as well. Considering that video posting already is possible in several other apps like X and Threads by Meta, it makes sense that the feature would be included also in the Notes application.

In terms of leaving Notes on other people's pages, Substack claims the new feature will cause writers' content to spread widely throughout the internet above and beyond Substack. For example, an example offered by Substack illustrates one way that a writer's Note could be embedded into a news article-that happens with X posts all the time. To get the embed code for any Note, users click the three-dot menu in the upper right and then select "embed note".

Substack announced on Tuesday that Notes has generated more than 3,000 paid subscriptions and 230,000 free subscriptions for writers and creators on Substack in the past 30 days. In its blog post, it claims that Notes are especially useful to those who do not have big pre-existing audiences.
The company saw an opportunity to cash in on the chaos at Twitter as soon as it began. In October 2022, Substack took a direct shot at Twitter and warned in a post that: "Twitter is changing, and it's tough to predict what might be next." The post encouraged creators of all sorts to port their Twitter follower base to Substack. Substack then took its ambitions further by launching a Chat feature and then later, Notes.

As Substack continues to grow its Twitter-like product, X careens further into chaos after the company said on Monday that it plans to begin charging new users a small fee before they are allowed to post to the social network, as it tries to stem the tide of bots that have begun populating the platform.