Substack, findable
How to find an old comment or conversation on Substack
Substack has no way to search the things you’ve said. There’s no search box for your comments, your notes, or your activity feed, and older exchanges scroll off and don’t come back.
The hardest part is the comments you’ve left on other people’s posts - Substack keeps no list of those anywhere, so once a thread scrolls past, getting back to it is genuinely hard. A few workarounds help at the edges, and if you want your conversations to stay findable for good, that’s the thing Orbit was built to do.
What Substack can and can’t do
Substack is built for publishing and for the moment - the note you just posted, the reply that just came in. It is not built for looking back. There is no search across the things you’ve said, and - the part that surprises people most - no page anywhere that simply lists the comments you’ve left on other people’s posts. Your own notes have a tab on your profile; your comments have nowhere at all. The activity feed shows recent replies and likes, but it isn’t searchable, and items fall off the bottom as new ones arrive.
Notes are the hardest to hold onto: Substack only exposes them for about a week, so a note you loved from a month ago may be genuinely gone from anywhere you could look it up. None of this is a knock on Substack - it’s just not the job it set out to do.
How to find it by hand
A few things help at the edges, if you remember roughly where or when:
- Search your email. Substack emails you when someone replies to or likes your comment, so your inbox is the closest thing to an archive you have - but only for the exchanges that got a response. A comment nobody answered leaves no trail in your inbox at all.
- Go back to the exact post and use Find.If you remember which post the conversation was on, open its comments and use your browser’s find (Cmd/Ctrl+F) to jump to a name or phrase. This only works if you can place the post in the first place.
- Scroll your notes tab.Your profile’s notes tab shows the notes you’ve posted - not the comments you’ve left on other people’s work, which don’t appear here or anywhere else. For your own recent notes, though, it’s something.
- Check your browser history.If you visited someone’s post or profile, your history can surface the URL even when Substack won’t.
Notice what none of these can do: hand you a list of the comments you’ve written. They lean on your memory of where a thing happened, and they don’t reach back far. The conversation you can’t place, with someone whose name you’ve half-forgotten, is exactly the one they can’t find.
Where Orbit comes in
The conversations that scroll out of your feed, kept.
Orbit is a Chrome extension that reads your Substack right in your own browser and keeps a private, searchable copy of your conversations and the people in them. From the day you install it, it remembers going forward: the exchanges from your activity feed where someone replied, alongside your own posts and notes.
Then you find things the way you actually remember them - by a word from the conversation, or by the person. One of the first things people do with it is exactly this: “I talked to someone about a podcast and I can’t find it” - and there it is. Every good conversation, findable again.
It works for the people, not just the words. The reader who commented that they wanted in on your next thing - three weeks and two hundred comments ago, the one you meant to circle back to and then lost - Orbit still has them. The people who commented that you’d otherwise lose track of stay in reach.
A fair word on what it isn’t: Orbit doesn’t reconstruct your whole past. It starts remembering when you start using it, and because Substack only exposes notes for about a week, even Orbit isn’t a complete history. It’s a memory that begins now and only gets richer. It reads and remembers; it never writes for you.
Questions
Can I search my old comments on Substack?
Not natively - and there is no list of them anywhere either. Substack keeps no page of the comments you have left on other people’s posts, searchable or not (your own notes have a profile tab; your comments have nowhere). The nearest workarounds are your email notifications, for exchanges that got a reply, and going back to the exact post to use your browser’s find - both by hand, both only if you can place where the conversation happened.
How far back can Orbit see my Substack conversations?
Orbit starts keeping a copy from the day you install it, going forward - it does not reach back and reconstruct your whole history. It captures conversations from your activity feed where someone replied, plus your own posts and notes. Substack only exposes notes for about a week, so even Orbit is not a complete record of everything - it is a memory that begins when you start using it.
How do I find a specific conversation once it is in Orbit?
You search by keyword or by person. Type a word you remember from the exchange, or open the person and read back through what you talked about. There is no date filter - you find things by what was said or who said it, the way you actually remember them.
Does the Substack activity feed keep a history?
Only loosely. The activity feed shows recent replies, likes, and mentions, but it is not searchable and older items fall off the bottom. It is built for glancing at what just happened, not for finding something from three months ago.
Does Orbit capture my direct messages?
No, not unless you turn them on. Orbit only ever receives your public conversations and the people in them - never your password, never your subscribers’ email addresses. Direct messages stay off by default.
Is Orbit affiliated with Substack?
No. Orbit is an independent product, not made by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Substack. It works alongside your own Substack account in your own browser.
Orbit is a paid subscription, invite-only while it’s in beta. If keeping track of your people is the part of Substack you keep wishing for, come find me.
Get access through my Substack