@bfg

Why I Ditched Social Feeds for a Private Notebook There used to be tens of blogging platforms you could use for free. It seemed like the internet was only going to get better. Apparently, it only got worse. I was recently looking for a platform for random, not-yet-fully-formed thoughts. I don’t want to pay for it because it’s just a hobby, not a business. No multimedia, nothing big—just pure writing. Asking the LLMs got me nowhere but frustrated. The Landscape: Social Networks vs. Pure Text Turned out my only obvious choices were big social networks like X, BlueSky, or Farcaster (the decentralized version of X). Or other networks like Nostr or Lens. Even Tumblr is still kicking, which surprised me because I thought it died years ago. But proper blogging platforms have too much UI overhead just to post a short thought. Micro-blogging it is. Golden Rule of Capture For Me: If the friction to post a random thought requires more than two clicks, your framework is broken. Keep the pipeline stupidly simple. My old favorite from 2020, Write.as, was beautifully designed just for writing and supported anonymous posts. They had a free tier and an iOS app. Too bad that app hasn’t seen an update in seven years, and the free tier is dead. Starting at nine bucks a month for a fun side project makes zero sense. Then there is Micro.blog and Mataroa. Mataroa is too techie and lacks a native iOS app. Micro.blog almost won because five bucks a month is cheap, but I really didn’t want to pay. Bear Blog was another clean possibility, and I thought about Substack Notes, but you can’t download your data in bulk. Once it’s posted there, it’s lost unless you screenshot it. The Pivot to an Unexpected Creative Vault I thought I’d be swimming in options, but it felt like choosing different types of pain. Since nobody likes pain, I almost gave up. I didn’t want to use Apple Notes because it gets chaotic too fast. Then I had a last-minute idea: I created a private collection (like a notebook) inside the Sublime.app. I am chronologically saving my thoughts there. The magic happens when I review my text. Sublime resurfaces potentially relevant ideas and notes from other users inside the ecosystem. Reviewing my random thoughts became a much more fun and inspiring experience than I ever expected. If you haven’t tried the Sublime app yet, you need to. For creative thinkers, it is a brutally under-promoted and under-appreciated tool! Definitely let me know how you like it

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction