Picture it. The year is 2013. Something called a “cronut” keeps popping up in your Instagram feed. You went on a trip with your best friend, so you made an album on Facebook, tagged her, and geotagged the restaurant. Then you wrote a Yelp review. Maybe you publicly disagreed with a stranger on Twitter about a movie. Then you go about your day.
These types of interactions are disappearing, in a process that Cory Doctorow famously called “enshittification.” All those places on the internet—X, Facebook, TikTok, dating apps—where you once went for connection are now places where you either feel bad or buy things. Technological research firm Gartner predicts that 50 percent of users will abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media by 2025.
In response, we’re seeing a boom in journaling apps as safer, easier ways to ease us back into posting everything online. Last year, Apple released a journal app with iOS 17. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just unveiled a photo app called Shine, which is made to share photos and memories with a select group of people. Today, Retro—a startup that we called “the new Instagram”—is launching a feature called Journals within the app, which lets you record both photos and notes for a select group of people.
As a lifelong journaler, it’s hard to forget that I already have an intimate, safe space to record my life and share memories. It is a notebook. I don’t have to worry about marketers selling my information, because it’s not accessible. What if creating a safe space all of your own means just getting off the internet altogether?
Better Together
Most of these apps are based on the central premise that most of us would rather talk to family or close friends than with a pretty stranger shilling snack boxes. As we reported previously, Retro has a few standout features. Once you join the app, you’re prompted to select a few pictures to post per week. In order to see your friends’ and family’s photos, you have to share photos of your own. That keeps people actively participating instead of lurking.
You also get no help in selecting these photos. The company does not use AI to prompt or resurface memories, the way that pretty much every other photo app does. “There’s a big difference between passive reminders and actively chronicling the moments that matter to you,” says Retro founder Nathan Sharp in an email.
Retro’s team is made up of six former Instagrammers, and their original intention was to create a better Instagram, a place where you can share snaps and commentary with people you actually care about. The Journals feature expands on that by allowing you to share that content with a larger group of people.
For example, if you’re a parent, you can create a Journal for each of your children. You can post photos to that journal and share with grandparents. Then you can share public links to that journal via Instagram or Facebook. People you are not friends with on Retro will see your Journals as curated photo albums.
“We wanted to emphasize the ongoing use case,” Sharp said. “This isn’t just a photo dump. This is building something for your future self to look back on.”
Shine’s use case is similar. It’s aimed at people from multiple generations with different phones who want to pool photos on similar themes or events. (Even the seemingly dated color choice and app design seems a deliberate callback to an earlier time.) Let’s say you attend a baby shower. You can create an album for that baby shower and add photos via two separate modes. In Magic Mode, Shine’s AI will select pictures for you, or you can add photos manually. Then you can share that album with whomever you choose, and they can also add pictures.
As we discussed in our review of the feature, Apple’s Journal app also prompts you to write about your day on a regular basis. You can schedule reminders and turn on prompts. You can paste in photos, locations, and voice memos. This feature is, of course, available only on iPhones; moreover, it’s not remarkably different from a few other, older apps that also provide journaling services (WIRED has a few other suggestions here). Apple is presenting the feature as part of its new suite of mental health services.
Paper Trail
How do you make or share memories? Like most people, I share my photos haphazardly: in photo batches texted to group chats on different messaging apps, in shared Google Photos folders, in Instagram posts, or in the occasional Story or Facebook Reel. It would be very nice if every single person I know could get on the same app. Unfortunately, every person in my life also has other people in their lives, so I suspect this will turn out the same way as when everyone tried to force everyone else to use Slack, or Discord, or WhatsApp. I half-heartedly texted Retro invites to a few friends, but only got a disinterested “What is this?” in response.
Sharp also suggested creating a private journal with my husband, but with a 6- and 9-year-old, we are unfortunately too busy making memories to document them thoroughly (my spouse also hates social media). I scrolled back through our text messages for possible snaps, but I really do need to enlist an AI to help me decide which of our constant backs-and-forths of “Where are you?”, “Where did you guys go?”, and “Did you get garlic bread?” moments are worth memorializing.
Before I could even begin to start thinking about Apple’s Journal app, I realized I had to turn off the pings immediately. As an iPhone user, I started getting constant location-based push notifications from the app to quickly jot down my thoughts on the bar that I’d just popped my head into, or my son’s violin lesson. As Sharp notes, there’s a difference between consciously choosing to remember a sweet moment between you and your spouse or child, and having a robot ask you repeatedly at the most inane moments whether you’re having a good time.
At some point, maybe we have to acknowledge that the reason why finding a new way to regularly share information about ourselves feels a little forced is because, at this point, it is a little forced.
Even mental health apps are acknowledged to have some of the worst privacy protections. I checked Retro’s privacy policy, which includes the disclosure that it collects marketing information about you (of course, you will have the ability to opt out). Shine’s is similar. Even Apple’s ostensibly privacy-focused Journal uses Bluetooth to make you discoverable by others by default.
The final straw? I don’t have to find a good online journal because I am, as I mentioned, a dedicated paper journaler. I have kept a daily handwritten journal in a notebook since I was 12 years old. I just walked upstairs and flipped through them. All I have to say is, thank God none of it is on the internet (although I do have a lot of taped paper concert ticket stubs tucked into the pages, and those are very cool). It is all raw and real, and intimate, and as true as I could make it at the time. With minimal effort, that data—on where I went and with whom, and what we did—will remain mine and mine alone.
Of course, I will lose them all if my house burns down or if there’s a flood. But the server will never go down; the parent company will never shut down the app. It can’t be leaked, and no one can mine it to sell nostalgia-based Olive Garden merch to me (although I would probably buy it). Even if the rest of our lives are online, not all of our memories have to be.
