Peter Gombos

Connected, but not captured

I do not want Moments to become another place that tries to keep people inside.

That sounds obvious, but it shapes a lot of small decisions.

A photo journal should be a home for your photos, not a cage around them.

Some people already have a blog. Some have a homepage. Some have a now page. Some have a little personal site that has existed for years.

Moments should not ask those places to become less important.

So I added a small way to let moments appear elsewhere.

A few photos from a trip can sit inside a blog post. Recent moments can appear on a personal homepage. A quiet photo journal can become part of someone’s existing corner of the web.

Not as content to optimize.

More like placing a photo on a shelf.

I have also been working on Mastodon and Fediverse support.

That one is harder to explain without making it sound more technical than it is.

The simple version is this: people should be able to respond from their own place, without Moments needing to become another social network.

I do not want likes. I do not want follower counts. I do not want rankings.

But I do like the idea of small, loose connection.

Someone on Mastodon seeing a photo and replying from there. A moment having a life outside the app. A journal being reachable from the wider web, without turning into a feed you have to maintain.

Maybe that is the line I keep trying to find.

Connected, but not captured.

Open, but not noisy.

Visible, but not performative.

I still think Moments should work even if nobody else is there.

That matters to me.

But the web I miss was not made of isolated apps either.

It was made of small places that could link to each other.

That feels worth building toward.