Remembering what matters
📷 Have you tried Retro?
Social media
Rachel Feintzeig, who used to be the Work + Life columnist at the WSJ, had a piece in The New York Times this week that you might enjoy. In it, she discusses her evolving relationship with social media:
If I Don’t Post About My Vacation, Did It Even Happen? (NYT, gift link)
What is your current relationship with social media? Please take a moment and respond to two quick questions and help create a composite sense of our community:
I remember when Facebook first launched in 2004. I had a friend that shared her photos on Bebo, which launched in 2005. In those early years, social media seemed amazing. I carefully curated my connections and friends lists and enjoyed seeing what high school and college friends were up to across the country and around the world. Over time, of course, Facebook ceased to be about friends.
Today social media is just media. Occasionally, you may see a post by someone you know in your feed but it’s increasingly filled with posts by accounts and brands that you don’t know in real life. The feed on Facebook, Instagram and the rest has become an algorithmic content distribution platform.
Rachel Feintzeig linked to a bit on Instagram by a British comedian, Jain Edwards, who explains what 2025 is like to someone from the 1990s. It’s really funny and worth watching. I’ve embedded it below:
So what to do?
Last winter, I did the noble thing and got off social media. I lacked the inner strength to delete my accounts fully, so I settled for removing apps from my phone and enlisting my husband to change my Facebook password. It worked. I stopped scrolling and liking and generally monitoring the lives of people I do not actually know. I felt better — less inadequate, more present, vaguely morally superior.
-Rachel Feintzeig (source)
Maybe you’ve done something similar. Or perhaps you haven’t uninstalled the apps but simply find yourself posting less often. That’s my reality.
If I don’t post, the photos are still there, swirling in the jumble that is my iCloud account. But when I winnow them down to just what I want to remember, when I can tap on my profile and see them lined up there, it feels sturdy, like some unimpeachable record of my life.
-Rachel Feintzeig (source)
There is something to this.
Retro
If you like the idea of saving what you want to remember but don’t like the how noisy Facebook and Instagram have become (or don’t want your photos to be used to train Meta’s AI), I have an app suggestion for you: Retro. (I’ve been testing it for over a year and like it.)
Founded by two former Instagram team members, Nathan Sharp and Ryan Olson, Retro is refreshingly simple. It is private by default and uses weeks as it organizing principle. You can use it as a private photo album or share with close friends and family. There are no ads, influencers or other distractions.
The ethos behind Retro is different and refreshing:
Why We Started Retro
Retro is a social app that feels like a joy, not a habit. It’s a friends-only photo journal where you share for yourself as much as your friends. It gently nudges you to find at least one moment each week to remember and then put that moment out there in a post so your friends know what you’re up to.
One early indicator that we’re on the right track is that our friends that deeply value privacy and safety feel comfortable enough to share photos of their kids’ faces and flight itineraries and wild parties — things they wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing elsewhere.
We started working on it when we realized something: after all that has been built in social since the iPhone, we now see less of our friends on social than we did 5 years ago. The apps that have traditionally served this purpose well have pivoted toward entertainment created by people you don’t know, and even though this content is entertaining, it also crowds out the other content that friends share with each other. So now we’re left sorting through a ton of message threads to see what’s going on with friends, or most commonly, we just don’t get that update at all. That’s a superpower lost.
Even though consumer social is insanely hard, we decided to do this together because it’s the app we wanted for ourselves, and we think it’s important that people have a place that remains dedicated to being the best place to catch up with friends and family.
Here are a few screenshots of what Retro looks like:
Here are a few news stories that provide additional information on Retro:
Retro is a deeply personal photo journaling app for close friends (TechCrunch)
Retro, an actually good photo-sharing app for BFFs, launches collaborative journals (TechCrunch)
If you’d like to give it a try, it’s available for both Android and iOS. (And, if you do, I’d love to hear your impressions.)
August
This is the first weekend of August. Our tomatoes are finally starting to get ripe and I picked some fresh basil in the garden last night for dinner. Soon it will be time to pick peaches. I can’t wait because we’re eating the store-bought nectarines faster than they are ripening.
Wherever you are and whatever you do, I hope you have a lovely summer weekend.
Be well,
-Bryce
I've not heard of this before. TFS
Hello Bryce, thank you for sharing this interesting info and insight.
Re: Retro I read that is free but it has in-app offers/purchases. As you have been using it for a year or more, would you share what is the cost of using and the differences with the free version?
Thank you.