Today I pushed one new feature:

• A Hashtag filter menu on the web view of a journal. On the same row with the Journal / Grid toggle, but aligned left, you'll see a '#'. Click / tap it to open a filter menu with all the hashtags used across all posts on your journal. Hashtags are sorted most common to least common; click one to view just the posts tagged with that hashtag.

Today I pushed two new features on the web side:

1. A toggle on the web journal that lets you switch between the full journal view and a photo grid view. Clicking on an image in the grid view takes you into that post, where you can see all the photos from that same post and open the photo viewer if desired.

2. Automatic hashtag recognition and formatting. The website will now automatically convert text hashtags into links so you can see all the photos on a given hashtag in one view. There's no special hashtag treatment in the poster app...just type your #hashtags inline or at the bottom of your post, and the website will make them clickable and generate hashtag views.

As a guiding philosophy, I'm building to avoid the tyranny of the influencer algorithm. I say that tongue-in-cheek, of course. But, the algorithm really can steal time from you.

With that in mind, there will never be an algorithm-driven combined feed of posts from different accounts. What I might do, though, is make it so that it's easier to find other Gestalt accounts you might be interested in, and allow you to add accounts you want to keep tabs on to a group or circle of accounts that you feel close to. The idea being that you can check in on them from time to time (still probably not in any kind of combined feed), so it becomes easy to curate an interest community without being distracted by the BS that takes you down a rabbit hole.

I've been on social media from the beginning. I was on BBS's in high school and college. Was too old to be on FB when it launched at college campuses, but joined when it opened. I remember when Twitter started and it was web and SMS only (hence the original character limit). At one point I had 5 different Instagram accounts, each one tuned to a different interest community. Along the way, I realized that the thing I loved the most about the experience wasn't so much the social part (it's hit or miss, and I was never an influencer), but the curation of a story, over time, that I could point people to so they can see a little bit about who I am. And, also, so I could go back and relive parts of my story too.

I also got tired of getting sucked into the feed every time I opened the app, giving someone else attention instead of curating and telling my own story. Social just got too loud, too frantic. I wanted something calmer. I had a blog, but I rarely posted to it because a blog post is a whole thing, and there was no app for it (not for the platform I was on, anyway). I wanted something where I could easily post from an app, using familiar social-style UX patterns (pick a few photos, add some text, post), but where the post landed on my blog site, not in a closed, auth-required social ecosystem.