From the Gram to the Blog
I used to do weekly digests on Instagram.
A grid of nine images. Some album covers. A movie still. A book cover. A manga panel. A one-liner about each. Swipe through, double tap, move on. It was fine. It worked. People liked it (or at least nobody complained).
But I stopped doing weekly digests a while ago. Not because I stopped consuming things. If anything, I consume more now. Two jobs, content, hobbies, the endless firehose of stuff that demands your attention. It is a lot. Managing that on a weekly cadence became a challenge. I was spending more time formatting the digest than actually thinking about what I consumed.
So I decided to switch to monthly digests instead. Give myself time. Time to actually sit with a piece of music, a film, a book, a manga. Time to form an opinion that is not just the first thing that popped into my head. Time to let things settle.
(like my opinions matter anyway, but they matter to me, and that is the point)
The real reason I am switching from Instagram to the blog is simpler and more stubborn than convenience.
Freedom and ownership.
Instagram limits me to a 1:1 image. A single square. A one-liner caption. That is it. I cannot link to the artist’s page. I cannot link to a previous blog post I wrote about the album. I cannot rearrange the layout. I cannot add a paragraph break. I am confined to the template they gave me, and the template is designed for speed, not depth.
Here, I can do whatever I want.
I can embed a Bandcamp player. I can link to the full review I wrote three months ago. I can group things by mood instead of by medium. I can write a full paragraph about why a specific album hit me the way it did. I can design the digest to look exactly how I want it to look.
(and with CSS and JavaScript I can try a plethora of things, get creative, break things, rebuild them. Instagram gives me a filter. The blog gives me a blank page.)
There is another reason. A practical one.
Instagram has been asking me to verify my identity a lot lately. Probably because I am not that active anymore. The algorithm notices. It flags me. It wants to make sure I am real. And every time that happens, I feel a little less secure. If the account gets compromised or deleted for any reason, I lose everything. The digests. The comments. The archive.
That is a lot of trust to put in a platform that does not care about you.
Here, not so much. The blog is mine. The files live on my machine. The domain is mine( or netlify’s technically). If something goes wrong, I fix it. I do not have to beg a support team in another country to give me my account back.
(ownership is not about control. It is about not waking up one day to find your work gone.)
I am going to start the monthly digest format next month. Albums, films, books, manga. Maybe anime. Maybe other things I stumble into. The first one will be for May and I am excited.
It will not be polished. It will not be optimized for engagement. It will be mine. And that is the point.