Why Doodlypress exists

This is my personal experimental alternative to Instagram; I liked the visual-focused posting aspect of the app, but in the last couple years it’s gotten increasingly enshittified: ads everywhere, the stupid algorithm suppressing some posts and surfacing others, the insertion of content from accounts I don’t follow in my personal feed, what feels like an eternal pivot to video.

There are also aspects of it that were always clunky: the fact that you couldn’t put hyperlinks in posts or format text, and you couldn’t create tags for your own content (e.g. I couldn’t have a little tag for all my travel/food/outfit posts).

When the guy who runs Meta made it a point to scrap content moderation—the last bulwark of reason on any social media platform—I looked around for Instagram alternatives and then realized that what I really wanted was a blog. I already have a blog, of course, but I wanted an image-focused microblog that I could just chuck random ephemera from my life into. Hence this blog.

Why “Doodlypress”

More than a decade ago I made cheeky stationery on my vintage tabletop letterpress, and in a fit of ambition I bought doodlypress.com with the intention of setting up an online store. Turns out, having a multifaceted music career doesn’t leave any room for side hustles, and this domain languished. The name doesn’t have anything to do with the current purpose of this site, but I didn’t want to let a perfectly good unused web domain go to waste.