GoKawiilI enjoy doomscrolling reels and sharing them with my pals on Instagram as much as the next person, but every once in a while, I wonder how the platform went from being a place you'd go to check up on friends and family to the addictive maze of short-form videos it is today. Think about it: when's the last time you launched the app and saw a familiar face on the home page? Well, for those who yearn for the simpler times of social media, Retro has a solution that might be worth checking out.
Retro calls itself a "friends-only photo journal." The idea is to share at least one moment from your life every week, which is then displayed only to people who follow you. It's basically what Instagram was in its early days before it turned into an engagement-farming machine. Funnily enough, Retro was co-founded by Nathan Sharp, who happened to launch and lead the Stories feature on Instagram.
During initial setup, you can choose how frequently you wish to share photos on Retro — daily, weekly or monthly. The app will then nudge you to post at your chosen interval. The photo picker only lets you choose images you've captured during the same week, which I found helped with two things: decision fatigue and authenticity. The app pulls metadata out of your photos to determine when and where they were taken, both of which can be displayed alongside your uploads.