Thoughts after trying Noterook

Okay, spent the evening trying Noterook and poking around and experimenting, briefly compiling my thoughts here.

I don't think Noterook is the answer a lot of people are looking for, and a lot of people think it is. The format is interesting, the idea of not hosting any content at all and instead having the user host the posts themselves on their computer and just load them into the site when they're only, it's neat. It's got some merit to it. It immediately runs into an issue where your posts will not be visible or accessible if you're offline for a period of time, ranging from instantly when you log off to as long as 30 days. A social media site that won't hold your posts or make them accessible is kind of a problem, a majority of activity happens when you're away from your computer or even just not on a site, and though the 30 day extension is nice, it still seems to be a bit of a flawed system that's not super conducive to blogging as a medium, even if it is geared towards microblogging.

Related to that is the issue of media hosting. Noterook hosts nothing at all. Text and raw files are held by the user and synced with the social media part of the site upon login, but images, videos, and audio have to be hosted elsewhere on the web in order to be cited via link in a Noterook post. This is a huge problem, as a lot of people's Tumblr blogs are upwards of 100-200GB worth of data, a majority of which comes from media. Obviously not everyone individually is uploading 100GB of pictures t their blog, but some people do upload large amounts of media themselves, anything from posting selfies to sharing art to a clip from their favorite streamer. In order to share anything like that on Noterook, you have to host it somewhere else, and cite into the post you make. So if I'm not hosting that data, and Noterook isn't hosting that data, where do we go??? Are we all supposed to have Imgur accounts just for posting photos to Noterook? I have a catbox.moe, but uploads were paused when I checked earlier and I wasn't able to use it. The ironic thing is, I had to use Tumblr posts as image sources to post them on Noterook. What's the point then? The issue of media hosting is pretty large, and while there's a ton of ways to do so, none of it works like a social media site. You can't casually upload a selfie to Noterook, you have to go out of your way to post it somewhere else, and then put it in a Noterook post. It's almost like...

...yeah, it's almost like you, the user, are given all of the impetus of running a personal website, such as hosting and creating formatted text, finding image hosts, maintaining online availability, but instead of actually running a website you're doing all of that just to connect to a social media site. It doesn't have any of the benefits of decentralizing and running a website of your own, and it doesn't have any of the ease-of-use that social media sites have standard. It's taking a lot of interesting ideas from both angles, and pushing them up against each other in a way that has a lot of really huge cracks, and I kept tripping over them just trying out the site.

I understand where the creator of Noterook is coming from. The idea of a social media cite that is light on censorship, friendly to trans women, and light on host costs sounds like it's too good to be true. I think it likely still is. I like a lot of what it's going for, and I even support it, I feel like the people hailing this as some kind of fantastic alternative are laying out a really nice rug for the guests that covers the cheap floorboards until someone steps through them. The social media aspect of Noterook is just another Tumblr Clone But Not Really The Same, but interaction is infinitely harder than even something like Bluesky. If you take advantage of everything that Noterook is, then it's like all of the storage/hosting/HTML+CSS responsibilities of making your own website, but wrapped in a social media presentation that both prevents you from decentralizing and having your own website, while also not bothering to do any of the file hosting for you. The social aspect is very nice, but I would infinitely prefer if we normalized guestbooks and comments and contact emails and messaging platforms, rather than this format which feels like it's not really a social media site and not really your own website, because it's not fully either.

I respect what the creator is trying to pull off here, but I feel like it needs a lot of reworking to be viable, and I worry that this is just another Indie Social Media of the Season that'll be gone or depopulated in a relatively short time frame. Y'know, like when everyone freaked out and said to go join Cohost, or Pillowfort. It's just the latest outlet for people's concerns about Tumblr that doesn't solve anything about Tumblr, or even really recreate the format of Tumblr that's allowed it become so popular in the first place. So, yeah. Not really feeling it.

The sticker mechanic is cute. I will give it the stickers.

~ Alex Amelia Pine