There's a peculiar magic in stumbling upon something you wrote years ago. Not because it's particularly brilliant—often it's not—but because it captures a version of you that exists nowhere else. A moment frozen in time. A thought you had. A feeling you were working through. A small victory you wanted to remember.
That's what I've come to believe Jottings really is: not a social media platform, not a content engine, but a gift to your future self.
Memory is Fallible
I used to think I'd remember everything that mattered. The important decisions. The conversations that changed how I think. The small moments of joy scattered throughout ordinary days. The projects I was excited about. The problems I was trying to solve.
But memory doesn't work that way.
A year passes, and you can't quite recall why you felt that way about something. Five years pass, and entire chapters of your life have blurred together. You remember the broad strokes—"I was working on that project"—but the texture is gone. The details. The why behind it all.
Writing preserves what memory alone cannot. When you write something down, even casually, you're creating a record. Not for an audience. For yourself. For the person you'll become.
Jots as Time Capsules
Each jot you publish is a small time capsule. It contains:
Your thinking at this moment. Not your final, polished thoughts, but the raw, real version of how you saw things on December 6th, 2025. The constraints you were working within. The information you had. The conclusions you drew.
Your voice. How you expressed yourself. What made you laugh. What you cared enough to write about.
The context of your life. What were you building? What were you reading? What were you working through? These jots become breadcrumbs that map the terrain of your life.
Moments you'd otherwise forget. The small victories. A conversation with a friend. A realization that shifted something. The weather on a particular day. The book that changed your perspective. These are the things that disappear first from memory, yet they're often the most precious.
The Permanence Problem
Here's the tricky part: if you're writing in a silo, what happens to your archive when the platform disappears?
This is why I built Jottings the way I did. Your microblog generates a static site—real HTML files—that lives on your own domain. Not locked into a corporate server somewhere. Not dependent on a subscription fee. Just... yours. Permanently.
Whether you use a Jottings subdomain or connect your own custom domain, those files don't disappear when a company pivots or goes under. They're real files, owned by you, accessible forever. Your archive isn't just a backup; it's a living website that belongs to you.
That permanence matters. It means you can write with confidence that your future self will actually be able to access what you wrote. Not through some proprietary platform. Not through a company's API. Just by visiting your domain.
The Joy of Rediscovery
I started keeping archives years before I built Jottings. Old blog posts. Notes. The occasional reflection.
And there's something genuinely moving about reading something you wrote five, ten, fifteen years ago. You meet yourself across time. You realize how much you've grown, or how you've circled back to questions you thought you'd settled. You laugh at old concerns that don't matter anymore, and you're struck by how prescient you were about things you're only now grappling with.
You see patterns in your thinking. You notice what you cared about across decades. You read the hopes and fears you didn't fully articulate at the time but expressed in your work.
That's not narcissism. That's genealogy. It's you tracing your own lineage, understanding how you became who you are.
Building Your Personal History
Your microblog is an archive of you in motion. Not the sanitized, perfect version you present to the world. The thinking version. The wondering version. The version that changed your mind and double-backed and tried again.
When you write a jot—whether it's a quick thought, a link you found valuable, a photo that mattered, a passage from something you're reading—you're doing something profound. You're creating your own historical record.
Not for followers or engagement metrics. For you.
Five years from now, you'll want to know who you were. Not in the broad strokes, but in the details. What you thought. What you cared about. How you expressed yourself. What made you pause and think.
Your microblog can be that record.
Start Writing
You don't need a massive essay. You don't need perfection. You don't even need a "point," really. Just write what matters to you, what you want to remember, what you want to say.
A sentence about something you learned. A photo that meant something. A quick thought you'd lose otherwise. A favorite passage. A small win.
Years from now, you'll be grateful you did. You'll read it and remember not just what you wrote, but who you were when you wrote it. You'll trace your journey. You'll see how far you've come.
Your future self is already grateful. They just don't know it yet.
Jottings keeps your archive permanent and owned. Because your history deserves to belong to you.