Care is not an infinite scroll
How a slow app made my relationships stronger
It would have been in my kids’ middle-grade years—something like ages six, seven, eight?—when they first properly observed Instagram over my shoulder. We’d be on the couch, pasta boiling in the nearby kitchen, and they’d hang their little elbows around my neck or maybe fold into a half-sit on my lap. That was a developmental era with bright bursts of consciousness, big leaps in abstract reasoning, and a bare-bones sense of numeracy. But then—simple numbers turned out to be all they needed to understand social platforms. “Wow, Mama,” they’d say. “43 likes!” They had internalized Instagram’s deepest logic. More is nearly always more.
In the years since that little-kid parenting era, I’ve asked myself—the way so many of us have—whether more is what it’s cracked up to be. And I don’t just mean the self-evidently hollow offering of “likes.” There are all kinds of numbers that animate apps on the scale of Instagram or Facebook, reinforcing the algorithmic idea that bigger is better—or that bigger is inevitable, anyway. It took me a while to figure out that I needed something simpler, more intimate, and I got it in an unexpected way. I started using an app that’s officially marketed to families, and it became the digital social experience I’d been hoping for—not just as a parent, but as a person.
Notabli is not the kind of self-announcing refusenik tech targeted to folks who are outraged about the big social giants, who want to go rogue—or even just go weird or experimental. Notabli is an approachable and minimalist app for privately sharing, archiving, and easily printing digital images—led, as the app often notes, by an interest in “the kids you love!” It’s marketed as a convenient way to keep images of children far away from the public (or even the slippery semi-private) internet, and as a way to build the 21st century form of the family scrapbook.
My friend-from-the-internet, software engineer Jesse Kriss, started using Notabli in 2014. He had quit using Facebook in 2009, and the prospect of a modest-scale sharing platform with strong guarantees of privacy and security appealed to him. The idea of digital connection “without all the baggage, complexity, and tradeoffs of a larger ecosystem” was so clearly desirable—even in those days, he told me. Back then, Jesse wasn’t even Notabli’s putative customer. He and his wife had no children at the time. He signed on anyway, to connect with friends who did have kids and, after his own child was born, to document his young family’s life together.
It was at Jesse’s recommendation that I started using it to share images of my own kids’ lives a couple of years ago with a small network of people—maybe two dozen, tops. Kids fresh-faced and heading off to school. A quick video clip of a bike ride. A particularly good cake, baked by a 10-year-old. After a while, I occasionally shared some non-kid snapshots, just life-in-general. A view of the trees. A lonely streetscape during the pandemic. And then, eventually, I got off Instagram entirely. Because once I’d started noticing Notabli’s designed features—and my own behavior choices in response to them—I recognized that its virtues came from having less, rather than more.
Notabli offers a sturdy few interactive possibilities. In the app itself, there are likes, comments, and easy archiving, but zero of the glitter and charisma that make an app its own never-ending destination. There’s no third-party data harvesting, which is reassuring to parents, yes—but there are also no advertisements, no interactivity around comments, no direct messages, no ephemeral features like Stories, no tricked-out graphics. It’s a very slow, very placid feed. And the app isn’t even a necessity: You can sign up for a digest of images (or videos, or sound recordings) sent by email at regular intervals. (My parents, in their 70s and without a shred of interest in Facebook or Instagram or really even digital life in general, love the email bit: an uncomplicated and uncluttered delivery of digital media straight to their door.)
To a casual observer, Notabli might look like a banal glimpse of internet backwater, unlikely to compete with the social industry platforms and therefore, at best, a niche product for the extra-cautious. But like so many designs that are ostensibly marketed for family life in a narrow and even parochial way, there’s some signal present, something deeper that calls for sustained attention. I’ve come to think of Notabli and its “family”-branded counterparts as a proxy for another possibility—for technologies that support the smaller but heterogeneous networks in our lives, deployed at an adaptively manageable scale. The app delivers the simplicity and productive limitations that the symbol of family stands for. It’s a human-scale model for giving and receiving the records of our lives with the family-or-friend, neighbor-or-colleague communities we belong to, and want to build.
Like Jesse, my enjoyment of Notabli has little to do with having or not having kids. We both find it to be an example of ever-elusive calm technology. “The smaller scale of content and connections means there’s no anxiety about keeping up,” he told me. “Even if I went two months without opening the app, I could easily catch up with everything I missed in under 30 minutes, even with videos.” Notabli is an unapologetically modest interaction.
Okay, fine, but ask the average non-technical person about the idea of a smaller-scale and more humane social internet, and you’ll invite a scripted kind of response: That’d be nice, but this ship has sailed. You want efficient connection to your friends and family members? Then you go where the people are. It makes sense: most of us are too busy to find an alternative. And if you’re in the presence of book smart types, they’ll remind you: Big problems with capital—with monetized algorithmic “sharing”—aren’t addressable by individual human actions. We can be critical of these big platforms even while participating in them, they say. Make your big-platform account private and small; share only with designated “close friends,” and live with the rest. In fact, the logic goes, our participation at this point is probably out of our hands. Its entanglements in our lives have blurred the boundaries of work life and personal life. Opting out isn’t economically viable.
I guess this is where I’ll admit that for me, the draw to Notabli and away from Instagram isn’t really sourced from a high-minded refusal so much as a sober realism—vivid and bracing in middle age—about human fallibility, the liquid slip of time, and the lie of quantifiable value.
I find that Notabli’s limited scope—its designed less-ness—helps send me back to my closest relationships more of the time. My oldest and dearest friends, my extended family members, the lifeline mix of parents-and-children who share our schools and car rides and caregiving. I spend less of my life scrolling because I’m not trying to manage several oversized, ad-driven networks. So I’m checking in with that closer circle of people instead. And those people are going through stuff: navigating cancer and the insidious fissures in a marriage and the death of parents. I find the social bindery of more frequent interaction with a smaller set of people—the updates on the earrings they chose, or the “post”-Covid vacation planned and abandoned or, yes, the things their kids say—earns us both an open line of communication for getting through the big challenges together. These are the people who will be with me ten, twenty, thirty years from now. I want my technology to point me toward those relationships—connections with such tightly-woven histories that I can’t imagine their breaking apart, but whose ties can indeed become fragile under the slow pressure of more.
When my kids marvel at 43 likes!, I can frame my response to them with a moderate, knowing acceptance of how the internet is, calibrating my screen time, hiding the metrics, or adding on whatever other tweaks might be possible. Those are good options, and ones that plenty of us choose. But I can also invite the necessary friction of adopting some different interaction in my digital life altogether, where an app like Notabli hands me some well-designed constraints, building less into its very architecture. I am missing out on the serendipity of random connection—high school friends alongside my neighbors—that the big platforms promise, but I’m nourishing a smaller network instead. It’s one choice among so many that I can take up or let pass me by. Instead of fighting uphill with the big apps’ relentless invitation to more, I’m enjoying addition—by subtraction.
Here is the full loop of my interaction on Notabli these days: When I ask my 13-year-old daughter if I can take a picture or video of her playing the guitar, for example, she’ll say to me: Can you post it on Notabli? I post it, and we rarely go back to look at it again. We don’t track it for likes, even though (some two dozen) likes are available. We don’t get fed “suggested” content. We do get my daughter’s extended and inherited circle of relationships a little more closely connected to her life. That’s the point of the exchange for her: She is interested in something, and she is confident that a small set of people are interested enough in her to see it, to share it. She wants her grandparents to see these posts, and she especially wants my two best friends to see it—they live far away in Chicago, but they’re people who’ll be invested in my children forever. My daughter has taken this constellation of care in her mind’s eye and strengthened it with digital technology. We’ve learned to reinforce our relationships, not the draw to the machine.
Author’s note: It’s one thing to write critiques of technology—what’s going wrong is relatively easy to spot, which is why good, strong jeremiads are everywhere. It’s often harder to write about instances where things are going right, like I’ve done here. But rest assured that I have no connection to Notabli, nor was I compensated by them in any way for my thoughts.
Sara Hendren, contributing editor at New_ Public, is a humanist in tech—an artist, design researcher, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. Her newsletter is undefended / undefeated.
Design by Josh Kramer. Photo by Leo Rivas, via Unsplash.
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