On Thinking Nooks
And how I built my own
Little realizations come to my mind suddenly. Sometimes I’m hooked on a phrase I’ve crafted in my head. Sometimes I observe something fascinating in the world around me. Sometimes a spark is lit by conversation.
These bits of thought-stuff beg me to capture them when they arise. They nag me, although their persistence is short lived. If I don’t find a home for them, they float away, like bubbles that pop quickly in the wind.
Introducing Scribble
Over the years, I’ve experimented with various homes for my written thoughts. They’ve been sprawling online mansions and humble paper huts. They’ve held thoughts with varying degrees of success.
After trying and failing to find a sufficient home for these short-form, off-the-dome scratches, I built my own thinking nook. It’s located at an aptly named address:
Sitting in a coffeeshop, Scribble took a few hours to build. It did the bare minimum. I could safely save a short string of text to the app (I call these short strings of text “scribbles”). After using the little site for a few weeks, I realized how much I liked it – how much it opened up the ducts, letting raw insight and emotion pour into written form.
Many of my ideas for essays, tech, and life are seeds planted in Scribble. It feels incredibly healthy to hit the “publish” button for a much smaller audience: myself.
As of November 2023, I have a few thinking nooks:
My paper journal is for meandering thought, poetry, and brainstorming.
Obsidian is for notes and organized writing.
Twitter/X is for finding friends and sharing coherent musings.
Substack is for pondered ideas, still imperfect, but more collected.
And Scribble is my stream of consciousness – a log of inspirations and nascent realizations.
It’s a beautiful arrangement at the moment. I fully expect it to change with the winds of time.
Why Build?
This begs the question… why would I build my own tool when there are so many out there?
About a year ago, I began to play around with places to house short form thoughts. Naturally, I first turned to Twitter. But the social media site felt more like an arena than a space to think aloud. There was a performative aspect to it that felt decidedly higher-pressure than I was looking for.
To escape the pressure, I decided to host my own Mastodon server. There was a breath of fresh air there, mostly because it was empty and having a server by myself was refreshing. But the feed felt lonely, and the app incentivized me to follow others.
What I liked about my Mastodon usage was all of the unsocial bits. It dawned on me that all I wanted was to craft short form text for a single audience member – me.
I looked at several other options, but realized that I had a very specific set of requirements that were unfulfilled by anything else I saw. Everything was so complex, so feature rich. A lot of it was very cool. But it was far more than I needed or wanted.
I abandoned the search and took to my keyboard to build.
Scribble, the product
The app is very simple. Craft a Scribble:
And read your previous ones:
Thoughts captured as short form text have a vibrant yet unpolished surface. Although they might read as complete thoughts, they are often surface-level gateways to deeper and more intricate ideas. They can grow into more substantial pieces (like this one) over time.
What differentiates Scribble from everything else is that it is unapologetically anti-feature. I don’t need to title a scribble, I don’t need to organize it into a folder, it’s private, and I still have all the conveniences of storing my thoughts securely online, following me wherever I go.
I can open my computer or phone and start writing immediately. It’s the shortest route for a nascent idea to reach a secure home.
Like the seedling thought that desires to be written down, this project is small, simple, and rough around the edges – in an endearing kind of way. It’s not perfect software, and while I value stability in my code, it’s not meant to be overly polished.
The past six months of scribbling has been wonderful for me and my thinking, so I wanted to write about it here. Anyone can create an account and use Scribble for free.
If you give Scribble a try, send me your thoughts!
Saalik, this is excellent.
Congrats on building something hyper-specific for yourself - that I can see leading to others using as well.
What a beautiful lesson, in both, writing for yourself and building something for yourself.
Such a practice will lead to more discovery.
Excited to try Scribble for myself :)