The breakfast photo

In July 2025, Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker about something he calls Posting Zero, a point where ordinary people stop sharing things on social media. He opens with the breakfast photo, the thing people did in the early days of Twitter. He looks back on it fondly, as part of a big open space where anyone could post and strangers could see. Then he gives the reasons people have mostly stopped, and they'll sound familiar. The bar for polish keeps rising, metrics make people feel inadequate, algorithms favour accounts that post constantly, and a personal post can look cringe, or insensitive next to the news.

Frankly, though, it was always a little weird to share your breakfast photo with the whole internet. It was never meant for those people. Your friends or family might want to see it, but I never really understood sharing my own life that widely.

I don't think social media's turn toward polish, brands and influencers means we should be discouraged from posting our own stuff. Some people respond by not sharing anything, and I'm not a social media user myself. But we shouldn't let what social media has turned into (a marketing and advertising machine), take sharing away from us. We should still be able to post ordinary things. They just don't need to go to everyone on the internet. They can go into a Pool, a place made for the people you chose.

I understand why early Twitter users liked having a public record of the world. I'm not sure it's what we should aim for, though. Starting with our own connections, private by design, puts the breakfast photo where it belonged all along, with the people who want to see it.

Using Pools is kind of like early social media in how ordinary it can be, but you can have as many spaces as you like, organize things differently for different people, and you aren't forced to put everyone in the same group, which I've written about before. Only the people you invite can see what's in a Pool. There's no public count of reactions and no algorithm deciding what gets seen.

Sometimes a post should travel further, like when someone is publishing something and wants their ideas to spread. We have ideas for how to address that with Bonafide, but that's for another post.

If you try Pools, start small. Make one for one person and put something ordinary in it.