Sequences: A Small Step Against the Walled Garden
The steady drift of the web toward centralized platforms has become a familiar complaint in technical circles. Facebook, YouTube, Medium, and similar services keep growing, and with that growth comes less interoperability. Early gestures toward openness—XMPP in messaging apps, for example—have largely faded. Whatever comes next, one necessary condition for a less centralized web is that content still gets published outside those platforms. The exploratory energy of the early internet, when people built small projects across writing, graphics, and interactive media simply to see what was possible, is a useful reminder of what that looks like.
In that spirit, a modest new project has launched: Sequences, running from Berlin. The format is straightforward—a photograph per day, each accompanied by a short text. It is a self-hosted, minimal alternative to Instagram: no likes, no comments, no reactions, just a feed from the author to the open web.
How to Follow Along
Entries are published via an Atom feed, which is currently empty and will populate over the coming days. For those who abandoned RSS after Google Reader shut down, new entries are also announced on Twitter.
The project also served as an opportunity to try some new CSS techniques—a Flexbox-based image gallery being the notable experiment.
