Why I Chose to Make My flomo Notes Public

When I graduated back in 2020, I spent most of my time looking for opportunities at social networking startups. Whenever anyone asked why I wanted to work on social products, my answer was almost always roughly: “Because I’m terrible at expressing myself.” In more common terms, I was “socially anxious.”

Actually, that word isn’t quite accurate. It’s usually a lazy cop-out—an easy excuse people instantly grasp whenever I want to duck out of topics I’d rather not discuss or events I don’t feel like attending. What’s actually going on with me is a bit different, though hard to pin down.

I hate almost all instant messaging. The usual culprits are mindless chitchat—“Have you eaten yet? What did you eat? Was it good? Are you tired? Asleep yet?”—along with that dreaded guilt trip: “Why don’t you ever feel like sharing anything?” (There’s only one viable solution for my girlfriend’s appetite for daily chitchat: see each other in person every single day.) Then there’s the relentless real-time pressure of IM: I reply with one line, the other person texts back in two seconds flat, and suddenly I’m agonizing over whether I’m obligated to reply instantly, too. In the end, I just muted WeChat notifications entirely and started deliberately letting messages sit for ten or fifteen minutes before replying. Asynchronous conversations feel so much better.

This came with one inevitable consequence: a lack of human connection. While I do genuinely enjoy my personal space, every now and then I still have feelings I need to get off my chest. When I notice myself getting anxious and restless, my only recourse is calling someone up or flipping through essays that carry a genuine human touch.

Day to day, my primary ways of savoring—or coping with—solitude are reading and journaling.

I like talking with friends, but I get uncomfortable when it happens too often. I tried keeping in touch over email, and even set up a few one-on-one topic chats in Feishu (Lark), but in the end, every single one fizzled out.

I tried writing, grandly dubbing it “building a personal space for free expression.” Total flop. Nothing in the well.

I also really envy people on social media who always seem to have so much to say. Looking closely, though, most of them are just spouting endless hot air, while only a select few are genuinely knowledgeable. I tried spewing more nonsense myself 🤷‍♂️, but it turns out I don’t even have the talent for that.

All told, I had zero accomplishments on that front. With every attempt at opening up hitting a wall, I retreated further inward and decided to just accept my fate.

I’ve been using flomo (a note-taking app) ever since its early beta days. While I was obsessed with tagging strategies early on, I quickly shifted to dumping everything into the Inbox; by now, I’ve completely abandoned tags altogether. Fighting note entropy, especially for an INFP, is a total trap. Out of the dozen-plus note-taking tools I’ve tried over the years, flomo is the only one that actually stuck around.

Flipping through it at random brings me a quiet satisfaction. Some of those notes reflect exactly what was running through my head at that exact moment in time. For the right person, they could be a window into an authentic connection.

As for privacy—I find it hard to believe any of the fleeting thoughts I scribble down possess any monumental value. When my girlfriend looks through my phone and opens flomo, she loses interest almost immediately. Sure, there are occasional flashes of inspiration and product ideas, but after evaluating them one by one, even I can’t be bothered to build them.

Export flomo, and you get a fully interactive HTML page. I thought the default styling looked a bit unpolished, so I tweaked it with Cursor, hosted it on GitHub Pages, hooked up a custom domain, and there it was: my public flomo—

flomo.kkuk.dev

Feel free to click around and get to know me a little better. Here’s the note I jotted down in flomo the moment the idea first hit me:

Make your flomo public. In truth, there are no hidden treasures in my flomo, nothing that needs to be kept secret; my girlfriend read through it, and I didn’t feel any of the shame I’d feel if she read my private diary. I’m not good at using flomo—I never figured out tags, categories, or workflows. To me, flomo is just a quick scratchpad, totally messy. If I keep it private, almost none of this information will ever be seen; on the other hand, if people do see it, they might get to know me a little better. And things with a genuine human touch are becoming increasingly rare.