A Small Act of Rebellion: Introducing Journal + Platform Updates

Hey. Hey. It's been quite some time since our last episode, so thanks for being here with me. And I've got a lot of exciting updates to share. So as you may or may not know, I'm a parent.

And like most parents, I think a lot about what kind of world my kids are growing up in. Like, it's a world where every thought shared online becomes data to be harvested, where moments of vulnerability become training data for algorithms designed to manipulate, where there's nowhere left for us to just be. That's why today, I'm excited to introduce Journal, a completely private space for reflection built right into Mosselit. No connections required, no sharing, no surveillance, just you and your thoughts. But before we dive into journal, let me catch you up on what else we've been building.

So we've had an incredibly productive few months, and I wanna share some of these updates that I think make Mosslet more useful and more connected to the wider world. First, we launched Discover and RSS feeds. You can now browse public posts from the Mosslet community on our Discover page. It's a gentle way to see what people are sharing publicly without the algorithmic manipulation. And if you're an RSS person, you can subscribe to public posts and our blog in your favorite feed reader.

We also added GIF support because, you know, sometimes you just need GIFs. Here's something different. If you share MOSSA with friends and family, you earn real money. 30% recurring on subscriptions and 35% on lifetime purchases during beta. Your referrals get 20% off, and we pay you directly via Stripe.

No points, no gift cards, just cash. And, yes, even the referral tracking is privacy first with encrypted tracking and no creepy third party pixels. We refined how reposting works. The old share button is now a paper airplane icon. It makes reposting feel more personal and intentional.

We added smart sidebar indicators with color coded bars so you can see at a glance who can see your post. You can now remove people you've shared something with, add more recipients later, and authors can add content warnings for sensitive topics. Like, it's all about intentional sharing over reflexive reposting. Let's see. We've made accessibility a first class feature.

This is something that I've wanted for so long, so I'm so excited about it. Our accessibility dino, that's what I call them, has been hard at work, and we now have proper heading hierarchy, enhanced keyboard navigation in areas, improved screen reader support, and a fully accessible emoji picker. I believe privacy and accessibility go hand in hand, and both should be first class features of any service. But there's more. We have now better image uploads with more support for wider variety of images, bot defense, collapsible sidebar for better UI, UX on desktop.

We renamed groups to circles for a warmer feel, improved messaging in circles with smart date separators. I mean, you get the idea. There's been a lot of updates. We're constantly refining the experience while staying true to our privacy first mission. Now let's talk about journal.

So here's something that I hear a lot. I love what MOSFET stands for, but I don't really wanna share stuff with other people. I just want a private space online. Or I hear something like, Mosselit sounds awesome, but all of my friends are on Instagram or substitute Instagram for any big tech surveillance platform. And, honestly, that makes complete sense.

Not everyone wants a social network. Not everyone wants to be on a new social network when all their friends are over here. It's tough. They call that, what I'm learning, a cold start. You know?

So I've been thinking a lot about it. And some people just want a corner of the Internet that's actually theirs, a place to write, reflect, and process without worrying about who's watching or what some algorithm is learning about them. I know I'm one of those people. And honestly, almost every person that I talk to is also one of those people. So I built journal for exactly that.

Whether you're on Maslet to connect with friends and family or you just want a privacy first digital sanctuary for your own thoughts, Journal is here for you. Now you can use Mosslet to connect with friends and family or simply yourself. Whoo. So what can you do? Journal is designed to get out of your way and let you write.

So here's what you can do. Write freely. Create entries with optional titles. Choose from over 35 different moods, and we're, like, constantly updating and adding new moods. You can organize journals into books, group related entries into theme collections, maybe one for travel memories, another for gratitude practice, the third for working through something difficult.

Each book gets its own cover color, or you can upload a custom photo for your book, track your progress, see your total entries, word count, and current writing streak right on your dashboard. Small wins matter. I think building that daily consistency can be really powerful. You can star your favorites, mark entries that mean something really special so you can find them again easily. Now here's a feature that I'm really excited about.

We call it the privacy screen. Picture this. You're writing something personal. Someone walks into the room. One tap and your journal content disappears behind a privacy screen with a visual countdown timer.

When that countdown ends, then you'll need your password to reveal your journal again. If you reveal it before the countdown ends, then you're good to go. So we try to balance convenience with privacy. Your thoughts stay yours even in shared spaces. I think that's super cool.

And of course, everything auto saves as you go, so you may not accidentally lose, like, your thoughts if, like, the browser crashes or you forgot to hit the save button or the Internet goes out. Now here's where it gets interesting. We've added AI powered features to journal, but we've done it in a way that respects your privacy completely. So we got journaling prompts. Stuck on what to write?

Tap inspire me and get a thoughtful, personalized prompt tailored to your current mood. It's great for days when you wanna write but don't know where to start. Mood insights, after you've written a few entries will generate a gentle supportive summary of patterns like, you've been writing more on weekends and seem most creative after morning entries. It's like having a thoughtful friend reflect back what they've noticed without ever reading your diary. And then, you know, I like this feature a lot, handwritten journal upload.

If you prefer to write by hand, you can take a photo of your handwritten pages and we'll digitize them for you. The AI reads your handwriting, even detects dates, and converts it into a searchable encrypted entry. Now I know what you're thinking. AI usually means your data getting sent to some server, analyzed, stored, used to train models that benefit everyone except you. But not here.

Here's how we do it differently. When you ask for a journaling prompt, we only send your current mood, not your entries, not your history, nothing personal. They don't even know what account on Masala this is associated with. For mood insights, we send only dates, moods, and word counts to spot trends, never the actual content of what you've written. So it kinda looks like this.

The pattern, March 15, happy 450 words. Tells the AI enough to notice patterns without revealing what you actually said. Pretty cool. When you upload handwriting, it's process one to extract the text, then that image is immediately deleted, gone from everywhere. We don't store it.

We don't do anything with it. The extracted text gets encrypted with your personal key before it ever touches our database. And that, like I said, that original image, it's gone. We don't use your journal entries, prompts, or insights to train AI models. Not ever.

Your reflections are not our oil. So how does the encryption actually work? Here's what happens when you write journal entry. You write, we encrypt it with your personal key, we store it as encrypted gibberish, and only you can ever decrypt it. With post that you share on Mosslet, you end up creating a shared key with whoever you share with, and then you and only that person can read it.

Again, we can't read it. But with journals, there's no sharing of journals. Nobody can read the journals except you with your password. Now we do store some functional metadata, things like entry date, word count, that sort of thing. We need these to show you your journal and let you sort and organize entries.

But the actual content, like your title, your writing, your mood, those are all encrypted noise to anyone who isn't you. Even the AI generated mood insights that you'll see from time to time on your dashboard, those are encrypted as well with your personal key before they're ever stored. So if someone somehow got our database, they'd find just a bunch of encrypted blobs. InsightText only becomes readable when you unlock it with your password. I think that's about all I have to share.

I started building Mosslet because I wanted a safe place for my family to share moments without becoming data to be mined. I didn't want a post I sent someone or one of my kids send someone to end up altering their credit score or affecting their access to services later down the road. Or worst case scenario, to be the reason they get ripped off the street and kidnapped and sent somewhere awful. So in a world like our world where every platform wants to know what you're thinking so they can sell that information to somebody or use it to make behavioral prediction products that manipulate us in the future just outside of our awareness, like a crazy sci fi movie that's actually real. Journal is our act of rebellion, a place where your reflections stay yours, where AI helps without harvesting, where privacy isn't a marketing claim.

It's your reality. Whether you're processing something difficult, practicing gratitude, tracking your creative projects, or just want somewhere to dump your thoughts at the end of a long day, you know, pull out your phone, Journal is here for you. And with everything else we built, the Discover page, RSS feeds, our referral program, intentional sharing tools, accessibility improvements, and circles, Masla is becoming the privacy first platform I wish existed when I was born. Ready to claim your private corner of the Internet? Join Mosslet and start your journal today.