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Moments

A moment is an ephemeral photo pinned to a place, visible to friends by default, gone in 24 hours unless journaled. It is the lightest piece of content in the product — small, location-aware, deliberately temporary.

The story

We didn't want a feed; we did want a way for the product to feel alive. A friend dropping a photo of the bar they just sat down at, or the corner of the park they're reading in, or the pop-up they wandered into — those are the textures that make a location-aware product feel populated. So we built moments: a single image, a caption, a category, a location (or raw coordinates), and a lifetime. The default lifetime is 24 hours. The default visibility is friends-only. After 24 hours the moment is soft-deleted, and seven days after that it's hard-deleted with the media removed from object storage. Most moments live for one day. That's the point.

The exception is the journaled moment. If the user wants permanence — a place that mattered, a trip worth keeping — they flip the duration to "journal" at upload time and the moment never expires. Journaled moments don't show up as map pins; they sit on the user's own profile as a personal diary. The same primitive (location + image + caption) doing two jobs: ambient short-form by default, personal-history opt-in by choice.

The third shape worth knowing is how moments interact with places. A moment with a location_id is attached to a Tomoda location — it counts toward that location's "moment count" badge on the map and shows up on the location detail panel. A moment without a location_id is a standalone pin at raw coordinates. We do this so a moment dropped at a named venue doesn't double-pin (the venue is already a pin), but a moment dropped in the middle of a park has somewhere to live. The location resolver handles the conversion — a raw drop at "the corner of Smith St" can be persisted as either a new minimal location or matched against an existing one within 50 m.

What we're optimising for

  • Ephemeral by default. 24 hours is the default lifetime; permanence is opt-in via the journal flag.
  • Friends-only by default. Public moments exist, but the default is the safer one.
  • Tied to place. Location is a first-class attribute. A moment is always somewhere.
  • Low-stakes posting. No drafts, no edits, no comment thread. A caption, a like toggle, a lifetime.
  • Cheap to clean up. A 5-minute soft-delete worker and a daily hard-delete worker, with media reclamation tied to user deletion.

What a moment is not

  • It is not a long-form post. There is no comment thread, no rich text, no media gallery — one image, one caption.
  • It is not a status update. It's pinned to a place, not to your profile.
  • It is not a story (in the IG sense). There is no auto-cycling carousel of moments at the top of the map. Each moment is a discrete pin.
  • It is not a stamp or check-in token.

See also