The Story of 128KB

One day in January 2024, I was lethargically scrolling through my Instagram feed on my laptop. And, as so often happens, I felt wistful and thought back to better times.

When I started posting my experimental, code-generated animations on social media in 2014 and discovering the work of other artists and designers, the world was a completely different place. Back then, I used Tumblr, a platform that was quite niche at the time but very tidy, offering countless freedoms that today’s antisocial media have long since eliminated: you could post links to other websites, and there was no malicious algorithm curating the feed.

It’s hard to imagine that today! On Tumblr, the feed was very simply structured: the latest posts appeared at the top, and you didn’t see any junk from other channels you never subscribed to. I used Tumblr back then to document my progress in learning creative coding and to share it with others. On Tumblr, other channels could also easily repost my post so that it appeared on their pages too. It was a really productive, inspiring platform.

As I was scrolling through Instagram on my laptop, I noticed something: I had left my browser’s developer console open and saw in the “Network” tab that the number of megabytes consumed by my mindless scrolling was skyrocketing. The videos that were thrust in front of me unsolicited had consumed almost an entire gigabyte of noise in perhaps three minutes.

That brought me to an idea: one of the many technical advantages of social media giants is that they have unlimited resources. They can host petabytes of cat videos and bullshit reels on their gigantic servers. What if we celebrated the exact opposite of that? What if I developed a slow, dedicated social web for creative coding that ensures quantitative scalability precisely because of the small file size of the posts? What if we celebrated the smallness of posts as an aesthetic feature? What if the creative coding scene retreated into such a digital safe space and the noise finally came to an end?

At that moment, I remembered a feature that I really appreciated on Tumblr: the posts I uploaded there at the time were animations in .gif format. Tumblr limited the file size that could be uploaded to 2MB. That was a real challenge back then, and this technical limitation also had a major impact on the way I designed my visuals. I used few colors, limited the format, and developed animations as perfect loops where you couldn’t see that the sequence was relatively short because the end and the beginning were not recognizable. So the file limit served as inspiration for me; every visual I developed was some kind of hack, I had to use tricks to get below that 2MB limit. And that’s exactly what I loved about it.

For my own small network, I wanted to be even more radical and make the file size so small that I could theoretically host thousands of posts on the platform. I set the limit at 128KB. 128KB is much less than 2 megabytes. You have to think really hard about how to bring an idea to shine within these tight limits. But that’s exactly what makes it so appealing.

Now the platform is online. It works. It is much slower, simpler and has far fewer features than what is described as social media today. But I believe it can make it clear that you need much less to come together as a globally scattered group of creatives. I hope that 128KB will fill with life over the next few years.

Tim Rodenbröker, 11. September 2025