Your year in review, computed from your own Instagram export
Wrapped is a plot of what happened to you, and the Nostalgia Museum is rooms you can walk. Both refuse the parts of "nostalgia" that a record cannot have, and both carry the answer's source as a stamp.
The year-end review is the one product the whole industry built around the oldest urge
there is, and the one that an export is least able to celebrate. An export does not hold
your favourite songs, your best friend, your worst month as a feeling. It holds events,
timestamps and counts. Most tools covering it try to fill the emotional gap; LMKFR
covering it decides not to, and the difference is the whole of the post.
Wrapped is a plot of what happened to you, and the Museum is a building of rooms for
those same facts. Neither writes a story back at you. Both take their shape from the
records in your own export, both carry a provenance stamp for the record count they are
made of, and both are explicit about the parts of nostalgia that were never stored and
so cannot be returned.
- 30sWrapped reads your year; Museum waited for it.
- 4minwhich room is which, and what each shows.
- afterwards — what it refuses to compute, and why that matters more than the whole
- visual.
Wrapped is the year, spelled out
A Wrapped run is twelve months of every activity kind the parser found, in order.
Messages, follows, posts, reels, story interactions, searches, watches, link clicks —
the year is counted by the same taxonomy the Activity page reports, and it sums to a
shape: busiest month, busiest time of day, longest streak, the person who carried the
most of it, the words you left, the words the archive stores about you.
The card you share is a picture of that shape. Anyone reading it can reconstruct the
math from the same twelve months you are looking at, and that is the point of the
provenance stamp it carries — a count of the records that made it, printed on the card
itself rather than buried. An emotional number the Wrapped page puts on the screen is
always a number you could reproduce; it is never a promise about what it meant.
The Museum is the same facts, walked rather than read
The Nostalgia Museum takes a different shape on purpose. Where Wrapped is a single plot,
the Museum is walking rooms for: where you started, the people who stayed, who you
looked up, the moments you have to be proud of, the words you left, the shape of your
nights, the places you kept returning to, and what your chapters were called. Each room
is a computed proof from the archive, and each carries its source: the first conversation
that survived, the night your own message count doubled, the person whose searches you
ran at their name enough times that the file is willing to say it.
What both refuse to calculate
There is a class of question that an archive cannot answer, and the rule on this site is
that those questions are not asked — not silently, and not in a wreath around a
verification stamp.
- It does not say what was the best. A year of events is a series; a "best" is a
value judgment that sits with you, not with a count.
- It does not name who you were close to. The record holds your message volume and
its timestamps; it does not store affection, and the Wrapped or Museum pages will never
look for it. - A milestone is a count, not a memory. A first message in the file is not the first
message that mattered; it is the first one the archive kept. The page says it that way.
- The gaps are as honest as the numbers. The months that hold no record are drawn as
no record, not stretched over to feel continuous.
A review page that filled those gaps might be warmer to read. It would also be the exact
move we criticise, which means Wrapped and Nostalgia Museum do not take that move for
better.
Wrapped versus nostalgia museum, and why two
The short version: Wrapped is the year, one axis, one card. Museum is your whole record,
more than one axis, walked through in rooms. They are the same honest engine wearing a
different interface, which is why the Museum room that computes a person is the same
record — a count from messages, searches, story reactions — that the Wrapped card's
engagement tier puts on a relationship. One you can pin to a wall, one you can walk.
This is not the same nostalgia as the essay
It is also worth saying what this is not: it is not a passage written about the feeling
of the archive. We have three of those essays on the site — the archive as a time
capsule, the person inside it, and the choice a photo carried in. They are allowed to
name emotion because they voice that the reader places there. This page is the
opposite: the words it returns are the ones the account itself stored.
Where this was checked
The year is assembled in packages/shared/src/analytics/wrapped-year.ts, and the Museum
rooms are the collections in analytics/museum.ts. The provenance stamps are arithmetic
on the place where the record sits at the timestamp of the claim. There is no
interpretation layer, no model, and no emotion assigned. Where the text says a thing was
computed, the computation is at that module.