“Share a piece of lore about yourself.”
This tweet by Moon Dragon (@frozenaesthetic), which went viral in July, triggered one of the most memorable events on social media in 2025. It now has hundreds of thousands of quote tweets and over 1.3 billion views — meaning the equivalent of every Twitter user saw it at least three times or the equivalent of every Nigerian at least six times. We’ve also seen countless variations of the tweet released by others on the platform, with varying degrees of success.
What I took away from the episode is this: people are eager to share interesting anecdotes about themselves and to read such stories about others. It tells me that in a world where machines have become the most prolific producers of knowledge and where it is arguably more lucrative for content to be silly than serious, people still crave genuine, interesting, and relatable storytelling. It also renewed my confidence in Chronycles, a media project which I launched, coincidentally, also in July this year.
I had started an Instagram-based storytelling project called Japa Chronicles with KÁNYIN Olorunnisola in 2024 to document the experiences of Africans in the diaspora. However, I abandoned it because I just could not get Instagram ads to work, and I’d relied on this as a means of attracting new submissions. In May this year, while on a flight to Cape Town through Doha, I drafted a small concept note, building on the idea. During the layover between the countries, I bought the www.chronycles.com domain. Why limit the project to “Japa” Chronicles, I thought. Why can’t we also have Conflict Chronicles and Love Chronicles and Work Chronicles all in one place?
Because I intend to explore a wide range of topics using this platform, what distinguishes it from others is the storytelling format adopted: first-person experience-centred narratives. I consider it the purest form of human-centred storytelling and I like to call it journalism with the least amount of journalist, or journalism as an art of collective journaling.
Personal experiences elevate every kind of speech, writing, and story. A book about war is more valuable when it is written by someone who has lost sleep to bombing and lost loved ones to armed hatred. A TEDx speech about making money is more valuable when it comes from someone who has dedicated their life to making or understanding wealth. A sales pitch about a pair of sneakers is more compelling when it comes from someone wearing the same pair. You get the idea. We should encourage more experience-centred op-eds, advice, and stories in a world where content has become cheapened by the bandwagon effect, the dunning-kruger effect, the loneliness pandemic, generative AI, and the desperate need to make a buck.
I should add that stories that offer a glimpse into the unfiltered lived experiences of other people are crucial as a way to deepen bonds and heal fractures in a world that is so divisive, despite being the most interconnected it has ever been. So many of the problems we face — from conflict to bad governance and gender inequality — exist because we do not take our time to truly listen to one another. We live in and jealously protect our bubbles, afraid that our worldviews might be shattered by the hammer of a broadened perspective. But it is stories that will save us, because it is stories that will change us — the ones we yearn to hear and the ones we find uncomfortable.
For people in the West, there are already tons of websites and social media pages dedicated to meeting this need (think of Soft White Underbelly, Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, The People’s Portfolio by Platon, Model Strangers by Christopher Ward, Subway Takes by Kareem Rahma, Can I Walk with You by Thoraya Maronesy, and so on). That is why Chronycles aims to fill the same gap for Africans and black communities.
The primary storytelling format is what I call the snippet, which is simply an original photo and a short narration from a person about something they have experienced (often extracted from interviews). We have memoirs, which give people an opportunity to dwell more deeply on an experience, providing as much context as is necessary (often written down by the narrator). And then we have the series, which are collections of snippets and memoirs (usually between 10 and 25) curated by a commissioned journalist/researcher from a demographic of people. They are published at once on the website and then released gradually on social media, giving people the freedom to consume slowly or voraciously, linearly or at random.
Every weekend since the first post was published on July 16, at least one snippet or memoir has gone up on the website. Specifically, so far this year, we have published 55 snippets, nine memoirs, and two series beaming light on all kinds of topics, from the Boko Haram conflict in Borno to banditry in northwestern Nigeria, flooding in Lagos, mental illness, romance, dating in the diaspora, grief, sex trafficking, drug addiction, tourism, and so on. Three more series have already been commissioned and will be published between January and March. They will focus on the experiences of students living with disabilities, medical students and professionals, and area boys in Nigeria.
The website has averaged thousands of monthly visitors, and the analytics on Instagram are even more impressive. We’ve attracted over a thousand new followers. Between August and November, the account got over 187,000 views. One of the best-performing posts had up to 418 likes and 82 comments. The idea is not to treat social media as a means to merely amplify content from the website but to see it as an autonomous publication channel, giving readers an alternative means of consuming information.
Another thing I’ve done with the platform is to host my vibe coding experiments with it. The first app I released was PriceGuessr, a quiz game where you guess the price of various products based on Nigeria’s economic realities in 2015 (based on archived Jumia pages) to see how bad or not so bad the inflation is a decade later. Then I released StorySpark, an AI-powered story idea and research plan generator that allows journalists and writers to use text, emoji, or image prompts. Both apps have views ranging between 420 and over a thousand, respectively, despite not being actively promoted. As part of the The Day Boko Haram Attacked series, I vibe-coded two interactive storytelling apps that offer readers an opportunity to immerse themselves in the experiences of conflict victims and to visualise how much of their life has been overshadowed by the war.
This project, Chronycles, is in roughly four phases:
- Promoting human-centred storytelling.
- Promoting AI-powered interactive storytelling.
- Promoting curiosity-driven feature writing.
- Setting up a structure to fund the previous phases, such that people who want to read a certain kind of story can be matched with people who can deliver those stories and such that the platform has a more robust and self-sustaining structure.
So far, only the first two phases have been activated. The idea behind promoting curiosity-driven feature writing is this: public-interest journalism isn’t the only kind of journalism there is, and we’re missing out on a lot because of our obsession with it.
I hate that many of our systems and industries in this part of the world are designed for our day-to-day survival and nothing more. When we think of university degrees, we see them strictly through the lens of employability (which makes sense, but is nonetheless sad because it reflects how we’ve created a society that doesn’t accommodate a wide range of specialities). When we think of making movies and music, our first (and often only) loyalty is to what genres and topics are moving the market. Art for art’s sake? Research for research’s sake? There’s no room for such nonsense. Who is going to fund it? Why should we fund it if we cannot make money from it? It is a product of widespread and deep-rooted poverty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight it.
We see the same thing in journalism, too. What dominates is either journalism that manifestly promotes public interest or journalism that directly or indirectly brings in money. This is why some platforms start off as being strictly investigative or niche outlets, only to dilute their content with what they believe the people or the funders are craving. Journalists should be able to say, “There’s a fascinating story I want to write. It doesn’t fit or set an agenda, it doesn’t hold power to account, and it might not interest a lot of people, but I want to write it regardless because I’m losing sleep over it.” I want to create a room for such stories.
Anyway, now to a more important matter. You might be wondering: What can I even do to make sure that the vision driving Chronycles becomes reality? Well, thank you for asking. I have painstakingly curated a few ways you can support the project.
- Go to the website, check out our publications, and feel free to share your honest feedback and suggestions on how the platform can be improved. You can even click here to read a random story.
- Follow us on social media and engage with our posts. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
- Send us money. This will go into keeping the website alive and healthy, paying curators and contributors the handsome fees they deserve, and paying for social media ads so that our publications can reach more audiences. You can either make one-time donations or recurring donations using our Paystack payment pages.
- Fund a series. So far this year, over ₦1.3 million of my money has gone into commissioning story collections. With some help, I could do more and pay better. If you would like to see a series on a particular theme and want to pay for us to find a credible curator with access to the community to conduct the interviews, please reach out. If you know an organisation that may be interested in funding a series, please reach out. After all, a wise man once said, “Info l’eeyan fi nfo (it is information that makes one fly).” A small nudge in the right direction can sometimes be more valuable than money.
- Ask how you can support the Unusual Ideas Reporting Grant. (Remember what I said about curiosity-driven journalism?)
- Ask how you can support people whose stories are told. In November, a reader sent some money to one of the people featured in the The Day Boko Haram Attacked series through the curator. Hopefully, we will have more of this.
- If you are a journalist, there’s a lot we can do together. I want Chronycles to be a place where you can publish the interviews from your reporting that did not make it into your final article, especially if you work as a freelancer (because of copyright concerns). But more importantly, I want people to build stories out of the experiences shared in our series, to give those issues more visibility — the same way you would write a news feature based on reports by Amnesty International, which often include similar first-person narratives.
- Share your story with us. Visit our submissions page for details.
I am grateful to everyone who has supported this project in one way or another since it started. I am grateful to people who have offered advice: Olivia Obichukwu Ndubuisi for letting me realise the importance of narrowing the target audience, Malik Samuel for stressing the need to maintain journalistic standards, Fu’ad Lawal for suggesting that the font on the Instagram carousels ought to be bigger, and Gbemisola Adebowale for constantly reminding me to protect the interests of the people sharing their stories. I am grateful to Ọmọge Femii for gifting me a mug branded with the Chronycles logo. I am grateful to the stranger who read the The Day Boko Haram Attacked series and shockingly donated ₦100,000 back in November — it meant the world to me.
I am grateful to everyone who has shared content from the website and social media pages. I am particularly grateful to everyone who has trusted us with their stories, especially during the early days when there was hardly any incentive to do so. Thank you, Temitayo Akinyemi, for writing the first memoir (or even the first anything) to be published on the platform. Thank you, Aliyu Dahiru, Ridhwan Adetutu Abdullahi, Sada Malumfashi, Yusuf Anka, and others. A big thank you as well to the wonderful curators.
And thank you, too, for reading this piece. I asked for a minute of your time and have stolen so much more, but I hope it was worth it.
See you on the other side, I guess. Wherever that is.