CyanSorcery

Game Developer

Plural Collective | ΘΔ& | Game Developer | She/Her | Pan/Demi | 37 | California


🦊Roxy, the programmer
🐭Mika, the artist
🪐Willow, the musician
🦨Ashe, the girl who gets things done
🦝Coco, the generalist


Links and More
https://cyansorcery.carrd.co/

Commissions
https://cyansorcery.com/commissions.php

explode



CyanSorcery
@CyanSorcery

Edit: I locked this one too, I'm done talking about it

idk the more I think about it the more I regret joining cohost. it's just me posting into a void for maybe 5 people to see it who all also follow me on some other site, while the admins sit around with an arrogant attitude throwing money into the void (where the posts are.) I shoulda never joined this site or wasted time with it lmao, but I wanted to give it an honest go

at least it seemed less shitty than some alternatives, but maybe I shoulda taken that bluesky invite lmao


CyanSorcery
@CyanSorcery

and I can't even say like, oh but at least I met some people on Cohost. I didn't. This site is specifically designed not to meet people. The people I did meet? From mastodon. Some people joined my Discord server, and I'm glad for that, but "following this lady's link to her chatroom" isn't the same as like, we replied back and forth to each other's posts and became friends. Because this site is designed to not help you find anyone or talk to anyone

and now people are like, "oh roxy you just want cohost to be Twitter 2, you got numbers brainrot" when actually, I do not care about numbers. Hell, give me a bar on each post with no numbers that's normalized to the number of likes that the average of my 3 most popular posts got, idk. Just make me feel like I'm not posting to the void. People say, oh on Mastodon you have no visibility, and like I said in the other post, I get so much engagement on Mastodon, both in boosts and likes, but more importantly, in comments. People reply to my posts, people want to talk to me there

I think it just sucks that I can post tons of images and stuff onto this site, and the only one that people actually seem to interact with are either CSS crimes or posts about cohost itself

At least they liked that hot pic of my fursona I drew a little while ago, but I shouldn't have to post a nude pic of my fursona all the time just to get people to say hello


Comments on this post are locked.

in reply to @CyanSorcery's post:

well let's not go that far. I keep waiting for the admin of that place to start biting people, he's definitely gonna start biting people.

I'd like this place to keep improving, but it seems like some of the owners need to know when to take a break.

I got offered an invite to bluesky by a friend and I felt bad because I felt like I was really rejecting my friend's gift, since I was the first person they offered it too, but I just hate dorsey and the concept of "twitter 2" that much that I had to say no

in reply to @CyanSorcery's post:

i'll be honest one thing that makes me not interact with posts here is that comments are, ironically, public. there's some anxiety in being the FIRST person to speak up, and doubly so if you're the ONLY person to do so

on masto i can just like, turn on lock or mention-only/dm mode and not worry about it being a public display of appreciation

thing is i'd be happy to stand up and make an ass of myself lauding people if i felt like that was something people wanted, but the notion of "reply guy" is so deeply baked into any site in this format that it's just inherently stigmatized.

Yeah!

tho dang i wish you could like comments. its something ive seen people comment on (and ill paraphrase as i agree) that comments on cohost kind of come with a burden of acknowledgement? like if someone says something nice, theres no quick tick for the OP to say "yeah, good, thanks" without a comment of their own.

for some people this energy is a positive feedback, for others it's an additional spoon spent, and i worry about the latter unless i've got something poignant to say?

im probably overthinking it!!

no yea I get it, a lot of the times I'm just sitting here like, what they said is really good and I agree, but I can't really acknowledge that without replying to say "what you've said is really good and I agree" which like, idk then it ends up being a whole thing. do you reply and give them another superfluous amount of text to read? or do you leave it be and let them think you hated what they wrote?

I’ve sometimes wanted to comment but not wanted to put my neck out being seen approving of certain things, or just been anxious about talking to people. I’ll miss you if you go, and I definitely like this place better than Twitter or my latest Mastodon instance (I got dogpiled for posting a comic and voicing concerns about the way the Fediverse CW culture often does more to protect fragility of the privileged than help people who actually need CWs — for instance, the normalization of providing a CW of just the word “politics” on literally any political discussion — and accused of being an ableist transphobe, while one of the mods actively undermined my attempts to clarify my position or explain things, as well as taking a general comment on Mastodon culture as a comment on the formalized rules of that particular instance for no reason. It’s a nightmare, and considering moving back to my old, mostly-deserted instance to escape it or just continuing to avoid Mastodon)

EDIT: Oh, jeez, sorry this turned into a vent post.

yea, no I get it. I've heard some Real Shit about people's experiences on Mastodon, which I have to say, I haven't experienced on the one I'm on currently but definitely have experienced in the past. I was just talking about earlier how there's a growing culture on mastodon who will just jump into the replies of some post to absolutely try to eviscerate people because they Posted Wrong, and it's like, buddy calm down lol

I find there's an astounding lack of empathy towards artists who kinda do need to know at least some basic metrics to figure out how best to cater to a very slippery market, but fuck us, right? And I think that's the intractable problem right there, is that there's an (understandable) disdain for Capitalism around these parts, but also a failure to realize we're all still embedded in it and are forced to play by its rules.

"Be the change you want to see in the world" doesn't pay the rent.

I know you specifically aren't claiming this, but "you shouldn't care about making money/running a business because Capitalism Bad" kinda misses the point that Capitalism != Selling Things. As long as we live in a world where people need to trade things in exchange for survival artists are gonna need to make money; we might as well try to support independent creators.

I know that in an idealistic world, we wouldn't need to worry about money and we could just post freely. But we do not live in such a world, and the way it is currently cohost is not fit for artists and creatives to survive on, and given the attitude of the admins it sounds like it'll never be fit for it

Yeah, like, it's really one of those things that I'm seeing repeated everywhere of, "Stop being addicted" which is very much a thing that Capitalism engineers to perpetuate itself and maintain power. Some things are independently worthwhile to know, however. It's just unfortunate that Capitalism has found a way to corrupt that.

yea, that's one frustrating thing I've been seeing is just, if you care about numbers then you must be addicted to numbers. No, sometimes you just have to know them like, imagine if I was running my discord chat and they didn't tell me how many members I had. How would I know if my @ everyone is gonna make a ton of people show up? How would I gauge how many moderators I need to handle that?

You have a point. There’s also a point to the fact that chasing metrics can get incredibly toxic, alienating and addictive. I don’t know how to square that circle. This site gets a lot more right than most others I’ve been on, but also gets some bad things wrong. (As someone who needs donations to survive, the difficulty that can be present in getting my calls for donations seen is rough. And I’m a streamer, even if I’ve lapsed due to stress and lack of good sleep.)

This might be a "hot take", but being a creative is already kinda an alienating thing to go through. Society views us as magical beings who can conjure awesome things seemingly out of thin air, but at the same time devalues that magic by thinking it's a bare few steps above kids doodling on a piece of paper for funsies.

From the outside as a non-creator (I do believe being creative and creating are two different things) that sounds like it can't be true. Yeah I believe that you might be devalued (and I find that a massive shame) but creators work with eachother all the time, I'm in a community where the whole objective is to unite creators of all different disciplines come together to create stuff. That sounds like the opposite of alienating to me.

As with most things it's a give and take, because yah, it's great having a camaraderie with artists, being with a room full of other art nerds just sketch-jammin' away, but eventually the sketch jam ends, the convention ends, and you have to deal with rent and bills while some dipshit is throwing a tantrum at you because you won't draw them a company logo for free.

Most everyone I know doesn't do art for a living. They may do art as a side gig and because they enjoy it and are good at it, but I can count on one hand the people I know personally who can get by on the sale of their art alone, and it's painfully apparent then how much of a divide there is between us and the rest of society.

I feel like no matter how much you make it the only way to engage, people just aren't gonna want to comment because that's Scary. I know I tend to overthink the hell out of it because I feel like I need to say something meaningful to justify it, even though I know most artists say they'd literally love any comment.

yea, like, I think a lot of people want to just like because they think "hey that's cool." If everyone had to leave a comment and there were no likes, it'd just end up being like Facebook where people comment "shared" on a post, except it'd just be a bunch of people just typing "nice" as if someone just posted the number 69

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