• She or They

your local trannic pissy meme girl


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

1.
I have been trying to figure out how to write this and I don't think I'll ever figure out a coherent structure before this site shuts down. So I'll just put down sections and paragraphs. I have a friend showing up in 45 minutes to pick me up in her car so I'll probably just keep writing and then post whatever I got before she arrives.

2.
I saw a good post circulating around here saying to keep an eye on where everyone says they're going and what they plan on doing cause you never know what they may create together. I think that's a good idea. I don't particularly like Bluesky but it is cool seeing clusters of Cohost folks showing up there. It's like okay here are the people who embody Cohost values, who likely have thought deliberately about what they want social media to be, who are aware of the dangers of clout chasing and mass harassment. Also been seeing folks move to the fediverse, and Cohost has made it less intimidating to follow them there. Since Cohost is a slightly more technical website than your basic Twitter or Tumblr, it can be kind of like training wheels for the fediverse.

I was recently rereading Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and mulling over the ideas about social spaces and city life. When I first read the book I thought to myself, man I'm sad I never got to live in the vanished "Times Square Blue" of porn theaters and sexual encounters and queerness lived in public. After finishing the book I found myself thinking about it almost on a daily basis, and it influenced the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I held myself around strangers. I found myself talking to people on the street more, approaching public spaces with a more expansive set of expectations, and a few weeks later I had a very Times-Square-Blue sexual encounter. Times Square Blue is a vanished place and time, but also it's something you can build a little bit of around you right now. I'm hoping the same is true of Cohost. (On second reading I decided to actually look at the introduction and was pleased to see Delaney saying the same thing I figured out on my own.)

3.
I also think of the person at the beginning of the documentary Queercore: How Punk A Revolution who said that the best way to start a punk scene in your city is to pretend it already exists and then people start coming to it.

Gotta go for now! More later!


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

4.
Before I was on social media I read webcomics a lot. I recently got back into them and I'm currently reading a furry webcomic that started in the 2010s, and I'm finding that older-internet mix of painfully earnest and tongue in cheek to be really refreshing. I didn't know how much I was missing it because I never noticed how slowly it slipped away.

Was the 2010s internet better? Who the fuck knows. Recently there's been a strong anti-nostalgia push in my corners of the internet. Stop saying the 90s were better. Stop glorifying the 2000s. The past sucked. And I think it goes too far and misses the point. Yes nostalgia can be mindless reactionism, but at its best it fulfills a similar function to traveling or learning a new language: not so much showing you a world where everything is better as showing you that the world can be different. I will cling to my memories of a world before digital cameras not because I hate digital photography but because I value privacy. I want to use my memories of the old days to help build a world where we actively maintain people's privacy not just passively grant them privacy by now having the technology to spy on them. Things were different. Things can be different. I have proof.

5.
Privacy functionality is something I'm gonna miss about Cohost. Other websites do it but Cohost does it better. Nobody sees who I'm following. Nobody sees who follows me. Nobody sees my super-secret contact information unless I follow them. I can make a private account, or multiple private accounts. I can post experimental interactive text pieces on my private account. I can write a little note on someone's profile reminding myself why I blocked them, and use it to consider unblocking them. I can put an 18+ tag on some of my posts and not have to subject myself to endless discourse about putting adult content in front of minors.

I try to maintain a "holy shit two websites" mindset whenever I can but I can't help being mad as fuck that Cohost is dying while Bluesky, which has practically the exact opposite approach to privacy, is thriving. Bluesky makes your follows and following public. Bluesky makes your likes public. Bluesky makes your blocks public, and seeing discourses like "hey I noticed this person is blocking this other person and I think that's suspicious" makes me wanna drink rat poison. Bluesky only just recently added the ability to remove yourself from a list by blocking the list's creator, which, as someone who used to get added to Twitter lists with names like "hitlist may 2020" and "idiot tranny", I'm less than happy with how long it took.

Of course they're not going to call the list "idiot tranny" on Bluesky. No no no, that would defeat the purpose of marketing your website as the trans-friendly alternative to Twitter. Instead you call the list something like "pedophiles" or "zoophiles" and you can still populate it with mostly trans people and if anyone questions you on it you can question whether their motivations might be impure. Or, and Bluesky especially loved to do this, you make a list called "people who are shitty to [minority group #1]" and fill it up with your least favorite people from [minority group #2]. Bluesky has a problem with anti-[#1] prejudice; subscribe to my blocklist or you're part of the problem. Or you make a list called "bad people and bad people apologists" where you use the publicly accessible following data to incriminate anyone who has contact with a persona non grata. What you call the list is less important than what it does. My Bluesky account is on one list called "interesting people with interesting opinions" and one list called "pickle toast with peanut butter" and for all I know those mean the exact same thing as "idiot tranny".


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

6.
There's so much you could write about what a shitshow the moderation list scene was on Bluesky especially in the early days, how the staff subcontracted the serious work of keeping a website safe to a bunch of hobbyists who were chasing clout and maintaining grudges and going through second puberty and sleeping with each other and using clout to get sex and sex to develop new enmities and enmities to grow more clout. What stands out above all is that Bluesky's "move fast and break things" approach has succeeded in a way that Cohost's mindful approach has not. @alyaza has written that if Cohost tried be a social media site that was good for its users and failed, it makes you wonder how much social media is worth having in the first place. I've sure been reconsidering that.


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in reply to @DiscoDeerDiary's post:

The part about bluesky is scary. This website really has allowed me to interact in a more comfortable environment. It feels low stakes when there's not a social network graph and numbers making me focus on things other than interacting with other humans.

Now that you mention it, that comic does have a pretty nice tone that I miss on the internet. Even the military stuff isn't annoying

in reply to @DiscoDeerDiary's post:

re: point 6, I think whatever success Bluesky has had versus Cohost is so wildly overdetermined by having a VC-backed ad budget and the clout (deserved or not) of having ex-Twitter people on board that it's a mistake to try to read anything into it being actually preferable for anything other than network effects

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