Aisling

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!

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".

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.

7.
I'm not ready to give up social media entirely but I've been spending the past year or so seriously reconsidering how much load-bearing dependency I've been placing on it. I can't rely too much on any individual website when any individual website can turn poisonous or die at a moment's notice. And increasingly I've been trying to get my needs met in ways that don't involve social media sites at all. I've been trying to have more and more one on one conversations with friends (it's been an uphill battle with my avoidance symptoms, but the rewards have been great). I've been reading more blogs. I've been reading books. I sublimated my desire to make short quippy posts by getting myself a bag of alphabet beads and making enough kandi singles to cover both my arms. I keep a paper diary. I keep a digital diary. I would like to start a blog. I went to a rave last night and exchanged kandi with some cute people. And I got their discords and instagrams. And so I circle back to social media but this time in service of the rest of my life, not just being on social media to be on social media. I go to people's Twitter accounts to find the next blog I'll read or the next book. I'm not so much interested in avoiding social media as in finding a diverse set of off-ramps.

8.
Off-ramps. Like that joke attributed to Groucho Marx "I find television very educational. Every time someone turns on the set I leave the room and open a book." A joke from a time when television was the medium with the greatest power to pull you in and discourage you from leaving. Cliffhangers before commercial breaks. Teasers for the next show, which begins immediately after the credits for the last one finish rolling. Now television feels more toothless, almost easy to remember it as more benevolent than it actually was. Shows watched on streaming services, blu-rays, pirate sites, letting you be in control, letting you select for the highest quality works that you watch on your own time. Television, a high-production drama series with a complicated plot that you choose to concentrate on, choose to ignore the phone in your pocket that entices you to scroll endlessly to see one more post waiting for you just below the bottom of the screen.

I hate endless scroll. I didn't realize how much I hated it until I came to Cohost where the dashboard is presented to you in discrete pages. At the end of each page a decision: continue scrolling, or do something else? Usually I choose do "something else", but when I choose "continue scrolling" it's because I'm genuinely having a good time looking at the posts and I genuinely want to see more of them.

Cohost may be gone but at least I've developed the habit, when I'm looking at other social media sites, of saying to myself "you've looked at about a page of posts, do you want to keep scrolling?" where yes and no are both valid answers but the yes has to be a true yes, not just the absence of a no.

9.
One tap, and we close the social media site. Two taps, and we've opened the e-reader app. Three taps and we're back into the book. Some people like the rituals around reading, the feel of opening the covers, the one specific chair to sit in, the trip to the library. I enjoy that, but mostly I want to read as easily and convenient as possible, so I can throw myself into a book almost reflexively when I'm sick of the internet. I love having a lot of books on my phone at any one time. Why else would they make a computer that fits in your pocket? That and being able to write programs while sitting on the toilet.

10.
Lately I've been more inclined to focus on the "social" and "media" parts of my life as separate from each other. Socialize by messaging my friends and by hanging out in person. Read people's blogs and webcomics. Scroll through artists' galleries. Read news sites. Listen to podcasts. Write less like a poster and more like a blogger. Stop using social media as an everything machine. I don't want my Everything to be under the control of a company CEO. I would like CEOs to only have the power to fuck up one small part of my life at a time. This feels stupid but I am relearning the fact that I can be talking to one friend and mention a conversation I had with another friend. Maintaining a network through a series of individual connections without having to rely on any centralized platforms. Those platforms make connection quicker and more efficient, but they don't have a monopoly on networks.

So my current answer to "what will you do when Cohost dies" is "I'll take note of which things it did automatically and try, to the best of my ability, to continue doing them manually". I won't always have the energy, I won't always have the mental fortitude, I never know when my avoidance symptoms will come back in full force. But I will try. And I will pick myself up and try again.

If you're younger than me, you may have learned to play solitaire on a computer and then, having learned the basic mechanics, been able to play solitaire with a physical deck of cards. You can kinda sorta do the same thing with the complicated games we call social media sites. And you can make your own house rules.

11.
There was a point in 2023 when I thought Cohost was going to be my only social media site, because it was giving me enough to keep me contented. Then October 7th happened, and I started going back on Twitter because it was a quick way of keeping up with news updates, both in Palestine and with local activist groups, things that take longer to get to Cohost, and take more work to seek out. That reminded me of the usefulness of microblogging platforms, both for speed of information transfer and for wideness of dissemination. I could be lying in my bed, hear that Boston Police were planning to overnight raid a student encampment, throw some clothes on, jump on my bike, and join a whole bunch of other local folk defending the camp.

(I got to briefly set food inside the border of the encampment and the world felt different inside there in a way I struggle to describe. It's like, everyone called it the liberated zone, and I could feel everyone's belief making it into a liberated zone. Which is to say I realized that all the time before that I had been going around thinking "this is Boston, it is run by Mayor Wu", "this is my apartment, it belongs to my landlord", "this is the library, it closes at 5" and I hadn't been aware of myself thinking those things until the normal rules got upended. I'm putting this here because it has implications for how we create spaces, both activist and otherwise.)

12.
Twitter as the space I go in small doses to look at people who I trust who read more news articles than me and can point me toward articles to read. Twitter as a space where activist groups give updates on actions as they happen. Twitter as a site that I use for a handful of small purposes. The more Elon Musk retools the space as a would-be nazi bar, the more important it is for me and everyone else to not engage with the default content it tries to feed us.

13.
In accordance with my plan to focus on "social" and "media" separately, I have already reserved discodeerdiary.neocities.org and discodeerdiary@proton.me.

14.
Many months ago I was suffering from chronic pain and sleeping on a cheap air mattress and it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. My solution to make it easier was to log into my private Cohost account and post something like this:

And then I would look at my own post and click it, and then I would get up and it would be easier because it felt like I was playing a simple text adventure. And then the next morning I'd make the same post but I'd do it with a different font or color or size or other css stylings. I explained this to a friend who responded with a hey you you're finally awake joke and I laughed so hard.

Is there anywhere else on the internet this could happen besides Cohost? Will there be anywhere on the internet this can happen once Cohost is gone? I sure hope so.

15.

16.
That was another interactable vent post from my private account, and I copypasted it here not because I think it's particularly good writing but because holy fuck. Interactable vent post. I'm so happy I even got the chance to use those three words together.

Maybe I will set up a secret blog in a secret corner of the internet and I will notify some friends about it and they will see on their RSS feeds that I am once again having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

17.
FUCK I was in the middle of writing another section and page refreshed and I lost my work, which is a lesson to everyone that you should always save your drafts, if you're even using the post editor at all.

What I was saying is that it's really fun to communicate with other people just casually dropping some css stylings into conversation, and how this is kind of like the fun future of electronic communication I imagined as a kid in the 2000s reading Jaron Lanier columns in Discover Magazine.

Then I talked about how now we know there's a demand for a social media site with a thriving #css crimes scene. Maybe not enough of a demand to make a sustainable site, but still cool to know this in a way we kind of couldn't before.

Then I moved on to the possibility that someone might make a site kind of like Cohost except it would suck, and I considered the possibility not because I think it's likely but because I know it's very easy for me to romanticize Cohost precisely because it was so short-lived. And I know it's easy for other people as well.

Then I kind of went off the rails and compared myself to Franky from Flying Saucer Video, which is a great webcomic by @littlegoodfrog that I found through Co-host coincidentally.

But then I noted that in spite of my constant temptations to lose myself in the tragedy of what might have been, I'm getting a lot better at teaching myself to not be Franky from Flying Saucer. Related to the avoidance symptoms I mentioned earlier, I am getting better at actually talking to people when I like them (for many meanings of the word "like").

Then I noted how painfully on the nose it is for the overall story of Cohost that Flying Saucer Video is about dealing with messy queer feelings in a space that you don't yet realize is about to vanish.

I think that covers everything I was about to say before it got erased SEND CHOST