I'm so so glad that CoHost is here as the first social media platform I genuinely feel comfortable with since really early Tumblr
But I'm still beyond frustrated that Discord/Telegram are the only real messaging apps that my queer furry friends use though...
Don't get me wrong they are huge improvements over the Skype+Mumble/Teamspeak days or earlier AOL/MSN+E-Mail Chain days before that. But like, both companies in recent years have continued to paywall features and make decisions that favour their investors and CEO's vanity projects, rather than serving a better experience for the end user (Discord more than Telegram, but I get weird vibes from both)
I've slowly grown an appreciation for the simplicity of long-running IRC servers, but they aren't a solution to what I want either. It's frustrating that Discord does have a lot of what I want for server functionality and Telegram for DMs, but both of them kinda just feel bad. I keep looking at the alternatives, but things like Revolt I think are too niche/imperfect to get my friends to move and stuff like Guilded is just trading one icky corp-minded group for another
All of this isn't even touching on my frustration with gallery websites and lack of Adult spaces online, just...
How dare normies and corpos get majority control of the internet. Everything is so much less personal and closed down now compared to the internet of the early 2000s I grew up with. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but I long for the days of webrings in terms of personal expression, even if I can admit their convenience and reach are severely limited compared to what we have now
I'm basically, "not that old lady shouts at cloud" but I'm just so tired that many of us have our lives built on internet structures and foundations that are at the whims of delusional mega-corps who are out of touch with the common person, let alone queer creatives
