hope it's okay to ask this, but i'm curious about your thoughts on interacting with fans on site like this, since cohost is shutting down, being on twitter or like bluesky or threads, when fans can interact with your posts at will, do you see this as a "part of the job" kinda thing? how do you relate to it?
so the thing about 'here' vs other places is that ... idk, there is a blend
a large part of the reason i've come to resent twitter (to a smaller degree, youtube, and to a larger degree, instagram, which i've fully removed myself from) is that it is not a place where one has community anymore. especially for myself, now that i'm somewhere over 100 thousand followers. that's too fucking many people! every single post i make is scrutinized and responded to impersonally. to a vast majority of people on that platform it is not me, the person, who is posting. it is me, the Entity or Brand or whatever the hell they think of people they deem famous enough to not treat like a person.
when you only infrequently post on somewhere with an overwhelmingly large following, people treat your latest post as the forum in which they can talk to you about anything they feel like talking to you about. if they're a transphobe, they can use that latest post as a place to put their transphobia. or if they're a resentful minecraft fan, they can use that post as a place to land their dislike of my music existing. it becomes a festering wound that i have to go in and disinfect to continue existing on that platform in a meaningful way.
i am not a team. i don't have a social media manager, or a moderator, or anything else. i am just a girl who happened to write music for very large projects that attract a lot of attention. i don't see myself as a celebrity, because i don't want that shit to infect my brain. i get people poking fun at me that i'm humble about what i've done, but i seriously can't put it to mind or else it'll ruin my ability to enjoy what i love doing. (it already has affected it to some extent, but that's not really the subject here lol)
on cohost, there's a blend of friends and fans. because it's been a relatively small space, i've had the ability to be more personable, more unfiltered, less 'on stage'. when my friends interact with me here, it feels like home. because that's all i want out of social media. i don't want to be 'seen', i just want to be at home with the people i care about. when a platform becomes so large that my friends can't even stand at the front of the stage, because it means exposing themselves to the people who aren't there to be my friend, then it all tumbles down for me. i have to put on my professional voice and choose my words carefully because your random person stumbling across 200-ish characters will never find the relevant context.
you go back in my twitter account 6-7 years (i've deleted much of my archive because people WILL search for random things and use them against you, no matter how innocent) and it's so much silly little interactions with people. now it's announcements and words of encouragement. i love the ability to engage with someone i've never met and praise their work. that will never get old to me. but i hate how much it becomes a performance when everyone is watching.
ultimately i just want to be me, but the internet makes it so hard to do that anymore. part of cohost shutting down means that i just sort of have to hole up in private spaces, and maybe that's ok for my stage of life. i've very much enjoyed finding people here that have interesting thoughts and things to say, and i wish i was more social enough to pursue communities like that in places that aren't giant awful social media sites. but it is what it is, at this point.
