Annie D

i think where The Web started to go wrong was when your ISP stopped offering 5 megabytes of free space on their servers, where you uploaded files to public_html on their FTP server, and they would show up on http://members.example.org/~atax1a. rather than closing that off, things should have gone towards allowing you to upload small CGIs under cgi-bin and have them show up under /~atax1a/cgi-bin

So much of the blame for the de-liberation of the web has been placed at the feet of social media and the startup economy, and certainly much of that has been deserved.

But not enough fingers have been pointed at the sheer greed of ISPs, which have consistently cut off every single method for practical self-hosting, so they could extract extra rent on your connection.

Which is to say, ditto, but also the point where you stopped being able to plug your old tower into the wall and fire up Apache.

We've lost so much and we didn't even notice.

I was getting antsy about still being stuck with the Reaper default look after all this time, and wanted to create a look that suited Shadowbringers. I found it in the process of getting wildly detoured on the way to picking up the bandages, and ended up doing the entire Omega raid series, just to get the top for this outfit.

What I'm trying to say is, since Twitter is dying and people seem to be migrating more to Tumblr and Masto than here, it's starting to feel like Cohost will not come on top of the social media succession wars.

But this is still my favorite one, and so I will stay here. This site is safe and uncompromising, and my close friends are here. Despite popularity and all, this may become my true "main".

tldr I wuv eggbug

we had started the closed beta before elon even tendered an offer for twitter; a lot of the things we could do to "win" are things we consider morally unacceptable; and even if another platform wins for now, we think there's a pretty decent chance that their users are going to realize that they left in haste for somewhere that still suffers from the same fundamental problems (save for the one where it got acquired)

our goals are:

a) build a place people like spending time on -- one that feels more social than patreon and easier to make a living off of creative works on than twitter;
b) hopefully have enough revenue that we can afford to pay the bills

one of the things that really stuck out to me as funny in the peri-crisis period where people started talking about Twitter Alternatives is how many people said some variation of "forget about mastodon and cohost, what I want is just twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful"

a) I'm gonna be real with you, if you want twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful, what you want is proooooooooobably mastodon, or maybe like... plurk or something
b) even before elon y'all were calling twitter The Hellsite enough and in a despairing enough tone that I don't believe you actually want that

it makes me sad when i see artists moving to tumblr or instagram, two sites that downscale any image posted to a miniscule 1280px on the long side or 1024px, respectively, making it look like shit

artists shouldn't have to sacrifice their hard work on the altar of Engagement