• he/they

It's a horrible day on the Internet, and you are a lovely geuse.

Adult - Plants-liking queer menace - Front-desk worker of a plural system - Unapologetic low-effort poster

✨ Cohost's #1 Sunkern Fan(tm) ✨

[Extended About]

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Three pixel stamps: a breaking chain icon in trans colors against a red background, an image of someone being booted out reading "This user is UNWELCOME at the university", and a darkened lamppost.(fallen london stamps by @vagorsol)



(Here, social media is defined as any site made primarily of profiles/blogs/etc that follow each other - a site centered around individuals-as-topic, as opposed to topics-as-topic like forums or Discord.)

I feel like the Big Sites tend to push us to think of social media as a place to... market ourselves? Even if we aren't artists or other people who depend on visibility for income, there's a pressure to post consistently, and post the right things, and in the right way so that we accumulate more likes/followers/etc. Make the number go up.

But there has to be more to social media than just that. So, I ask: why do you use social media? What do you think of your social media page/profile/etc as? A place to vibe with existing friends? A place to meet new ones? A place where you can post at length about your interests without worrying that you're imposing on people? And what do you want social media to be?


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in reply to @bazelgeuse-apologist's post:

for me, socmed's most important function is a way to find fandom content (art, theories, jokes, discussion, cosplay, etc) and share my own - as a kid i always longed for people to talk to about my special interests, and i was so excited to find that on tumblr as a teen! but i'm also not a very social person and really only need / have the energy for 2 or 3 genuine long term friendships. so i like that socmed lets me join a new fandom, follow a bunch of ppl, talk to them about AUs and ships and speculation, and then unfollow most of them the next year when i've moved onto a different fandom and so have they. sometimes i'll stick with a couple people i vibed with and talked to the most, but only bc it takes almost no energy to just blacklist a couple key terms from their new fandoms and press the heart button on their occasional personal post or original content.

sometimes i sell prints or find commission clients on socmed, but not enough that i couldn't make money easier other ways. it's also fun seeing a variety of original content and informative posts, and using my blog as a diary for whatever's going on in my life, and killing time by looking at posts, and doing silly games, etc, and i've gotten used to them enough that it would be weird to go without them, but "people who will listen to me gush about my favorite thing and even bounce ideas with me" and "a steady stream of content even when canon has dried up, and sharing my content w ppl who appreciate it" are what i would Really miss if i went and lived in a cave.

I really like the point you've made about unfollowing people as you move from topic to topic! I feel like the current culture around social media treats unfollowing as something Bad (like making a moral judgement on someone, or as something to avoid if at all possible) and I think that's a damn shame. (One thing I've really appreciated about Cohost is that hiding follower/followed counts makes it hard to notice when people unfollow you.)

Also like the distinction you've made between close friends and people who you enjoy talking to about fandom. I wonder if in part the culture around unfollowing sort of comes from different expectations on what following someone means? I never really understood the social importance people assign to mutuals, for example.

I definitely think I'm a little more free with my unfollows than some other people are... and a little more lenient about "we don't have to be mutuals to be friendly, you can reply to me even if i don't follow you" bc if i Don't want someone to reply to me i can block them, mute them, or just ignore them! i'm not gonna conflate "who can talk to me" with "whose posts do i want on my tl all the time" bc that venn diagram is not a circle.

i probably still don't unfollow as much as i should though these days... i joined cohost on the public day 1 so i ended up following lots of ppl whose content i wasn't necessarily particularly interested in so i'd have Something on my dash. but cohost has been poppin enough recently that i could follow ppl w more relevant interests instead now... but i Am a little invested in lots of these ppl at this point, enough that i don't want to never see them again.... maybe i should start following people on another page, make a "cool ppl with cool interests im vaguely interested in" dash to scroll through when im bored, and a more tightly curated "ppl who post My Sorta Shit in particular" dash that i stay caught up on.