Well, the end date is nearly here. It's been interesting, the initial outpouring of feelings, then a bunch of almost-regular posting through it, and now the end is here.
I'll take away a lot of things I've learned from this experience. I found the posts and the conversations compelling, I didn't need the phone beeping with notifications to check in here. And now I realize not just how annoying that is but how unnecessary it is. And the ability to just post long thoughts really highlights how annoying the multipart twitter/masto/bluesky threads that may or may not even display in order are. Or how annoying it is to follow a link to a post hosted on some site run by Nazis that has all the begging for your e-mail and the cookie permissions and all the rest of the nonsense before you can read it.
I've never had a big following anywhere, never pursued viral posts, so I never obsessed with the numbers because my numbers are small anyway. For those of us who often feel like we're posting into the void I wondered if the lack of counts and numbers would make it feel even more like posting into the void, but you see the likes as they come, you maybe get comments, see the rebugs, you don't need to have a number on the activity to see it. It's been interesting to now and then do severals here and a few times see the "99+" and that's fun and I guess it just feels like, ha! That was a popular one! Without a bunch of metrics to look at and no obsessing over whether it was more or less popular than the last one or compared to anyone else.
I showed up on November 1, 2022, early days but not the closed testing days. As I remember it I found out about cohost from @atomicthumbs tweeting about it as the twitter eloning was happening.
I had a weird Tumblr experience, joining when I figured out I was some sort of trans and finding a bunch of nonbinary people, and as it turned out nearly all of them were, unlike me, assigned female at birth to the point were everyone took everyone being AFAB for granted, which wasn't so helpful for me, and while at the time I gradually figured that "these are mostly young people" meant more teens than twenties, it was only much later I figured that as best as I can guess teens meaning more like 13 than 19. My efforts to find assigned male people yielded a good half-dozen, mostly people who write eight or ten posts per year each. So when I read Mia Violet's book in summer 2019 I saw her twitter handle in it, went back to twitter for the first time in ages to follow her, and found more trans women in a few weeks than I had in the previous four years. Whole new world. So the end of twitter (or usable twitter) left me wondering if I'd lose the community of people much more like me and more helpful to me that I'd finally found. Turned out to be easy to find adult, actually transitioning, willing to talk about it, assigned male, trans women on cohost and in the fediverse. I guess it helps to start with knowing some instead of stumbling around Tumblr totally new and clueless.
Part of the experience of setting up on Cohost and in fediland was starting from zero and it just takes time to find people to follow and to have any followers such that it's not so much like posting into the void. I guess I expected that, and now with this experience I'm used to it, and as I bring my Dreamwidth back to life and so on it's just the way things are. The contrast to Facebook and Instagram feeding you stuff you didn't ask for and mostly didn't want but you are going to see lots of things is stark and I guess not everyone is expecting thing to be very quiet at first.
Although again, I do wonder how things are going to work out for some of the cohost community post-cohost since we're setting up blogs and RSS and Dreamwidth starting from already knowing each other here, may be a bit less of the total void at the start.
It's been an experience, it's been great, it's been a lot of fun, and it's been a great community of trans women to be a part of. During my time here I've gone through a phase in my transition going from being That Guy Who Wears Dresses to starting HRT and electrolysis and now living as a woman in a way I didn't really think possible and which is an amazing delight.
I'll be seeing many of you in many places, you can find me in these places:
links to my other places