Biochemist, mass spectrometry witch, caretaker for the nanoflow liquid chromatographs. Trans woman, lesbian. Recumbent cyclist. Wisconsin, USA


places I can be found:
mspland.com/links.html

posts from @beige-alert tagged #goodbye

also:

One of the things I really liked about cohost was the flexibility to write long posts, use formatting ranging from the mundane (italics!) to the CSS crime level, put in links, photos, whatever. Or write a shitchost in the title in 140 characters or fewer. Whatever.

And every time I think this, I then think, well, is that good? Might it not be more "optimal" to separate different functions? And then I remember what happens in real life. Is twitter great for writing long posts? Very not, but people always tweetstormed up long threads that might or might not be readable in order. Bluesky goes out of its way to make reading long threads harder. Don't allow italics or bold and people will post in weird math symbols, which then provokes the evergreen discourse about how That Is Bad. Just let people fucking use bold!

I'm on a Mastodon instance with a 1000 character limit and oftentimes I can get my whole thought into that, but there's that character counter ticking down, urging me to be a bit less clear, drop that other point because is my other point worth another hundred letters? Why do we do this? I get that the Dril tweets would not be better if they were ten times longer, but two points: One, most of us are not Dril. Two, there's more to life than Dril tweets.

Lots of us loved the really complicated CSS crimes, but what I saw a lot more of was just people getting a bit of whimsy out in rainbow letters or something simple, and you could do that. It was nice. Didn't have to post in math symbols or put text in GIFs.



It's sad to see cohost shutting down. Looking back there's lots of people I saw in the past who drifted away as is usual, but having a date when everyone is cut off is different. So many people who were a nice little part of my life with their funny posts or their long thoughtful posts, all the funny interactions some people had with each other, all coming to an end.

I'll see some of you elsewhere, I already have for people who have also been active in fediland. But some people are just going to vanish from my life. Which, again, happens, just now a bunch all at once.

Even the end is a cohost end, orderly in a way I don't think I've seen before. A date to go read-only set weeks in advance, an interval to download archives, a plan to make that easier. Time to do some last posts, some goodbyes, to give out contact information, time to set up accounts elsewhere and give out links, if you don't have other places yet.

The great twitter-musking, when for a while it was quite unclear if the site would keep running, was a whole different thing. And of course lots of sites over the years have been just abruptly shut down. Or, everyone I knew on Livejournal back in the day left the site ages ago but the site lingers on, still sending me e-mail reminders now and then.

At some point I'm gonna sit down and cry, now that I'm on estrogen I get to feel emotions. In fact I started estrogen a couple months after joining cohost, it's overlapped a really significant era in my transition.

Oh, and links to me other places