Peter Hosey

that damn eggbug just aint payin the bills anymore!!

anyway, in all seriousness: i need a job now. surprise! i'm stilll getting my affairs in order so this is barebones for now but it'd be really foolish to not post at all.

I have 6 years of experience in UI/UX design, with specific focuses in game UI and e-learning.

i designed everything you see on this website. colors, logos, wireframes, buttons, widgets, everything. (i didn't build it. that was jae and colin.) i managed the store and all the merch. i created eggbug.

I am looking for full time, mid-senior UI, UX, product, or instructional design roles in PDX or remote.

resume available on request, but a vast majority of my previous work is NDA'd pretty heavily so I can only discuss it privately. that sucks, but it is what it is. please get in touch if you'd like to hire a UI designer and need to see more materials!

here's my website and public portfolio
contact me on linkedin
email me
@ aerialshading on instagram and twitter

Ive noticed that even as this site is closing, the culture is different from other social media. On twitter, a lot of people were happy to see it go and happy to pull it down. They made fun of the monetary cost of twitter. Here, people are sad to lose this site. We are sad that money puts a price and a limit on life. We acknowledge its usefulness and power but do not accept it as a conscious authority. We are happy for the community, art, jokes, site design, and vision for the future. That last one I see reiterated a lot. Everybody says they'll take lessons as they leave this site. We will pass on giving people grace and kind, empathetic interpretation of their words. We will pass on being honest about our thoughts and our feelings without hiding from corporate and social systems.

As this site is closing, Im seeing art and genuine love and celebration of our shared experiences. Im seeing people trying new linux distros, going to new places, and exploring and living life Im still following people Ive never interacted with before, because the majority of people here have some baseline respect and kindness towards each other.

Im very glad I got to spend time on cohost. It helped me break away from using twitter and become more mindful and careful of my media diet in general. I've been critical of various aspects of large social media for years, but Cohost is what finally gave me a push to really seek out snaller stuff with intent.

Recently Ive started planning out reimplementing Discord's main features in Wordpress, cuz it's funny and really sorta cursed, but mainly because I want a space for my friends that isnt beholden the whims and rules of big corporations. I want a space that isnt afraid of nsfw content and doesn't depend on making a profit to function. I'll host, maintain, and run the server myself. It wont be as reliable as real discord, and it wont have all the features or the quality of features. It'll cost me immense time and effort and some money as well. But it'll be a great space for my friends.

I think the biggest lesson Ive learned on Cohost is:
We can make any kind of website we want if try.
We can make any kind of workd we want if we try.

Anyway, this is all just furthering my feeling that the era of social media as we knew it is over.

With Twitter still dying (active users down 30% in the last year!), I've seen more and more discussion of where everyone's going - but what I'm seeing is that most users aren't. The numbers don't line up; more people are quitting twitter than are joining Bluesky or Mastodon or anything else. Which is what makes me think the era of participatory social media is ending.

This isn't just because of twitter dying. I remember reading in Garbage Day a year or two back that Twitter was seeing active posting go down in the early days of the pandemic. People kept using group DMs, but stopped posting. And as much as Adam Mosseri's "people aren't posting, they're just sharing links in group chats" comment has to do with the site culture he built, it's the same phenomenon - many normal people pulled back from posting like they would have before. Meanwhile, the fastest growing things were TikTok and Youtube, which have a highly stratified audience/creator relationship that's more like traditional media, and Discord and Telegram, which are non-public facing social media.

There are people like us who post, who need to post to survive. But it seems like for a lot of people they're simply losing interest, or are happy to settle into a more passive relationship where they "consume content" but don't post.

I was thinking earlier about how the value of Cohost, in part, was that it's a space where I didn't feel pressured to post. Like, it's a user culture and UX where 'your silence speaks volumes' was always a joke and only a joke. I always felt comfortable not commenting on the discourse or news of the day if I didn't think I had something to add.

This in contrast to the microblogging platforms where people absolutely will constantly quote-tweet some piece of news or some chunk of discourse just to add "this sucks!" or whatever. Cohost allowed for silence which just turned the signal to noise way up; if someone was posting it was typically for a good reason.

I also note the phenomenon of people who posted a lot on other platforms, came here, and became lurkers on Cohost. I think some people don't actually need to post, or don't need to post so much, and once the pressure is removed (either through platform design or just a 'break' that makes them quit the old platforms), they stop.

If cohost is to be the last breath of social media as we know it, let the best thing about it be the lesson for any future websites.

You always had control over your notifications
You always had control over what you see in your feed
You always had control over whether to react or not (because you weren't constantly incentivized by numbers going up)

Yes, the site culture that emerged was natural, but it's extremely important to remember that a new user signing on cohost finds their notifications off by default, no default accounts until they go looking for tags or people or friends to follow, and no numbers beyond X comments on each post; and it is small and not prominent, fulfilling its purpose of information instead of being a score counter.

The culture we built here was guided by the system. Cohost is built with the intention to be respectful of your choices

Was it perfect in every way? No, but there's something to be said about intent in design. This more than anything is what the modern internet abuses the most. All major social media platforms exploit and abuse engagement, creating people who simply Can't Stop Posting and forming parasocial relationships and addictions.

Those are the people who quote tweet, those are the reply guys, those are the people who just can't stop talking; and that's the sort of people that says insane bullshit like "Your silence speaks volumes." Refusing to engage is anathema when you're an addict; so naturally, how can anything happen in good faith? How can you post anything BUT engagement bait, BUT the angriest takes, BUT the shit that polarizes people the most, in pursuit of the almighty engagement?

Have I ever felt addicted to cohost? Yes, but it was natural and entirely my own fault. I got addicted to checking this webbed site out because it is good-old-fashioned good and because I liked it that much, and I suspect this is also the case for many if not most users.

It wasn't built to clamp down on my lizard brain; only to put a little eggbug in my mind, and so it did.

as of last thursday i am technically unemployed. i spent all my savings moving out of florida on three week notice earlier this year so i don't have a ton of time to rest.

i am looking for staff-or-above frontend (or frontend-focused fullstack) work. i do not want to be a people manager but i will consider technical-leadership roles. i would prefer remote roles but i am willing to do in-office or hybrid in boston. i will not relocate.

i've spent the last five years doing this. cohost's backend is built on node.js, typescript, and server-side rendered react.js. the frontend is react.js and typescript. it's deployed using kubernetes. i already had a decade of experience building tools and doing fullstack work prior to this.

my full resume is available upon request; message me on linkedin or e-mail me. thanks.