I'll probably write a longer eulogy for cohost closer to the shut down but truly this was one of the best things to ever happen to my mental health and growth as a person. I know how difficult it was on staff so I appreciate the decision to shut down and understand it. I truly truly hope this is remembered as an ephemeral success and not a failure. Tumblr gave me brain poison. Mastodon left me with trauma. Twitter gave me even worse brain poison. Cohost healed me substantially. Two years on cohost was like a novel kind of therapy.
[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]
- she/her
- twitter.com/ceargaest
linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.
since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!
username etymology
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in reply to @shel's post:
I'm really sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with Mastodon / Fediverse. It's really hard keeping certain people from driving other people away.
Is there anything anyone might be able to do to get you to reconsider it? I'm personally a big proponent of the whole movement behind it.
Yvgeni "Eugen" Rochko writes a personal apology to me for calling my feminine soft work on important parts of the software "stupid" and thanks me for all of the "stupid" feminized labor I did organizing and managing his unpaid volunteers, community relations, and marketing efforts during the early days of the project, including guiding him through not embarrassing himself when journalists wanted to do profiles on him and he wanted to send them a blurry screenshot from a DOTA highlights reel as his headshot.
Mastodon wouldn't have survived infancy without me and tons of other unpaid volunteers and what we got for it was a boatload of misogyny and homophobia that ran most of us off the platform because furries are cringe.
I am grateful that I don't even remember the names of the other assholes who would have to write me individual apologies, like the person who publicly implied my ex and I engaged in nazi fetishism in our sex life, or the guy who called me a crypto-Zionist. The lady who got an ass tattoo to demonstrate her hatred of me and my ex doesn't need to apologize though she already had to live with a huge tattoo on her left butt cheek for her entire life that she got over internet beef.
Also, frankly, I am only interested in platforms that are built for and support long form writing. Nowhere with a character limit is going to do it for me as a platform to host my writing.
Yeah, honestly, people on the internet are crazy, and something about big social networks brings out the crazies the worst.
That said, if you're willing to give it another shot, you don't necessarily need to use Mastodon. There are forks of the software, and other software entirely, and there are a few servers that support long posts. I know that WordPress also has support for it, so you could use that to write long posts that are viewable and can be replied to from there.
I just want to make sure that the door is open for people here.
I think the entire concept of the fediverse is a bad idea at this point. Truth Social and Gab being mastodon forks made me feel like I had just done a bunch of work for the enemy, If I go to Wordpress I will actively look into blocking federation to mastodon
i recommend using literally any other blog platform instead. even substack is a better option and they're intentionally unapologetic abut the fact that they platform nazis.
The thing about Wordpress is I already have one that I don't really use 😅 but I will look into what there is out there.
i'm currently collecting all of the alternatives people here mention to post on my site because i can't just leave the internet. i want to find ways to build bridges to wherever people end up until we have cohost2.
