several years back when i was in a few small worldbuilding and artistic discord servers, i had an #insp channel to which i posted images, posts, and ideas i found interesting and inspiring. illustrations, photography, essays, things from fiction, etc.
#insp eventually found itself with friends, as i wanted to have more precise categories for art, tools, and ideas. at one point my life shifted and i created a singular friend server to which i attached these channels. no more posting in multiple places, just one easy location.
over time the channels expanded into a slightly silly number, causing me to diminsh the number of other channels in the server so i'd wouldn't get overwhelmed. there was:
#✨recommendation - for shows, texts, videos, and whatever else folks recommend
#🐚inspiration - ideas, concepts, and whatever else makes the mind fly
#🎴artistic - artwork the poster loves the style of
#📄resources - tools and resources
#🌾existence - resources with a specific slant to those for day-to-day life
#🌐atlas - others' worldbuilding focused around maps. i love cartography
#🔲keyboards - cool mechanical keyboards
the latter two were very niche and self-indulgent, but the top 4 especially saw frequent use, mostly from myself but from some others. i called these "gallery" channels, styling them each as a wing of some bizarre museum.
and for a long time i have been deeply dissatisfied with them. i love chronicling interesting things i've found, but i hated them being on a weird little discord server that i could only access through a bloated webapp. i wanted to be able to post these somewhere that retained the usefulness of socially sharing them, but without having to use discordapp. maybe a forum? no, too heavy and complicated. static site generator? no, i want something faster and more social. what else.......
i haven't found that tool, but i've found the next best thing. i want to start using cohost as the new gallery1. i want to get better at tagging things, better at sharing things, able to create digests out of "here are some fun things i've found this week", and i wish to become a dealer of eccentricities and delights. i'm going to spend the next little while working out how best to do this before sorting through my archive and depositing some gems here
-
a bonus of this is that i can eventually archive those discord channels and start using that server as a proper social space. wow! it's almost as if that's what discord should be for, not using it as a wiki. unthinkable