deadryn.

My latest piece, Pact and pike, is an in-depth look at the deep networks of aid and resistance built by peasants across feudal Europe. Often dismissed as mindless mobs with pitchforks they instead sparked revolutions in communal organizing and fought their oppressors with a wide array of innovative tactics.

Over a year in the making, this anarchic history winds its way through community pacts, masked secret societies, revolutionary conspiracies, skilled ambushes, peasant militia breaking whole armies and a whole hell of a lot of dead nobles.

(If you like the piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or supporting my writing by donating a few bucks.)

Secret plots! Assassinations! Peasant mounted infantry! Lots and lots of burning castles! If I get to $275/mo in subscriptions you can read all about it.

(Also I am in poverty and I'd like to be able to afford bills)

an important thing to remember about cohost: it doesn't get the benefits of having been around forever, or having (or having had) a significant number of employees working on it, like tumblr. it's barely been around for a couple of years, the software is still in extremely active development, and site staff is a total of four overworked (despite their efforts to avoid overwork) queers who are clambering around on it and building and running and maintaining it while it's actively in motion. @jkap in particular is currently finishing a move out of florida on a timetable they had to accelerate by several months for safety reasons, with only a few weeks' notice thanks to florida's Fucking Government.

it's got problems sometimes. they're workin' to fix 'em as they crop up and to make the site better. bugfixes and good new features and improvements on existing functionality show up with regularity. it's nice but you gotta be patient.

edit: you gotta trust their intentions, too. their goal is building the only social media site that is actively nice to use. compare it to the legacy ones (twitter, tumblr) and the newer-generation ones (bluesky, mastodon) and you can notice a major difference: this is the only site that's designed specifically to foster good community and fight negative tendencies they've seen on other sites. hence no numbers, no ads, no federation, and a variety of other important design decisions. the others (cough bluesky) are designed from the bottom up, technical-first, starting with their ~elegant federation protocol~ and with only afterthoughts given to "oh shit people are building a community on here" after it had been around for a while.

the people behind cohost are trying to do something different, even with stuff as basic as the corporate structure (a cooperative, which can't be meaningfully sold to a third party). it's nice, but it takes some getting used to. and unlearning assumptions from other social media sites like "when they add a feature it's gonna be useless and we're all gonna hate it."

sometimes something like the "pinned tags/recently used tags" dropdown below the post composer will just appear and be useful. it's nice.