fran

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

-- Brian Eno

So, when i was living in Berlin I really got into a nice flow with firefox's Pocket as a way to save things that I wanted to read later and sync this list between my laptop and my android phone. I've felt myself drifting away from Pocket (or maybe it's been getting less matched to my needs), so I thought I'd cast out into the chasm to see if anyone had any suggestions or stories about what you use? Is an RSS reader the answer? Which one?

another exodus from twitter, another group of artists migrating to bluesky, another day of watching all of them be like damn this place is so nice but it's really missing [feature cohost has had since forever] and just screaming into the heavens

i'm almost positive that people come here and see no numbers on posts and think it means every post is a potential failure because it's not "doing numbers" and it makes me sad how much this shit has just broken people. i wish i could sit every person down and explain why that's such a meaningless way of measuring 'success' but also that it's like, actually a lot worse on BS because yeah you see numbers there but getting like 10 RTs on a site that has way more users than here is actually kind of abysmal! your posts relatively actually do a lot worse there because people are not there for that content. they never were, they never will be. the twitter micro-blogging experience is not condusive to art it is condusive to virality and low-quality posting.

sigh

I made a comment on how BS n Threadz kept getting these no context hype trains for furries/literally any content, but then promptly lose 75% of their users in a week cause it's just more of the same. Hell I know one of the people making this claim and I know for a fact she's already off those sites

Meanwhile people genuinely detoxing over here while getting the actual meaningful interactions they crave, but because it's not got some arbitrary rpg stats below it, it isn't "viable"

I think these people in general REALLY need to explore what viable actually means

Is viable getting people to click your kofi? Is it getting actual people critically interacting with your work? Is it being able to be honest and yourself?

Or is it getting folks you don't know, don't like and certainly don't care about just bumping up some stats on your posts?

Either way the answer is cohost ¯\ _ (ツ) _/¯

i made a whole thread on twitter to try and convince others to give cohost a shot! and i pointed out the stark difference in how much interaction i got on my art on both platforms

i've been on twitter for 5 - 6 years now. it took me 5 years to build up a following of about 500, and with that i'd get maybe 20 likes and a comment on an art piece, or a retweet if i was very lucky!

one tweet went viral, and those numbers jumped overnight. a chance event, and while i'm grateful for it, this should not be the only way to get your name out there. it just isn't sustainable

when i joined cohost, and started posting art to what i thought would at first be an audience of 0, i was instead pleasantly surprised to find that folks still managed to see my art and interact with it! what had essentially taken me 5 years to cultivate on twitter was just there on cohost! there's no pesky algorithm to fight, wahoo!

and here's the real deal-breaker for me: i get all of my first-time commissioners and kofi subscriptions from cohost

since i started freelancing full-time at the beginning of the year, i haven't gotten any new traffic out of twitter, as far as i can tell. that, to me, speaks volumes about the sort of platform i wanna be on. what's the point of being on a platform, even one where "everyone is going", if no one there is really seeing you??

i don't want another twitter, i want a better experience. cohost has been excellent in that department!

i was skeptical of cohost at the start as a place for promotion or longform criticism, but i've gotten more (and better!) comments on my stuff here than anywhere else i've posted in a long time. my post about steven universe got a lot of traffic in a shockingly short amount of time, but the real shocker was just how much quality commentary people added. the comments are full of personal stories and interesting perspectives, and all the additional reposts (do we have a word for when someone reposts with added commentary?) i saw were people not just engaging with what i wrote but adding to it substantively.

as someone who's been on the internet for more than 20 years, i've always felt it's better to get a handful of people to really engage with your work than it is to get a couple thousand people to glance at it in passing. a platform that emphasizes the former over the latter encourages high-effort high-quality posting... but the real hat trick of cohost is that it seems to encourage equally high-effort high-quallity behavior from the audience, since superficial metrics such as likes and vanilla reposts carry so much less weight. needless to say, an audience that actively engages with your work is an audience that is very likely to come back-- and while they might not be able to pay you now, their belief that you deserve to be compensated for your work will stick with them until they can afford to pay you.

and to the money point: a day after it went up, i decided to repost my steven universe article with a link to my ko-fi. i very deliberately avoided making a call to action or pleading poverty, just "if you liked this post, maybe consider throwing a couple bucks my way," because i wanted to see what would happen. i didn't edit that link into the original post either, and unlike on tumblr you can't easily see additional reposts from the source post, so i expected the audience for that donation link to be substantially smaller. it was an experiment i didn't put much weight in.

to my TREMENDOUS surprise, i got $120 in donations that day!! now an important caveat here is that the post in question is personal and emotional in a way that (in my experience) tends to draw out people's generosity more than traditional criticism might do. BUT, again, this was a repost on day 2 after traffic peaked, without a call to action, with no way for users to find it from other reposts of the original. and i got $120 for it anyway! comparatively, me quote tweeting a viral post of mine with a donation link barely got traction before elon took over, and i had 30,000 followers!!

i don't want to make too big a deal out of this because there's a million variables at play here... but as far as experiments go, this one makes me optimistic. when they add tipping to this website, i dunno man, i think it could really cement this place as The Viable Alternative a lot of us have been looking for. and it's not a hellscape of venture capital or data mining or perpetual surveillance!!! it's owned and run by human people who actually use the internet and are just as fed up with this shit as everyone else!!! they're explicitly inclusive of adult content, they're transparent about their financials and development plans, I AM BANGING ON POTS AND PANS AND SHOUTING FROM THE ROOFTOPS COHOST IS THE FIRST REAL WEBSITE ANYONE HAS MADE IN 15 YEARS PLEASE SUPPORT EGGBUG WE NEED THIS THING TO LAST!!!!

sorry for shouting i just get excited when i say things that are true