so I really like a lot about cohost. I like the people running the site and think they're making interesting decisions. I also like the sort of emergent "spirit" of the site, a sort of self-awareness and playfulness...and there are a lot of lgbt people etc. I also have some mutuals from twitter here, and they're (you're!) all people I like a lot

fediverse is much more "twitter"-like in a way that I'm not sure if I like or not, especially after using cohost. being able to like responses, for example, is sort of double-edged, becasue then I feel a pressure to just like everything. which is fine! but also kind of exhausting?! but it also reaffirms that people are reading things...on cohost it's sort of hard to get any feedback, which is part of the design, but can also make it feel kind of lonely, mixed with the other stuff. cohost seems much more "write for yourself and maybe close friends"

I guess that fediverse provides a lot more rails to the user experience that cohost doesn't have. if you find a nice little instance, you automatically have community in a way that I haven't found on cohost...cohost seems to encourage you to search tags, and I've been doing that, but when someone post about anime, is the expectation that I should be creeping up on their posts? I mean, it's totally find and people have been nice and I've found some cool people, but on fediverse it's crystal clear that the people on your local instance are meant to be "your people." it bootstraps a community for you

of course, it's not a competition! this is just a reflection of how the two communities feel different. I found a fediverse instance that seemed to vibe with me (which took time! that's why I hadn't joined in teh first place!) and it was like "bam" now I have all of these people engaging with my posts, there's all of this sort of twitter-esque social energy. a lot of conversation, a lot of likes, etc. on cohost it's much more restrained for the time being, I guess it feels a lot more like, well, livejournal did. sort of blogging, maybe some people will engage...I do like the general vibe, but it will definitely take more time I think for cohost to sort of become whatever it will become. I'm ok with that!

so I feel like this was an unpopular point of view on twitter, and of course the cohost people have made their decision. understandable! but there are aspects of the algorithmic timeline that I found very useful. in fact, for a long time, my algorithmic twitter timeline was really good! it was the "your friend liked/followed/replied to" stuff that really killed it...now, one can argue that algorithmic timelines will always trend towards this sort of thing. maybe! and I think there are other ways to achieve what I want, and I have hope that cohost will continue to invest in tools that let us curate various feeds.

in my case, the reason the algorithmic timeline was useful was 1. I followed a lot of people and 2. I am time shifted by ~12 hours from a huge chunk of the people I follow. without the algorithmic timeline, my timeline basically became 100% japanese cosplayers and artists...I'd have to scroll a ton to see anything by people in america etc. of course, one could argue that "I did this to myself," and maybe I did, but I mean...the experience was pretty good in the past--the algorhithm did a decent job of surfacing interest tweets from my follows. again, I think there are potentially other ways to deal with this problem, but I do think it is a problem. I don't think the solution is to simply follow less people...this is a data organization problem and I feel like we can come up with better patterns to deal with it

of course, the problem is that once you have an algorthmic timeline, the temptation to tweak it in ways that optimize for likes or whatever become too tantalizing, which is exactly what happened, and earlier this year my twitter timeline became significantly more useless. which is a damn shame

it's so interesting (and funny) when shows use some iconic piece of sound or music in a radically different context

my wife was just watching a variety that kept using tetsu's theme from akira

that'll wake you up

I can't read all the books play all the VNs read all the manga watch all the movies

it was a painful realization, and remains a painful realization

these days I'm painfully aware of time, how much times things take, how much time is "left" to do things. and there's never going to be enough. I try to just take a step back, pet my cat, sip some coffee, accept the ephemeral nature of life

it's hard. I want to watch it all. read it all. play it all. read it all. watch it all

but we cannot