jkap

CEO of posting

butch jewish dyke
part of @staff, cohost user #1
married to @kadybat

This user can say it
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๐Ÿ˜ mastodon
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๐Ÿฆ twitter
not anymore lol
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personal thoughts on using social media, long-ish post so slapping behind a read more.


realizing over time that i never really broke most of the habits that gave me such an unhealthy relationship with social media in the first place. sure, things like demetrification have helped with the skinner box Number Get Bigger mentality, but a lot of core habits that were ok when i was just Some Guy have scaled horribly now that i am (and i swear i'm not trying to sound self-important here) a Prominent Poster. and a lot of these issues didn't even really make themselves clear until we hit a critical mass of Active Users (probably around 5k, and we're at over 4x that now) and have only become less sustainable since then.

i have always been the sort to post about My Life. for the last few years, a terrifyingly large part of My Life has been My Job. i spent the majority of my time either working or thinking about work. this means that if i'm posting about My Life, it makes sense to also post about My Job, since that's such a massive component.

this really doesn't scale when you're posting on the platform that is your job. i've had to make the conscious effort to completely stop posting about work beyond rebugging @staff posts, which means i don't post a lot, because so much of my life is my job. (this is, on its own, not especially healthy either but i haven't figured out how to fix that). actively not posting about work is good and has helped prevent some of the more personal-psychic-damage causing shit that makes me miserable, but it is still impossible for me to fully disengage as long as i am using the website that is my job to maintain.

as i've said before, i really wish there were still something my friends were on that wasn't my job. twitter was, overall, unhealthy and bad, but my friends were there and that helped make it mostly tolerable. this is no longer the case.

the fix to "i can't disengage from work if i'm using cohost in any capacity" is probably "stop using cohost" but i mostly like using cohost and would rather not. i built it for myself just as much as for anyone else. i'm selfish and don't want to give that up.

i've thought about making a separate fully incognito account under a pseudonym to try and make it possible to use the site like a normal person, but i don't think this would actually help much. my "thinking about work" isn't just caused by seeing shit tagged "#cohost meta", it's caused by using the website at all and observing all the problems that i haven't yet fixed. it feels like a personal failure that there are still so many of those. pretending to be someone else doesn't fix that unfortunately.

idk! shit's hard! i've been having Website-Induced Brain Problems since last october and i've figured out a solution to almost none of it. i've tried to just not talk about it but that's hard too. ah well.


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in reply to @jkap's post:

clearly you just need someone to make a cohost-like but legally-not-cohost social platform that you can hang out on /j

(obv this doesn't fix the issue where half your work motivation is wanting to build the site you wanted to have)

it's caused by using the website at all and observing all the problems that i haven't yet fixed. it feels like a personal failure that there are still so many of those.

you're making a good website and it is getting better every day. truly. and there's only two of you who can fix things, right? it's not like y'all are doing nothing, y'know, it's just like a priority thing, right? it's hard, but it's a good website. you deserve to enjoy the fruits of your labors. i'd hope that an incognito account could help separate the ownership responsibilities away, but i know it isn't that easy ๐Ÿ˜ข

a combined vacation and social media detox might prove helpful here.

taking a break for weeks when i started having a bad time due to public social media overexposure was tremendously helpful for my mental state; it sounds like you've got a complex and possibly novel variant of the same issue, since your website is also your job

i still used twitter, but only locked accounts, and I ended up talking to my friends over messages a lot more than i was using twitter. going even further and logging off the private accounts wouldn't have hurt much, I don't think, and i'd have focused on closer friends more.

You are doing good! The only practical thing I'd suggest (and I understand this is more a vent than asking for advice - but when do people NOT give well meaning advice on the internet) is perhaps take a posting sabbatical. Say a month where you know you are going to post again eventually, but step back from it.

Then when you get back, of course there will still be broken stuff, but there will also be a much bigger jump in improvements between the start and end of the sabbatical so you can go 'oh, this is better yay :)'

shit is indeed hard. a lot of the problem sounds like you're stuck within a social media usage routine, to me, but it's also the nature of the beast: if you use a tool to communicate with people, they are going to inevitably talk about it within your perception, and if you work on that tool, then it's hard to separate their discussion and feelings on the tool from your intentions and goals.

i had a lot of problems with this running awoo.space. the only thing that helped me was taking breaks from the site.

i hope you develop a healthy relationship with us, your users, and i hope you feel less guilt about productivity - this site is amazing, and y'all deserve continued success because you do such a great job of taking feedback and criticism and work so hard on being intentional about this that i worry about y'all sometimes, especially when things get intense.

i hope you find a sustainable and happy way forward <3

I bet it's not easy, working on a growing social media website while so many eyes, so much discourse is happening about social media due to... all that's going on, and all.

For what it's worth, I really think you're making something special here. So, sincerely, thank you! :host-joy:

on one hand, i wish i had the perspective to actually be able to relate to your problem and give words thatโ€™ll help you, on the other hand, what youโ€™re experiencing is uniquely terrible in a way that i hope iโ€™ll never have to experience. unfortunately (or fortunately), all i can really say is that what youโ€™re experiencing sounds awful and i hope youโ€™re some day able to mentally separate work from using the website you made for the reasons you made it. ๐Ÿ’—

Even know Iโ€™m mostly a non-technical person, I relate to all of this a lot and the only solution that ever came my way was having garbage-ass management forcibly remove me. I donโ€™t recommend you go that route, but I donโ€™t know that I have any great advice for you other than to remember that whole โ€œitโ€™s a marathon not a sprintโ€ thing. Pace yourself and donโ€™t beat yourself up over the things you know arenโ€™t done yet. Youโ€™ll get there.

have you felt that same sort of trouble of not being able to disengage when posting about things that aren't cohost itself? like when posting about vr, or racing, etc? if there's less stress using cohost when engaging with it in that way, then maybe the balance can be helped by dedicating time to those activities so you know when you come back to the site later you can post about that instead.

If time allows, getting a new hobby might be a good play. Whenever anxious cohost thoughts come up having something you are actively more interested in and pivoting to thinking about and investing time in that. Classic CBT tech.

Of course that depends on your work schedule to some degree. Being able to go "I'm doing something else now" is not something you can do while actively "on the clock".

Sorry for being another reply giving advice. I'm sure it's hard not to come off as patronizing to some degree, but still wanted to say something. Thanks for working so hard on cohost.

I miss when websites that hosted broader communities were acknowledged as still belonging to/being for the people who created them, and one of the things that made me instantly like Cohost was the feeling that y'all are making the site you want to use.

Some level of this (incredibly shitty!) feeling is probably inevitable any time Job and Passion become inextricably linked, but I feel like one of the core elements of social media in general being a clusterfuck is the concept of platforms being services or products rather than places. For all the talk about Twitter being a town square or what the fuck ever, in practice it is run like any other live service; just like MMOs tend to acknowledge that there are other "adventurers" running around, only You, the Hero Reading This, are real and everyone else is part of Your User Experience.

In actual shared spaces, there is an obvious difference between someone using a megaphone to address a group and using it to speak to a generic You, loudly: the former is trying to organize people, and the latter is making a pitch of some kind to anyone willing to listen. Both of these are useful modes of communication, but one is overwhelmingly more useful in getting groups to cooperate at scale. While this is far from the only factor in social media being Bad--or even the biggest--I don't think that pitching prosocial behavior as a choice each individual social media user is empowered to make as part of their unique journey has worked out very well. But it's how you talk to people if you don't really want to build relationships with them that don't involve taking their money or managing their individual behavior toward profitability.

Cohost feels like a place to me more than any other recent community platform--in fact, it feels more like a community platform than any of the other sites I've tried. And a big part of that is the sense that I'm a guest in someone's house. This is not to diminish the work you've put into making this a public space, but if I'm at a house party and the upstairs toilet has a weird quirk where you have to hold the handle down for 30 seconds before it'll flush, that is pretty fuckin' normal and not something I expect folks to have in perfect working order before I will deign to sit on their couch and eat their food and otherwise benefit from the enormous amount of time and energy it takes to host a large public gathering, let alone one that doesn't end at 11 p.m. on the same day it began.

What you've done here is incredible. It is a massive success. And FWIW as a single random user, it is very, very important to me that it's sustainable for you and everyone else working on it. I hope it continues for a long time, but even if it did end at 11 p.m. tonight, you still would have thrown one hell of a party.

Hello, I'm a random messed up person giving suggestions without being asked for or qualified to:

Do not trust yourself to criticize your work. With 20k active users, some of them paying, it's clearly not a failure. Brain is only antagonizing you because brains do be like that.

"Damn Space what's next, you're gonna tell a depressed person to just be happy you dumb bitch?"

Good point, but sometimes when I'm spiraling down a self doubting train of thoughts, realizing "oh I'm dumb, I shouldn't listen to myself" actually helps me, so you never know...