lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox



since i stopped using twitter, cold turkey

and it's fine. i post here, some decent amount, and occasionally i toot on mastodon

but i still have this... weird tiny nagging feeling sometimes... that i used to have something, and i've lost it, and i don't know how to get it back, but i also don't really know what it was.

i don't know if i have much to say here that i haven't said before haha


i think about having a Twitter Following, and the dawning realization that most of them were there for dunks. but even before that, i feel like a lot of them were tech people who found me through my tech blog because i wrote about something mundane but broad-appeal like "there are chess pieces in unicode ♜".

i used to have a lot of fondness for twitter. surely at one point i had a decent number of... peers? acquaintances? friends maybe? i can think of at least a few people from twitter who i miss. but our actual interactions were replying to each other every few weeks maybe. do they think of me now? i don't know.

did i have a real audience, or a lot of people who liked a thing i did once and were waiting endlessly for a repeat that will never come? what is an "audience"? people who click the like button? prospective customers? what am i even selling? how am i supposed to make this online entrepreneurial thing work, anyway? patreon peaked years ago and it turns out it was mostly the tech people paying me to write tech posts, and i ran out of things to write for them.

i used to feel like my work was valuable and now i have no idea. but i don't know what "valuable" means, either. but that also didn't start eight months ago. i think it started when lexy's labyrinth received... much less interest than i'd thought it might. a reminder that the things i like aren't, in fact, also things that my twitter followers necessarily like. following my whims didn't feel like a safe bet any more.


every so often i glance at tumblr again and i still just do not know what to post. i made so many tweets, though. what were they about? i tweeted tens of thousands of things. personal anecdotes and jokes and stuff. do i post jokes any more? i don't know. did the response to my twitter jokes get worse over time? i wonder.

i still don't know how to be vulnerable again. i don't know how to even take steps in that direction. i look at my tumblr dashboard and i catch glimpses of people who silently cut me off and i just want them to not remember whatever made them do that because there's always the chance they'll start up an all new public fuss. i remember how many callouts started on tumblr, how there are still hate blogs there obsessing over whatever minutiae of our lives they can manage to overhear, how there is effectively no moderation unless it's about a boob. so my impulse is to keep my head down.

but i'm tired of keeping my head down. i somehow resisted the urge on twitter, but mostly by being mad a lot, and i'm tired of that too.

i feel like i keep going around in circles and writing the same post every couple months. i don't know what the path out of this looks like.

i don't feel as dire as this sounds, i think. i'm physically tired today and that's probably coming across. mostly i perceive a void that i don't know what to do with, and whenever i'm reminded of it it's just... annoying


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

Not this exact situation, just the feeling of "what am I doing?" "What was I doing?" In my case, I find myself bouncing from site to site, trying to find my niche, but never really finding it. Even now on Cohost, I still have to remind myself that likes and follows aren't important, but we've had that pounded into our head for years. You start wondering if anything you post has value, does anyone like it, then you start wondering "what am I even posting for?" I don't know, but I feel like stopping won't help me find my answer.

So, yeah, maybe not the exact some problem, but the same melancholy, I think?

I never dealt with nearly as bad, but the loss from ditching birdshit is... relateable. It's intentionally a discourse/outrage farm, and had been sailing in that direction over the last decade at least, but that "original big place" inertia means I deffo lost at least a few worthwhile (or at least interesting) contacts. A couple ended up reacquainting on furry masto like 5 years later, but not many.

Closest I found to a fix though, was basically a locked account and at least some degree of vetting? That way I could still share some deep lore with people, without them being in my -actual- innermost circle.

i think twitter has maybe fucked me up a bit because i was on it very early and it slowly changed out from under me

i had a locked account for a good while! but then Stuff Happened and i did not really know who my friends were any more, it dropped to maybe 3 active follows, and i didn't want to add anyone else.

i think the concentration of anger/dunkposting is why we avoided you on twitter, actually. but it is only such a faint memory, i don't know any detail more than that. our brief stint on twitter is such a blur.

lol the ambiguity is killer. "all i know about this person is that they blocked me on twitter. was it because they thought my tweets were bad, or because someone told them i did literal crime. hmmm"

i never had the type of following you did on twitter but ive still grieved its loss. its normal to feel conflicted about this kind of stuff. i cant relate to the internet entrepreneur thing with patreon and all that, but i hope it continues to work for you. i can say that my time on cohost has been both smaller and way more rewarding. im glad to see you on the site and its nice to see what you're up to. appreciate the real posting about stuff like this too. its good to have you around, eevee

despite claims to the contrary, this place just feels like you're either A Content Creator, A Commenter On Content, or some mix of the two, else you might as well just treat the platform like it's read-only. i think part of it is how vastly different Posts vs Comments are treated, versus tweets and their replies simply being a tweet that links to another one

you mean... because twitter replies are visible to everyone who follows both of you, so conversations are more likely to sprawl spontaneously, or something?

i can kinda see that but i think at a certain point i also cut down how much i replied at length to people on twitter, specifically because it could so easily invite third parties who were not always pleasant. the dynamics get real weird when 95% of your followers are people you've never interacted with

it seems like your phrasing is kinda tautological though — if you don't make posts and you don't make comments, then, yeah, you're just reading

I do definitely get fewer people reading my blog posts now that I'm not automatically crossposting links to Twitter, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It has been more difficult to promote my music and things I care about without Twitter (and I do still occasionally go to Twitter to retweet something important that needs more visibility). But I feel like I'm a lot happier without Twitter in my life.

I've definitely been focusing way more on more intimate social venues online, like a handful of Discord communities (especially yours!) and of course Mastodon and very rare Cohost posts, and while it's a lot more difficult to Grow My Personal Brand that way I also feel less pressure to do so.

Tumblr has gotten... weird. I mostly just reblog other peoples' posts, sometimes with commentary, and rarely post anything of my own (aside from automatic link posts to my blog entries of course).

The feeling of needing to keep your head down is understandable given a lot of what you've been through and how a lot of the Internet has historically been. I've been through a few things like that myself (although not to nearly the scale you've endured). There's always this feeling of looking over your shoulder, like you're about to become a target because some asshole has a vendetta against you or what they think you represent. A lot of those assholes still live rent-free in my head. I'm not sure how to evict them. I'd like to, though.

What's your real-life social life like? I feel like a lack of in-person interaction is the main thing contributing to my own malaise these days. VRChat kinda-sorta helps with that but it's still just duct tape, ultimately.

When I moved to Seattle I found meetup.com to be pretty helpful, although it got Weird when wework bought them out (and even Weirder when they got spun back off).

Lately I've been perusing Barq (dating app for furries) to find people and that is going about as well as one might expect.

twitter for me was mostly void posting adjacent to people i thought were cool, with 200 followers and a scattering of those i followed that i now follow on other platforms, i mostly dont feel too bad for having moved on. I hope we both can find better purpose in our internet personas, I know your css tutorials have been nice.

most of that isn't exactly questions, and we don't exactly have answers to them

for whatever it may be worth we remember you from those early days. we aren't exactly an entire audience by ourselves, but we're still here. we doubt we're the only ones. <3

damn, it sucks to hear that lexy's labyrinth didn't make much of a splash. i hadn't played chip's challenge before (or many sokobans in general, really), so when it came out i spent like an entire day going through the community levels, and found them not just really fun but also extremely enlightening! it was a blast seeing just how expressive levels made with this seemingly simple ruleset could be. i really need to go back and play through the other map sets sometime.

this doesn't have much directly to do with what you talked about here lol, but we'll, i've really enjoyed reading about the assortment of things you've talked about over the years, so thanks for doing what you do. (especially the programming stuff, which i'm sure contributed at least a little to me getting my current job)

that's the thing i always loved about it! that a handful of gizmos could be put together in so many ways. that sparked my imagination even when i was like 12

i'm glad you liked it!! a few people did, and that's good enough really. but i was bracing myself for a wave of tickling a bunch of nostalgia, and boy did i overestimate that lol