eevee

I remember seeing a couple of these tweets in person on my own twitter timeline

I think the thing about a place like Mastodon is that, you may get less likes and shares, but it most likely makes a bigger impact with them than on Twitter, and yea, Twitter seems to encourage a very specific way of posting that I found myself falling into once. I stopped doing that and just started posting however I like. I know I could have more followers on there if I played into the algorithm, and I know how to play into the algorithm on there, but I just won't do it

As for cohost, well it's nice here without the numbers, but also, you can't just go back to an old post later and go "wow people really liked that one huh" which I guess is ok

I would like to point out 'masto' means 'nipple' and therefore your masto two - which you neglected the chance to call 'mastwo' - would be 'two nipples'

The incentive systems for social media as currently structured is about making a glowing rectangle that tells you when to scream and wants to know why you're not screaming.

There's a lot here and I'm not really sure what to comment on in particular. I could just say "yeah I vibe with this" but that doesn't feel enough, because I've been wanting more than "yeah I vibe with this" from social media. And hell, often I feel like I've not even got that.

I'm still checking Twitter out of habit, but if I see anything neat instead link things in Discords, and try not to post at all.

I'm tired enough of discourse and activism I had to mute someone's retoots on Mastodon for being like... like it's not like I disagreed it just felt like preaching to the choir, every half an hour, except in the space of five minutes because it was a string of rapid-fire boosts.

I miss the vibes of "[being] on a forum that 8 other people read" and every time I see someone post about the damage losing Twitter will do because they rely on it for finances I just feel frustrated. I'm frustrated at the gravitational pull of there being only one website on the internet. We must've had some system in the past for commissions before all this! But I'm also frustrated because I too don't rely on commissions for finances (it's more a casual thing), so I'm not one that, say, will be unable to pay bills if people don't see me opening.

Organizing my thoughts here is hard, but whatever happens I hope you continue to get that more intimate experience with what you create and share online. More fulfilling experiences are cool.

it's nice to have cleared the slate back to people who are actually kind of invested, i guess. people who recognize me and go "oh yeah i want more of that".

as someone with a significantly smaller twitter account, one of the weird experiences here is that (especially as the site has grown a little bigger) it's just way more likely for one of my posts to get interesting replies here than twitter. This site is very much in a 'shaking out' period where people are being more outgoing as they look for friends, but it's been an interesting counterbalance to twitter where it feels like people RT/fave/move on without much thought unless you're specifically having a conversation with people.

(i suspect a lot of my current twitter followers are people who followed for one tweet and i cannot comprehend that level of instant committal. it did cross my mind recently that maybe there are people who use their twitter follows less to mean "give me all of their tweets" and more "hey twitter here is the general flavor of stuff to recommend to me", and if that is the case then i think i want to bury twitter in a deep hole that is not a place of honor.)

The "heavy twitter users are people who tweet 6x a week and are a minuscule portion of the userbase" thing has kind of shaken my understanding of how people even use the site. I was away I posted more than most but I guess in the world where people are using the site that differently, following off a single tweet maybe makes sense? Who knows

I feel all that. I never got super big on twitter in the first place, but I stopped posting as much on tiktok at a certain point because it felt weird that when I deviated from my 'brand' I'd get like 18 likes instead of 80k.

here, I found myself writing out posts and comments that with the flavor of pithy wording that might get likes on twitter or tiktok, and then deleting them, because there aren't likes on comments and that sort of things isn't really rewarded or valuable. so now I just comment when I actually have something meaningful to say, and do my best to ignore the rejection-sensitivity urge to delete something which I don't immediately get positive feedback for.

which is wonderful and freeing, but also a bit unmooring as someone used to chasing that dopamine. I think that's probably "fast food withdrawal", but brains are weird and I don't really know what's optimal for me in online spaces. I feel safer on cohost than I've felt on any other social media platform in a while, though.

I can relate to how you feel about Twitter and how it makes you post a certain way to get attention. Some of my last tweets were a meme I thought was very clever but got a whopping two likes, and a random reply under one of your tweets (funny coincidence) that got 30. It doesn't make any sense and it felt awful.

I was waiting to get out of no posting jail on Cohost, and even quietly watching a platform where people are genuinely happy to be here was such a jarring but welcome change that I tweeted where else to find me and swore never again.

It’s just as radical to live like you’re already in that better world as to imagine and advocate for it (to what little extent we can). Sort of a “dress for the job you want” thing. That’s why this actively radical space is much more positive than Twitter. We aren’t going to make a world where everyone’s happy by learning how to only be mad. Especially for the kind of society we live in: if we want people to join us so we can hit critical mass and actually change some things, we should strive to be a community people want to join.

Not to say that protesting and activism is pointless. Just that a balance makes sense, and is good.

it did suck that good engagement and community were hard to come by on twitter. seeing the sorts of unpleasantness that founds its way to bigger accounts, i guess i'm glad to have avoided all of that.

the exodus to smaller, more focused Nerd Zones like here has definitely been a shake-up, hopefully it'll've been for the better.

more to the point, i liked seeing your gamedev posts and about the skills you've been learning in the process. they've been really inspirational for trying to get my own stuff started.

I appreciate this post and I'm glad you wrote it and that you're here! I didn't follow you on Twitter, but I'd see your content from time to time. I hope you're able to find a way of posting you like on cohost

huh, i somehow missed “posting incentives 1” when it was posted. maybe i’m bad actually at using this website??? i’ll kind of reply to both posts here since i have several miscellaneous thoughts to share (famous last words before i end up typing another 4000 words… i hope comments don’t have character limits and that you don’t care about getting way super long ones!! sorry!! i guess i could’ve put all this in a “reshare”(?) but that doesn’t exactly feel appropriate either?? oh my god this is almost as long as your entire post fuck i am bad at using this website, this has to be using this website wrong,)

i’ve had vague awareness that there was some kind of 〜⁠⁎✧𝆯❈ ⁠internet drama ⁠❈𝆯✧⁎〜 surrounding you or someone you live with, but i’ve never cared to investigate specifics as i generally prefer to judge people on my own terms (i consider myself pretty good at it!). i didn’t realize this was in 2018 though; maybe i assumed whatever it was happened before i was aware of you. learning that kiwi farms was involved, i now have a higher opinion of you and your partner, and a complete disregard for whatever this manufactured drama was. frankly i’m just glad you survived that ordeal, because, very tragically, not all of the super cool trans people they go after do.

these posts made me question what it was that made me follow you in the first place, and i honestly don’t recall exactly what got me following your Twitter, but it was either your ZDoom exploits xor just people retweeting you often on Twitter and you seemed like another cool “alt‐tech” person so i hit follow (and then later i saw you on the ZDoom forums and probably was like “whoa that’s the fox i followed on Twitter, how’d she also get here??”). idk when precisely this was besides ≤2015 (it was definitely before you made Throughfare). then after the 2016 USA presidential election i dropped my Twitter timeline cold turkey (i.e. treated the site as write‐only) because i knew it would be impossible to escape all the politics on there that i didn’t want to see (though i did still look at it during specific events like E3 where the relative politics content would be far lower). (sadly i also lost that “ad hoc group chat” experience and so fell out of touch with a bunch of friends by doing this, but they were also falling into the Twitter trap of just tweeting about politics all the time, so…!)

when i tried getting back on Twitter in June of this year (which lasted ⁓19 days before USA politics promptly took a shit all over the internet again with Roe v. Wade), i aggressively unfollowed people posting too much politics and activism and just Discourse stuff onto my timeline. i was sad to see that this included you — and here i’m learning you didn’t even really like doing that! i guess i can also see what you mean about your tweets being more aggressive after 2018 though, since i clearly saw a vibe at that time that i didn’t like. but i’m still here because i followed your Mastodon in mid‐2019 around when i made mine (i don’t remember how i knew you had one?), and recently Twitter’s implosion combined with me wanting to get back on social media ended up getting me on using Mastodon and cohost instead of Twitter, and i didn’t want to unfollow your Mastodon without giving it another shot. because i knew you were cool even if the discourse posting was too much for me, and that you managed your Mastodon and Twitter differently (not just cross‐posting the same content on both), and that having CWs could mean i wouldn’t need to see politics posting when i didn’t want to. and now recently i seen you posting stuff like “stop showing me what fascists are doing!! i don’t care!! it just increases their reach and makes my brain bad!!” and i’m just clapping my meat hands together and shouting “YES EXACTLY” at my computer screen. i don’t think this approach to activism is something to be ashamed of at all!

having exceptionally bad takes in the early 2010’s is also an experience i relate to. it’s why, when i was credibly fearing targeted harassment from a specific group, i locked my public Twitter for many months and kept it radio silent until i created and executed a workflow to go through to remove any pictures that could doxx me (sadly also including cat pictures) and any old tweets that could be used to paint present me very poorly. that was weeks of work on and off — which will now promptly go down the drain when Twitter breaks down before this calendar year is over i expect. what even was the point!! sigh

honestly, the way i’m using cohost and Mastodon (and had used Twitter when i used it this year) is almost exactly like how you used Twitter, minus actually getting a lot of notifications i guess. so i wouldn’t say the way you used Twitter isn’t like how anyone else used it! seeing people appreciate what i post on some level also brings me joy, but i try very hard not to let it influence what i want to post. i got dozens of followers from tweeting about smooth Minecraft hole once (i also do not understand people who follow someone based on a single tweet, like at all, especially if they already follow like 3+ figures of accounts, what are you doing), but like, i don’t want to post about Minecraft much, so i don’t. i’m only interested in cultivating the audience of the people who will stick around for me instead of for specific content i make. on its face, this seems like a poor business decision! and i of course say all of this from the perspective of someone who’s never been presented the real opportunity to turn their posts into a livelihood. but i really don’t want my required participation in capitalism (“mildly corrupt motivation of trying to transmute <participation in society> into groceries”, as you put it, which i guess is “corrupt” insofar as capitalism forces us to work in corrupt systems) to involve creating a more complex persona than “me but in public”, because i don’t like what i’ve seen it do to people.

the “bristling to seem bigger” is definitely something i’ve watched happen to multiple cool people i’ve followed as they proceeded to get more popular, and so more negative attention in tandem (which has a much larger impact on a lot of people than positive attention does, so even if there’s more positive attention even proportionally, it doesn’t really counteract that!). it makes me really sad to see people close themselves off and become more cynical as they’re subject to this. maybe, actually, it’s bad to make it so easy for random strangers to put words in front of your eyes that you hate (too bad it makes tech corps money — i like that cohost and Mastodon seem to have better controls than Twitter in this area though). i’ve become apprehensive to amassing a huge audience because i don’t want this to happen to me too! seeing posts this honest and personable from you after the whirlwind of online experiences you’ve gone through is, based on my experience, very unexpected as such. but i’m also glad that the internet’s wrath hasn’t, i guess, destroyed this part of you.

as well, while the lower numbers on posts seems like bad business, i would posit that the networking you get out of the “post‐what‐you‐want” approach ends up being more valuable. i find that when people look at an online presence and see “a cool person” rather than “a curated, force‐fed brand”, they’re more likely to want to get to know you better / get “invested” as you put it, and so they’ll more often offer support and critique, engage with more types of content you create, and even collaborate on projects (when it comes to other creators).

i didn’t know your income dropped off hard during this “off Twitter” era of my life; i just assumed you were still doing well there. makes me sad, maybe i can also pitch in… related to that:

on the other hand, "give me two dollars because i told a joke you like" is a somewhat harder sell.

somehow the only place where i’ve noticed where this kind‐of‐sort‐of happen regularly is Reddit with their golds or whatever, i don’t know, i don’t really use Reddit. but if cohost also implements a system like this, maybe that could help us more easily fund all the shitposters who bring us their valuable shitservices. also, my understanding is that drawing furry porn which is “a bit niche” for commission can end up being surprisingly lucrative! even if you aren’t at all a professional with a highly detailed rendering process. i think this kind of work more than others draws people in based on just the base “art style”, and from what i’ve seen of your art on occasion, the style you’ve developed is fairly unique. drawing for money might be stressful in the same kind of way as feeling compelled to make blog posts all the time though, but also maybe not. hard to say!

as far as your games, i’ll be honest: the passion project of yours (“fox flux”?) is something i’ve kept myself in the dark about very much so on purpose — and this is not the first time i’ve done this. Oddwarg, creator of Eggman Hates Furries (unironically one of my favourite games), also started working on a magnum opus project they eventually crowdfunded. however, because the development was so open (literally the whole code repository was public during all of development), i so highly value “fresh experiences” with games, and i knew the end product would be incredible because they’re a Certified Furry Genius, i decided to never look at anything being posted about the game until i saw it was done — at which point i sat down and played it all through, which was an incredible experience i wouldn’t have had in exactly that way otherwise. i view your own “magnum opus” project in precisely the same way! i could still stand to play your other smaller projects though (besides the NSFW VNs you collaborated on which i don’t have interest in admittedly). (i also have so many games i need to catch up on in general though, christ.) also like maybe i should just say “fuck it” and play whatever demos and stuff you’re making anyway because i think i can give valuable playtester feedback. anyway i hope your game works out too! and everything else about being online! the internet is big and scary, just like the world, but i live for the beauty i can find in both

I'm preparing for Twitter to bite the dust too, and I swear you don't notice exactly how much it creates this emotional void when you're not doomscrolling or tweeting. I'm glad to recognize that, because it makes me actually stop on my way to go to Twitter and realize I can use my time for something better. Like here!

Most social media I've tried to use, I haven't been really active in participating in. I guess I'm guilty of being one of the ones who stare silently, but I loved seeing the interesting things people were doing and talking about. Maybe discovering cohost is a chance to change my ways and join in the conversation :P

You're an inspiring internet creature and I found myself getting sad and upset when all the KF stuff happened. But I'd seen this kind of weaponized outrage attack a couple times before so I knew what to expect...

Looking forward to more random stuff posts again, and the game! To me, being on the defensive all the time was super exhausting and unproductive, so I too retreated to tiny friendly spaces more like here

god, what you said reminds me too much of myself. even just the thing of "i don't like being followed by 90% normie tech dudes and i don't like the person i seem to turn into around them" has made me reorganise my twitter accounts several times, because it always gets to me eventually. i kinda want to force myself not to tweet about tech but it is still a part of me and i can't resist the catnip of doing it sometimes, and then i get hundreds of tech followers.

i feel a little ashamed to admit this, but i think i am tired of activism. or, rather, i am tired of pretending to sort of be an activist by saying things that seem both obvious and important, set off by having seen other people also say them.

I think this is the core of so many problems in that site's culture, and I say this having been caught up in them myself.

The idea that you can tweet the world better became an article of faith ... and as that faith got more and more tested, twisted into recrimination and rage spiraling, into the idea that tweeting is morality, that you must tweet through it to be a right and good person.

thirty thousand people and not even 1 in 300 of them is interested in my poképosting

tbh, I feel like this goes one layer deeper: the way Twitter is built up is that if I like pokeposting, my followers get to eventually see pokeposting, assuming they are using the Default Twitter Home Timeline Experience™. And because this somehow helps Twitter, they are good at making people use the Default Twitter Home Timeline Experience™. At some point, you grow aware of this and just start to understand the exact shape of the box you're in. It's a friendly cardboard box from the inside but you don't see the metal bars on the outside until you poke at it.

Using someone's likes as a way to show things to someone's friends has completely reshaped society. You can't be the "tech person that also likes Pokemon posts sometimes", because you're followed by tech people that don't like Pokemon, and interacting in the Pokemon community will completely confuse the algorithm. And people have forgotten how to interact in places where you can be two things at once. That feels overly dramatic, but it really did. If you want to be successful in those kinds of places, you need to do exactly one thing. The one everyone knows you for, follows you for. You can't do anything else. You can't even show interest in liking anything else. Anything you like can and will be used against you. If you're the kind of person that likes to do a bit of lots of different stuff then too bad, I guess?? Even though that's like, basically everyone. You don't get to be a person, you get to be a Content Creator™. If you're a normal person making things you get sent to the void because you're competing against Content Creators™ that have a numbers and probably also skill advantage.

And I can kinda feel this. I had a proper Twitter account for like 2 weeks half a decade ago, and one of the things I did was following then unfollowing someone that made neat art but also posted about chess a lot. As much as I like seeing people enjoying their things even if they're not things I enjoy, I don't want a feed that's 50% chess. And I also don't want a computer to decide what I end up seeing based on vague number things, because they're just not that good at it. It's like scrolling through my old old old email address' spam folder. I got kind of tired of the public internet after that.

For all of its flaws, reddit figured this one out by focusing on communities instead of people. I feel like reddit But Good™ is how things should be. Open but isolated communities, nobody cares if you like knitting, Pokemon, programming and other stuff because nobody's following you, they're just following communities. Cohost having a way to bookmark tags feels kind of like a hint at this, but idk if it'll work out. Sometimes those communities just really need special moderation that you can't get with open use tags backed up by general site moderation. It is 2022 and I have casually reinvented the concept of Usenet for the 50 trillionth time.

Anyway I did the thing where I write the same thing the long post said but in different words. Which are also really long but idk how to make them shorter. I guess that means I agree. Or something. Yay!

Thanks for describing your experience with Twitter, now I know for sure I was lucky to not get into it and therefore not get sucked into it.