when i was invited to join this website, sometime before launch, it took me a while to get used to. i'd been using twitter for six years. before that, i'd been on something awful for six years, and before that, fuckin' reddit when i was in high school, though i have little memory of it.
i graduated high school in a state: an undersocialized, neuroatypical nerd with an interest in photography, the sort of person you get when a kid doesn't get their ADHD treated and lives too far out of town to make more than one or two friends. i joined Something Awful for the photography forum, and ended up also using YOSPOS, the computer shitposting forum. both of these were buried in the subforum hierarchy, and relatively isolated from the viciousness the site tends to be associated with by the rest of the internet.
i learned to interact with people on something awful. it wasn't the best place to do that. i learned to make friends on something awful; it wasn't the best place to do that, either. (i'm happy i'm still in touch with the folks i'm still in touch with, though.) i learned to take photos on something awful, and it was an extremely good place to do that; me and folks in an irc-turned-slack offshoot of the photo forum went from chatting to bootstrapping ourselves into an actual crit group; we learned from each other as we learned to take photos, and now we get our shit in galleries.
in 2015-2016 or so, i started using the twitter account I'd created for uncertain reasons in 2009. i can't remember why. it might have been to keep up with politics, or keep up with the world, or because there were funny people on twitter. i'd just started listening to "chapo trap house" and was learning it was possible to be more left-wing than obama. i had just got into the San Francisco Art Institute on a transfer merit scholarship in part because of my carpet guy video piece. i knew how to talk with people, but wasn't great at making friends in person, and wasn't comfortable in my own skin. (didn't know there was something up with my gender, either.) i graduated, and i don't know anyone from art school anymore.
while that was going on, i had become a furry publicly on twitter. (i'd enjoyed furry art since i found it in like 2003, but i never figured out a fursona that clicked until my partner suggested a 4-legged wolf and a dozen things suddenly made sense, but being a therian is another conversation.) i started to make all these cool furry friends. i am still friends with them, in general. my friend network ended up completely non-local. i learned to talk privately with people, to have conversations with my friends, something i'd been basically out of the loop on for years. i felt like i was starting to become an actual person; my prior state felt like a "husk with interests" in comparison.
my follower count grew. people like my posts. occasionally one of them went viral; the first time that happened, it was me reposting someone else's stuff from yospos to show my friends, ended up getting 30k likes, and the guy elsewhere stopped posting because i blew up his spot. i felt and still feel real fuckin' bad about that. i kept posting, though. my own stuff. the sonos post, making Notch cry, getting stuck in the desert, etc etc. i tried mastodon once, then went back to try it again later and found my account and entire instance (snouts) had vanished for unclear reasons.
i topped out at ~14k followers. at that point, i had turned off notifications for anyone I didn't follow years ago, because having those turned on made me feel like I was going nuts. I retreated into more segmented private accounts. I could feel myself getting radiation poisoning when I spent too much time on main. it kept the dopamine pump running at high output and i could feel it eating away at me. the pandemic happened, and i kept posting.
then @vogon, who'd seen me posting about wanting a platform that's a single social media cooperative, "maybe written in elixir or something, messaged me." he said, paraphrasing, "we're building something new, not ready to announce yet, but it's written in node so it's up to you if that's a dealbreaker." i said i did not actually care what language it's written in as long as it works, and accepted my invite.
cohost was new. there weren't very many people on there; i found people to follow mostly through staff accounts, and partially through tags. i was following new people because i liked what they posted, for the first time in ages. i was seeing css posts and was in awe. i realized that it didn't have the same "sand-in-gears-in-brain" feeling that mass interaction on twitter gave me. i enjoyed how it was, before launch; it was a tiny community of people fooling around in a playground, sharing creative things and seeing what they could do with the site.
i got to post pictures without their being resized. my incredibly grainy photographs looked like they were supposed to. i started posting things that weren't subtly oriented toward being things that would get numbers.
and the thing that might stick with me most: i started to write. i hadn't had somewhere that even let me post longform writing since i left something awful 6 years prior, and i wouldn't have had anywhere to post the things i really wanted to write on there, either. it wasn't the environment for it.
i enjoyed writing on twitter a lot. being limited to 240 characters was like goku training with weighted clothes on and then going to fight frieza without taking them off. dumb ass why are you doing this to yourself type of vibe. i had learned to be concise, careful with my words, to express myself as much as i could in as few characters as i could. i found myself without limiters and had to get used to the fact that i could write longer. and as i did, i found i loved it and that i was fucking good at it. eventually, i made an AD account, and got to write out some of my ideas there in a format that wasn't RP sessions and slinging hot ideas back and forth with friends. i found i loved that too, and i could express things in a way powerful enough to permanently warp people's brains (in a good way). if you use that part of cohost you have probably seen some of it.
i posted my photos in a community that wasn't closed off. people enjoyed them. i'd click on the notifications on my photos and see that the people enjoying them were often fucking good photographers themselves. i slowly got back into the game i'd been forced out of when i graduated and lost access to the darkroom and the flextight x5.
later in that year, a friend of mine invited me to VRchat. it was a year and 9 months into the pandemic, and i had been fascinated by her posts, and realized "wait I've had a fucking vive in a crate for 3 years, why haven't I set this up yet." I still hadn't learned to interact with people in person, and I ended up in a 4-legged wolf avatar, being the dog at the party. I sat on the outer fringes of conversation and listened, and occasionally felt comfortable enough to speak up.
gradually, i learned to actually interact with people. something all of the people in my friend group who've used VRchat and had the chance to later meet VR friends outside the game have noticed: there is no "you're different offline." in VRchat, especially with things like full-body, face, and eye tracking, you are as close as it gets to being "in person." you just can't touch each other, and you have different (and wonderful) shapes. i was learning how to exist at parties and how to engage in actual conversation via twice-a-week immersion therapy, during a time when doing such things in real life was dangerous. (it still is, but i'm not getting into that.) i was learning to make friends in real life for the first time, by practice in a space where we were all in bodies we felt suited ourselves better.
these two simultaneous things found me gradually pulling myself off of twitter. i fully realized how foul it was making me feel every time i sank back into using it. the combination of clout seeking and dunk culture felt foul to participate in. my friends were driving themselves mad, quote tweeting people they disagreed with. i couldn't tolerate that shit anymore. i'd found a gentler place and a gentler way to be. the place was not just structurally resistant to that sort of thing, it was socially resistant as well.
i still got fired up about things i'm passionate about. i still felt the need to Use My Reach, which ended up being significant on here, in part because i told all my followers "i'm going to cohost, it's nicer" and a lot of them followed me on here. i posted about how this is a different sort of place, and that people should make an effort to be kind to others, and i meant it, and tried my best. and i tried to use my reach to help in a couple of highly contentious issues, and discovered that in those situations, i could still hurt people the same way people on twitter could hurt people, and that even in trying to help i did so by accident. i was horrified. i stopped using public social media for a while. i realized: i had to fucking chill out because the tools I was using were completely inappropriate for that purpose, in this place.
i did my best to chill out. that righteous anger had been a part of my life before twitter, even as far back as a petition drive to get the county parks department to change a new rule about going off-trail in open space in 2012, and i did my best to start changing myself.
i stopped speaking up about controversial things that got me fired up, because i am so highly connected all i could do was raise the temperature of the discussions. i boosted the voices of people more eloquent than i am, instead. i intentionally worked to excise those last twitter-y parts of myself as much as i could. i worked hard to kill kill the last parts of myself that would get Righteously Mad And Want To Speak Up, because i realized it made me foul and tired and it made the people around me feel foul too. going back to twitter (and bluesky, which is federated twitter with no privacy and fewer fascists) makes me feel like an alien, now.
there's still deep anger at the injustices of the world, but it's a cold, quiet fury, the sort that manifests itself in an urge to do instead of an urge to yell.
i learned to write longform, because of cohost.
i relearned how to indulge my creative drives in a huge number of ways, because of cohost.
i became what i hope is a more levelheaded person, and one more pleasant to be around, than i ever was before, because of cohost.
i made my rent multiple times when i had no way of doing so otherwise, because of cohost.
i sold prints of my photos for the first time, because of cohost.
i learned html and css, because of cohost.
i made friends, because of cohost.
i enjoyed my time here, because it was cohost.
i have seen better things are possible. i have seen that a small team can build something new that people will enjoy. things that have never been tried can flourish, at least for a while, and people will do new and wonderful things in the space and with the tools afforded them.
amidst the despair of losing the first place online i had that actually felt like home, i had an idea, and people liked it. now i am learning modern system administration. i am working with a team of incredibly skilled folks, doing things i'd never done before, some of which i'd previously bounced off of and assumed i couldn't learn. i am flexing my graphic design muscles for the first time in years, using the CSS skills i learned here. i am pouring every ounce of power i have into making something, burning the candle at ends i didn't know it had. (i can relax in two days.)
we all believe in this. we are a voluntarist organization, a union of sorts, instead of a worker's cooperative; we can spread the load out, even if we aren't getting paid. we can learn from the pitfalls of cohost, and we can learn from the mistakes, and we can learn from the things that went wonderfully. some of us have been on since the earliest days, some of us came later; we have seen the evolution, and we have seen the highlights, and we have seen the low points. we are working to remember the good things and fix the bad ones. we are examining our own actions and procedures critically, questioning ourselves, and trying to make sure we do this the best we can, with all the knowledge available to us.
we are building something new. it's not gonna be cohost; nothing could ever be cohost. it occupied a unique place in time, had a unique set of people, a unique culture. but we know things that are new and good can be built, and we think we might be able to build one.
we are trying because of cohost.


