So funnily enough I saw the financial update for Cohost just before posting this, and that situation is looking a little less dire. So that's good! Before I dig into the life update, I want to say I don't want Cohost to go anywhere, and I don't want to go anywhere either. So about that life update:
🎉 I'm unemployed 🎉
Wednesday was my last day at my now-former office. I don't feel a particular need to go into granular detail right now, or maybe ever in a searchable online blog format, but I've been keeping the job search up and reaching out to other folks in my industry for a while. The "job search becomes the job" part will become reality soon enough, but I'm taking some time to re-calibrate, too. The writing was on the wall for a while. I was prepared for it.
Financially I'm okay and am not in immediate need. Not having a solid, predictable income sucks, but at the very least it gives me time to really sit down and block out things I wanted to do with Ko-Fi and alternatives as a tip jar and to stream more. But there's time to hammer out the finer details on that considering I suddenly have a lot more time on my hands.
But it's also so, so much less stress. There's a lot I simply wasn't able to do because the work-life balance was so tilted towards work. Maybe that's a story for another time, years removed from where I am now.
Cohost
I turbo do not want Cohost to go away. I was thinking over the previous weekend how I hadn't done Cohost Plus, and maybe there was a way to do a one-time donation? Then the news hit and I signed up for a subscription. Multiple of them. And I want to keep that going for as long as I can - right now, doing so won't break the bank for me.
Way back in ancient times, I used DeviantArt; I moved away from that because they kept pushing obnoxious features, their Points system, and ultimately ended up deleting my gallery because they were experimenting with cryptocurrency. Tumblr is... we all know what's up with Tumblr. TwiXter is a fascist nightmare tire fire. I was on Pillowfort for a while but I ended up turning off comments because of people being weirdly content cop towards me, not to mention the various security vulnerabilities they had just... constantly. Don't fucking talk to me about BlueSky. The Mastodon instance I'm on is all right, but...
... it's not here. There's something kinder, more gentle, more community about Cohost that gets lost everywhere else. Comments on Cohost are something I actually get excited about. Unlike anywhere else, I don't get an anxiety spike assuming they're weird, offensive, or angry. There's genuine conversations and connections. I feel myself staring to feel open to linking with people again in these spaces after well over a decade of social media breaking everything into tiny, angry encampments spoon-fed algorithms.
Even if it ultimately goes away, if what I can offer in dollars keeps Cohost around for that much longer, it's worth it. So many people who need Cohost for this community and can't offer up dollars themselves. As long as I can cover more than my share for even a little bit, it's worth it to extend that time just a little longer for all of us. I dig this community. I need it too. There's a lot of people to meet, people I want to get to know better, still.
I want Cohost to thrive.
