Ryusui

and if it was turned it was on a cool place like colossal

i'm not saying half the shit elsewhere that I would here

yeah....

I remember talking to a random media person at a party right around when cohost first started and they seemed almost viscerally disgusted at the thought of a Place Without Numbers Go Up

this was like the employee break room of the internet

The very small handful of times I've seen a chost get picked up for an article (mainly thinking of ars reporting on that Smart TV from Hell causing wifi issues), it's been a cool effortpost rather than inane gossip.

good to know there are still places out there where we can get reliable, measured, objectively reported information about whether or not piss is a vegetable, though.

I actually have/had a big post written up about something tangential to this topic, about how I feel like I missed out on participating in a community I would otherwise have fit into just because I was conditioned by other social media to see myself as white noise at best and painting a target on myself at worst. Drama happened here, sure, but no clout-chasing, no stabbing people in the ribs with real or perceived grievances in public for views, no porn bots or reply guys or Musk stans or other flavors of awful people that keep me from participating in every other website on the internet. It was great, and I was happy to see so many people that don't suck in one place, all pursuing hobbies and talking about neat things and not having a looming specter of engagement or The Algorithm.

There'll never be another Cohost, but if something gets close, I won't make the same mistake. Good communities like this are too rare to let slip by.

You know, you’ll hear professionals talk sometimes about going to an industry conference and all the “great conversations” they had, and one of the things you get at these conferences is: you have almost no idea who’s a “big deal”. Is that person at the breakfast table an executive or Just Some Guy? You can ask, sure, and it might come out in conversation, and there are certain assumptions you might make based on age and how well-dressed someone is, but it’s all guesswork. Mostly you just don’t know and I think that’s a huge part of why these “great conversations” happen. There’s an equality of “important-ness”.

I recently installed extensions to block numbers on twitter and bluesky and. It’s so weird. I love no numbers on cohost but over there I’m still hyper aware of the fact that everyone else sees the numbers and is thinking about them!

Admittedly my use case and neuroses are pretty specific. But. I exclusively use twitter on a locked account and I knowwwwww people will notice if their post has 6 retweets and one is on a locked account, god forbid it be a quote, and it will make them anxious, so I won’t retweet something unless I feel like I can get lost in the crowd. My therapist would probably say I’m thinking too much about managing other people’s emotions, but here we are.

I will continue to sample extensions like this and see if I can get used to it… would love it if this was surmountable.

I was slowly gaining the courage to just say things here. I was beginning to post more often. That was, and still is, a difficult hurdle for me to overcome; I already don't tend to say much unless I "Have Something To Say", and my years on Twitter had conditioned me to shut up unless I have something nuanced and constructive to say. Asking questions led to ridicule and automated responses about tangentially related things. This feeling still hits me like a truck in Discord and here on Cohost.

But I was getting through it. I had started commenting on people's posts here for once. I was making discussion posts where I just wanted to get something out of my head. My art had an uptick for the first time in a long time, and I was excited to be able to eventually share some music that I've been slowly working on.

Cohost has been the biggest help in making me not feel like I shouldn't speak unless spoken to in public spaces. And the fact that I did not have to worry about clout or numbers, even subconsciously, was a huge factor in that. I'm going to miss Cohost so much, and I'm sad that it took me so long to actually start using it like this.

I wish there were more places like it.