Malachite

I barely have a social media presence, have nothing I would put on a dedicated personal website (yet...), and have not set up an RSS feed. I'm going to miss Cohost, not just because of what Cohost is, but also because its shuttering means I'm going to lose a good handful of contacts, many of whom are scattering to places I can't or won't follow.

I feel like I'm going to return to being that person who isn't on any of the sites the people I care about are exclusively communicating on, and thus I won't hear much of anything from those people because those they assume everyone who Matters To Them is on those sites, and so I'll fall out of touch with them just because I refuse to make an Instagram or whatever. I've been that person before, and I can already feel myself slotting back into that place.

That sounds like a lonely existence, and it is, but I also hate how my social life is tied to the surveillance device I have to keep in my pocket at all times (my smartphone). Maybe it'll encourage me to touch more grass.

I have been trying to get more involved in my local furry community lately. Because I've cut myself out of 90% of my local community's social gatherings by being irreligious, I don't really know anyone in my area. But apparently I live in something of a furmeet hotspot, so I'm hoping getting more involved in furry life will be a decent band-aid for my hemorrhaging social life. Half of my previously-local friend circle has moved out of state, and my college friends are steadily graduating and moving away as well--that and they're the ones who share their whole lives on websites I don't use, and almost nowhere else, so between that and my discomfort around alcohol (adult social life seems to revolve around drinking) I feel like I've drifted away from them despite my best efforts.

I don't know where I'm going with this post, and it ended up a lot more dreary than I initially intended it to be. I guess I'll end it here.

I tend to prize my pseudo-anonymity in online spaces, and I don't think I've interacted in a mutual sort of way with many people on here, but just in case anyone wants to know, here's the one (possibly two in the near future) other site(s) you can find me on.

• siliconereptilian is my Tumblr. Tumblr is really the only social media aside from Cohost that I post (and/or share) stuff on with any regularity, and though I've been kind of inactive there lately, I expect the death of Cohost will tick up my Tumblr usage again (for better or for worse).
• EDIT: siliconereptilian is also my Pillowfort! It’s currently barren because I’ve been out of the house most of the day, but it won’t be forever! I've been thinking about making a Pillowfort for ages. Cohost's demise is probably going to be what pushes me to actually do it. If/when that happens, I'll update this with a link to that. I would just sign up for their rolling waitlist right now, but I'm about to go to sleep after I finish typing this up. Will probably do that in the morning.

And that's literally it for other social media sites I use and/or will probably use in the near future. Here are the ones I have but am not going to publicly share. For completeness's sake, I guess.

• I do have a Discord and, more recently, a Telegram. However, I'm not comfortable enabling Just Anyone™️ to send me friend requests on Discord by posting my username--especially since I rarely interact with people outside of a server context anyway (in other words, I almost never DM people except for my wife lol). If I want you to know my Discord username, you probably already do. As for Telegram, I made that exclusively to interact with the furry community in the area I live in (apparently they're all on Telegram and almost nowhere else), so I will definitely not share that publicly, sorry.
• I have a Reddit account, but seriously, who uses Reddit as a way to connect with people? Also I'm in the subreddit for my university and I'd rather not doxx myself, lol.

Now, for the ones I genuinely don't use and can't see myself ever using.

• I don't use Twitter. I've been meaning to delete my Twitter, and it was barely used even before Elon Musk took over.
• Similarly, I don't use Bluesky or Mastodon. Probably never will, since I didn't have much use for Twitter.
• Only reason I haven't yet deleted my Facebook, which I haven't logged into in literal years, is a combination of What If I Need To Contact The Relatives I Don't Hate and sheer inertia lmao. Also sharing that would DEFINITELY be a self-doxx.

QUICK EDIT: Oh and it's not social media, but I also have an AO3, cardiacorigami. However, it's literally only got one fic and a handful of bookmarks on it. More might come in the future as I finish my MUCH bigger fics.

Twitter is made out of brain poison. Elon owning it is a problem, but not the problem. I will never join bluesky because it's made of the same brain poison. I made that same mistake years ago when I first left twitter, people had fooled me into thinking the problem with twitter was that it was owned by a company. Again, a problem but not the problem. And mastodon turned out to still be made of that brain poison, and being owned by one million different hobbyists didn't turn out to be an improvement over being owned by a company.

I'm glad I didn't jump ship from anything for cohost. I'm still on tumblr and I'm having fun there. Tumblr is also made of brain poison, but it's the kind of brain poison you can have recreationally like weed or alcohol, not the kind that will make me miserable unless I overdo it. I have fun on tumblr if I'm careful, whereas if I click on a link to a tweet there's an 80% chance I'll spend the next 5 to 60 minutes making myself miserable. I have fun on cohost too, I think it's a tumblr-type brain poison. Or maybe its own type of brain poison. Haven't yet had any really bad experiences by which to evaluate the nuances there.

here is the thing. the promise of web 2.0 was that the internet would provide a beautiful haven for free/volunteer-built utilities, and that worked for a while (probably related to the relative stability of the american imperial core). reddit chugged along great with volunteer mods, wikipedia was a bright beacon of free knowledge, archive.org was a brand new amazing resource.

those things, give or take, still exist, but the relative stability of the imperial core is faltering. the generally comfortable folks who once staffed the volunteer ranks of these utilities are no longer generally comfortable. The corporate state of america, broadly, is becoming more suspicious of these ad-hoc public utilities (in the same way that private interests always fear public resources).

so now we're in a weird state. the quasi-public resources of the past decade are retreating into their (always-extant, but rarely-enforced) private interests. broadly speaking, a lot of websites are shutting down many of the access/control routes they used to maintain in order to chase a more stable/growing/infinite profitbase (that may or may not exist). Private capital is squeezing the properties that it funded for the profit that it believes it is deserved (it is not deserved, of course, but that's capitalism. reminder that venture capitalism is, fundamentally, theft in the same way that any ownership profiteering is theft -- those who do not labor are receiving profit).

i'm not sure what happens from here. we are still in the long dark that births monsters, to bastardize gramsci. I personally believe that well-supported worker cooperatives a la Cohost are one way forward, but they require a buy-in from the public that I believe could exist but is slow to arrive. I also believe that there is a public solution, either via grants or entire maintenance, but that also feels slow to arrive.

I'm not pessimistic. I believe that what people want to exist will eventually exist, but it requires effort, evangelization, spreading the word. I would like Cohost to survive, to come out as a prominent pillar of the post-VC collapse of social media. But it will require a lot of support, and in the absence of vulture capitalism, that's gotta be us.

so anyway, buy cohost plus, and if you can, buy it multiple times.