I think if I were to describe cohost's biggest success it would be in making a site whose core design was so repellent to clout-chasing press and influencer types that I never have to worry about anything I say being picked up and turned into an article
help help i'm trapped in the comput
- yeah
- whatnames.itch.io/
i followed 4,939 people on twit and i have NOT learned my lesson
i make games, theatre, AND A LOT OF NOISE
parked url for future personal website
whatnames.fyi
a bearblog
what.bearblog.dev/
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
Yeah a big part of my issue finding a place for my gay-ass writing was, well. y'all saw the dude running tumblr. and the Twitter format (and therefore all of its clones) sucks ass for writing.
I really wish things worked out better.
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 place really does seem to somehow existentially offend some of the worst people online. Like not just nazis or whatever, who never seemed to even show interest? But like specific brands of Extremely Online Cop Brain types, whether their area of self-appointed enforcement was "open source" or "the existence of queer people who don't think like me."
Or even just "i should be able to sit in place while the website spoon-feeds me a [wholly imaginary] sense of knowing everything important that's happening".
Twitter really broke a bunch of people's brains by allowing them to pretend that it represented a singular consensus reality for news and the internet as a whole. Many journalists still live with that mindset about it.
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.
"I was conditioned by other social media to see myself as white noise at best and painting a target on myself at worst."
This is really the worst part about having to leave Cohost, every other website is just this
It's amazing how efficiently the profit-oriented social media mega-corpos make one of the most fundamental of human experiences a wellspring of conflict and misery for the sake of arbitrary revenue. We deserve better.
