published on 23 Sep, 2024. approximately a 6 minute read.
it's going to become pretty obvious pretty quickly that i have a complicated relationship with social media. i've been using the internet to connect with people since 2001, in some form or another. i have developed deep, meaningful relationships with some of my closest friends in the world without ever meeting them face to face. i would be surprised if the number of days in the past 20 years that i didn't talk to someone online in some manner were much higher than 50. i participated in forums when that was the thing that you did, i hung out in mmos, chat rooms, virtual worlds. the term "metaverse" described the space i spent most of my free time before facebook was open for public registration. this is all to say that i am very comfortable expressing myself on the internet.
but i hate posting.
to clarify, i love writing posts. i love sharing my thoughts with people who care about me. i am unfortunately not immune to the dopamine spike you get when the notifications tab has a badge with a number on it. but when you make a post on a website, here's the thing: people see it. and they want you to know that they saw it. sometimes that rocks! i love connecting with like-minded people whose work excites me. but sometimes it's kind of a nightmare.
i made a bluesky account recently, for reasons i will get to, and it has absolutely incurable twitter capitalism disease. it is full of weird art-theft accounts trying to make numbers go up, starving artists who follow you and interact with your posts to try to scrape up any followers they can muster, people replying to posts with reaction gifs oddly and poorly compressed into video files, all of it. this was all immediately evident to me within ten minutes of signing up for the site, just by looking. it's an inherent part of what that site was designed to be.
this is not the fault of the people doing it. this is a culture issue with what social media means in the world these days. this is the natural result of promising people a global audience, and giving them all metrics dashboards designed to maximize their engagement in trying to maximize other people's engagements with their content. this type of website has been refined over the course of years to hijack your brain and demand your attention forever and always. its power to connect people is a wonderful gift and a terrible curse.
but not every social media site has been like that! if you're here, you might be thinking:
well, this is the part where she talks about cohost.
hello. this is the part where i talk about cohost.
cohost, lovingly referred to as the fourth website, is an ill-destined social media website that wanted to not be what i described above. in a number of ways, it was remarkably successful. the only visible number you'd ever see on a post was how many comments it had. there were no follower counts, no likes or views numbers, effectively no statistics at all. this meant that when you came across a post, you were not engaging with it according to what a metric indicated you should think about it. rather, you engaged with the content of the post itself, because that's effectively all there was. artists were on a fairly even ground: you might follow someone who has 120,000 twitter followers, and someone else with 200, but if you only see them on cohost then there's absolutely nothing differentiating them from one another. the works stand alone and speak for themselves.
it also had a feature that really drew me to the site originally: its markdown parser allowed a subset of html, including some embedded styles. before the edges were totally sanded down, this led to some absolute chaos. a notable example was an animated dog that would stay in the same spot on your screen even if you scrolled away from the post. these became affectionately known as "css crimes," and were a huge creative staple of the community in the early days.
i won't speculate on whether it was the design of the website, the resulting community, or the intersection of the two that led to this, but cohost seemed to me to have an exceedingly high ratio of what i'll refer to as "good faith engagement." you had to put in a modicum of work to find people to follow, and there was (for most of the site's lifetime) no other way to see content than to follow people (or tags). this meant that an algorithm was never showing you a post you didn't elect to see; if anything, a person that you chose to follow was. this made interaction on the website seem a lot more intentional, and usually friendly, with people organically sharing and celebrating each others' works, observations, jokes, and absurd new viral music genres.
in the early days it definitely felt like there was a clique, and the site had a hard time shedding its reputation for being full of 30-something tech-worker queer furries from the pnw; seemingly offering little to people who didn't intersect with that demographic. i would say that, of the people i followed, most of them were probably between one and three of those things. but the thing is, for me, this was a place that had an unusual proportion of people who think like i do, create like i do, and care for one another like i do. it was the only website in the past several years that i felt comfortable posting and interacting on. i fell off using it for a while, but i had always taken comfort in knowing that i could go there and feel that again.
so of course when i heard it was shutting down, it lit a proverbial fire under my metaphorical ass.
i don't want to lose this. not cohost specifically; the site is going away soon and we will be celebrating its life. i don't want to lose the sense of potential it instilled in me. the notion that sharing your work with other people can be a positive, joyful experience, rather than a futile attempt to cut through an impenetrable capitalistic wasteland of noise. the idea that expressing myself through writing, style, art; creativity; produces meaning in the world. that other people may take in what i say and grow from it, or sense a sliver of the appreciation i feel for how they've done that for me. i don't want to lose the hope that we can build a network of positive human connection online. i need to see people like me creating and flourishing. now that i've truly felt it, i can't let it go.
people on cohost seem cognizant of the fact that there really isn't anything else like it right now. nothing that fosters the same feeling that i'm talking about here. there was always a push, within the community, towards owning your own space online. you saw a lot of posts advocating for setting up a site on neocities and just filling it with whatever makes you happy. this was already a concept i'd been rotating in my mind since before cohost went public, but the site was comfy enough that i felt like i didn't really need to? so the static site generator i was writing went on hold as i focused on other things.
but cohost is shutting down, and it seems like a lot of people are, actually, making personal websites now. there's even a push for posting to rss feeds, since that's honestly a pretty good model for how cohost's 'following' view worked. this, in particular, has really inspired me.
so here's my first post on a blog engine that i wrote completely from scratch. i'll make a technical post about it later; everyone who writes their own blog platform always has to, of course; but for now, i'm finally writing on something that is end-to-end mine. i finished up some tooling around generating and publishing posts, and wrote an atom feed generator this weekend. i signed up for bluesky, mostly to be able to follow people i've met on other platforms, but i'm also going to be linking to my posts on there and using it as the de facto comments section. my foremost goal with this static site generator was simplicity; it started as a gemtext to html converter, and that's absolutely still the heart of the tooling. i have gone out of my way to make the pages lightweight first, with a focus on accessibility and content.
as for what you can expect here, i honestly am not entirely sure. there will be technical posts, of course, but i have a lot of hobbies and i tend to cycle through them in long phases. i'd like to carry forward the spirit of sharing things that are nice or interesting or worth discussing, so i think i'll be doing that every so often. the intersection of simple home-grown tech and creative art are especially close to my heart, so it doesn't make sense for me to stay in one realm or the other. i'll write up an "about" page soon with a more comprehensive list of the things i'm interested in. (editor's note: the home page will have to do for now.)
for now, if you want to keep up with me: welcome. i'm glad you're here.