💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 9-06.gmi captured on 2024-09-29 at 00:39:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I think I'm done with cohost. The anti-capitalist bastard lovechild of Tumblr and LiveJournal was one of the first sites I tried once it became clear that Twitter, under its new owner, was basically screwed. I came there at the same time as a few other poets from Twitter. I think there were four of us. Two made accounts but I don't know if they even posted. One of them posted for a month or so with a fervor I admired - treating the site as a blogging or journal platform rather than a jokey, shitpostey Twitter replacement. And then she stopped. Ran out of steam, I guess. And then it was just me.
I spent I think a year and a half there, joining in late 2022. I tried posting, but it was really hard. The actual tools aren't bad - you have Markdown, you can do all kinds of custom CSS to do wild things (what're known on cohost as "CSS crimes"), but it's very difficult to find interesting things. Cohost, being owned and run by a small trans and queer team, made very clear early on that it would favour safety over all else. This has meant, among other things, allowing search to only consider user-applied hashtags. There's no way to do a full-text search of public posts like on other sites.
Discoverability, as you can imagine, is an absolute nightmare, ranging from annoying to outright impossible.
posts from @staff tagged #financials
Cohost has recently been going through a rough spell - and has for a long time, but in late March, it came to light that their investor (they have one, singular) stopped responding. Things since then have improved, somewhat, but oof. I came to terms a long time ago that cohost wasn't really going to be a central thing for me (a cis, straight, middle-aged [ow, fuck, ow] white man). I tried to make a go of it, but never found anything approaching community. I feel like, for me, there's been more community in the dark of geminispace than there. And maybe that's fine. But at what point do you stop trying?
I think for me that was a long time ago, and I could tell because, any time a post started feeling longer, more substantive, I'd select-all, copy, and start a draft over here.
I realized a long time ago that the golden age of blogging, or journalling, or whatever you want to call it, passed at some point in the 00s, maybe around the time that people stopped thinking about what they could make, or what they wanted to write, what they wanted to say, and instead shifted that thought to where they should go. There are a lot of reasons for this: the creeping competence of capitalism with respect to the online; the move to platforms, user capture, engagement; and whatever else. But I realized a long time ago that I wanted to talk about my life and listen to other people talk about theirs. I feel compelled to repeat this pattern online, over and over. HTML journal, LiveJournal, cohost, small web, and here. Life is short and I've lost too many friends the last few years, and I'm not going to watch videos and scroll until I die.
But ultimately it can't just be me screaming into the void. The quiet community here is still community. Through the odd email or response I see via antenna, I can tell that people are reading, that this might be a sparse and disconnected discussion, but it's a discussion nonetheless.
I can't keep going forever faced with nothing but silence, and cohost has the disadvantage of being the closest to my irl identity - under my initials, very easy to figure out who I am if you check particular hashtags that you can tie to the rest of my online life. The fear of creeping by a couple of people from my past is something I think about a bit here, as well as on the small web. On cohost, it was so bad as to be self-censoring. _Don't talk about ---_, I'd tell myself. _You don't know if you're still being searched._
So I found a few scripts to dump cohost posts as text - no images. I ran it, dumped it all to disk, and then I moved it into one of my personal repos, alongside my LiveJournal and HTML journal and all the other traces I've left of my life online. No one cares but me, you know? But it's still important. It's a record. And I'll come back to it later.