a social media retrospective

i typed up a different, equally long post on my feelings about cohost's legacy and shutdown, alongside social media as a whole; my goal with this version was to make it less personal, but, instead, i guess it just became better organized. maybe none of this is particularly interesting territory that hasn't already been tread by other former chosters, but hey, that's not the point, right? it's MY blog, and i get to choose the posts/essays :)

for those uninitiated, cohost was a sort of tumblr copycat trying to do Many things, but the thing i harp on most is what it did to discourage engagement-based interactions in favor of direct ones; posts didn't tally up how many shares or likes it got, only comments. this came with the downside of losing tag browsing, and, in a sense, took away a core function of finding new blogs for at least me and a couple other tumblr migrators. sure, we could use comments, and i think it was overall a net gain anyway, but i'd be inclined to agree with anyone bringing up the discoverability issues on the site, personally--i searched thru tags, tried to follow people, and i felt like i never reached those inner bubbles where "everyone" was talking about something, allegedly. i hate to start on a downer note, but in the end, even though i kept insisting it was fine because i was sure i was just doing it wrong, i was on cohost for a decent enough chunk of time where this shouldn't have continued to be an issue, and i'm quite disappointed about it now in retrospect.

on the other hand, obviously, i had enough incentive to stick around--i really, really did like the site for what it was, and what it was trying to be. i know people definitely got on ASSC's case for cohost's striking lack of profitability; i've seen sentiments both long-winded and short, both beating around the bush and saying it outright: "if i were making a social media website, i'd simply make it profitable!" and to that, like many others, i'd say i'm earnestly awaiting your attempt--maybe you'll make the first ever social media website that's both profitable AND worth being on!! wouldn't that be a treat in this day and age?? from where i'm standing, though, not even tumblr--or twitter!!!--are profitable either, so it definitely feels like a hollow little "gotcha!" about a website with 4 staff members, especially when it's said on like, you know, tumblr, lol. (on that note, i can't find The post i was thinking of from funder #1 of cohost, and also i was linking other posts from them too but the web archive links don't even work because you had to be logged in to view their posts. but, they talked more than once about prioritizing paying staff a living wage that reflected the cost of living and inflation. it may have seemed steep, but again, this was 4 people doing the work of running an entire social media website, and i continue to be of the opinion that people deserve to be paid a decent wage, especially for a particularly large amount of work. people have also said that pay raises at the end should've gone to keeping the site running; i think it's nice funder #1 pointed out that would've been wage theft, given the terms of raise agreements.)

a lot of the things that maybe could've made cohost more profitable are...very much the things we complain about on other social media websites, though, right? isn't it a running joke to try and keep tumblr unprofitable, in part because the solutions they throw at us for their funding issues are often extremely abrasive? social media just really isn't all that profitable to begin with, even under the most painful and predatory of efforts to capitalize, and i'm honestly surprised people got on cohost's case for that in particular--especially from people i thought would otherwise know better, and especially because the reception (at least in my own circles) is always so (rightfully!!) negative whenever a site tries to capitalize on something new. i have an immense amount of respect for the fact that ASSC stuck to deliberately trying to make something weird and unprofitable. when things got rough with stripe's policy changes and funding, they didn't cave to, say, promoted posts and advertisements on your feed; instead, they implemented something with the goal of actually enriching the site--the artist's alley!!

the artist's alley is where i found a ton of cool art projects, like corru.observer for example. as far as i understand/remember, it was pretty cheap for the amount of time you got on the page; it was in its own dedicated space, and if you wanted it on your feed, you could simply follow a page that posted each listing. people paid to list all sorts of things, sometimes just gags and jokes; looking at the listings, certainly a great number of them were written With Advertising Intent, and obviously not all of it grabbed my attention, but there was a much more earnest sort of culture about it, too--i really felt like a decent percentage of what i could find on the artist's alley was more passion and less cash-grab. i truly am sad that i never got the chance to put up a listing for my own projects--honestly, unless something similar ever comes along, that would've been the only place i would ever ever EVER consider to pay to advertise. this direction, i feel, was a hell of a lot better than contradicting the missions of the site just to earn a few extra bucks and keep going for a few extra months--or even years. that'd be like dragging eggbug's corpse around in front of us, watching it degrade and become less and less recognizable; and personally, i'm extremely glad i didn't have to see that.

altogether, cohost was temporary, but it was an important experience to me. it shut down, but i don't consider that a failure in the slightest. it did so with eggbug's dignity intact; they tried, and they gave us something new and different for a while--whether you liked it or hated it, we still learned a few things about what worked, didn't work, or could've been better. personally, i took away a lot from it; first, though, i wanna point out additionally that on the "didn't work" side, cohost certainly had some harassment and poor moderation issues that disproportionately affected users of color--staff started to make what sounded to me like some solid beginning plans to do better in the future, such as a more transparent reporting system for example, but we didn't get to see much of that implemented. i truly wish everything good i'm about to say about it could've been true for everyone; but, the fact is, my experience with cohost was different from visible users of color, and really isn't the complete picture if that's what you're looking for.

that being said, cohost was one of many dominos that led to me seeing myself under the light i currently got, if that makes sense--lesbian, furry, autistic, etc. maybe that'll change again someday, but it feels right currently, and to top it off, i like who i am now! :) one thing that was extremely important to me even just relaxing barely enough to realize i had myself all wrong was the much larger userbase of transfems, just interacting and expressing themselves without bigoted censorship--especially transfem furries. i realized both on cohost and on a very fun trip to see a friend that for however much i jumped on the bandwagon of cracking jokes about furries (i was going for a good-natured sort of humor, but, i don't think i succeeded, sorry x_x) i also feel most comfortable and at ease around furries, too. actually, i made a long, unfinished, low-effort comic about realizing i'm a lesbian, just for myself; here's a small bit from it that sums this up pretty well, even if it was still pre-lion times:

(fun fact, i wanted to be a werewolf around this time, lol. it's a slippery slope......)

ok wait, here's a sidenote that liveblogs my own comic i made, but i think these panels are funny too and i also gotta point something out for the road:

wow. i even acknowledged my gender envy for the vampire king, and i still didn't go lion mode for a good long while. wow.......smfh.....

ANYWAY, as you may notice, i was trying to work on some of my own behaviors and immediate, super-reactive, trauma-based responses to certain things and certain feelings, and i felt like--and still feel--it disproportionately affected transfems.

i'm still learning and trying to be better in that regard, and many others, to this day--they don't say it's a lifelong commitment for nothing ! but, it'd feel incomplete not to mention a great video i watched that led me to the mentality i used cohost with.

so i've mentioned freedom of sexual expression, and i've mentioned furries--there's one other thing though: have you ever noticed how tumblr is touted as the autism website, but there is still such a vicious fucking culture of mocking people for autistic behavior? not to fall into the trap of monolithing an entire website of users, but you really do see this a fucking lot, even from other autistic people--for not understanding "site etiquette" that basically amounts to "it's your fault if i don't like you and you either need to apologize+get the fuck out of my way or prepare for a mass harassment campaign (via callout or ridicule)"? for not understanding sarcasm or jokes? for not immediately understanding the implicit nuance behind a 1-sentence post, or needing things rephrased every now and again and asking for help trying to understand your point? (an ask, for the record, that to me, shows an encouraging investment in your post, but you could literally just ignore it if you don't want to/have time??) for taking chances to infodump and share interesting facts in good nature? for using a fucking blogging website, AS a blogging website? don't get me wrong--there definitely exists a loud base of users who genuinely do not seem interested in appropriately understanding a post; but, that's a different issue than the ableism i'm talking about.

completely normal autistic behaviors are immensely punished on tumblr; i heard a lot of "simply don't care about what other people think! :)"-type sentiments, but this is a problem i feel runs much deeper than positive thinking and self-confidence can solve alone, at least for me. i think there is a very good reason i kept quietly, unconsciously undiagnosing myself as autistic: a number of my own autistic behaviors that i have learned to hide or suppress over the years are mocked relentlessly on tumblr, and i grew both immensely ashamed of myself and absolutely, soul-crushingly terrified that i was always next in the overflowing line of "Main Characters", just to borrow a twitter term--the weird freak we reblog/screenshot and share around to laugh at. maybe we'll even scrub out your username in the screenshot, just to preserve some semblance of kindness and privacy; don't go find them and mess with them, ok? <3 but, at the end of the day, what fucking difference does that make, really? what does it change about your intent, and how often does that REALLY change the outcome? all that does is add, like, a couple extra steps at most to someone invested enough to go and start digging up that entire person's account for more mockery fodder and proof that "it's okay, they're problematic, actually!", and let's be honest, that proof is usually something to the effect of an out of context post that mentioned homestuck off-handed five years ago.

i've seen it happen too many times to count, sometimes--to varying extents--even to my own beloved mutuals over the 10+ years i used tumblr. in my final post on tumblr, i called this fear paranoia and delusion; but already, i'm feeling like that's massively unfair to the fact that it literally happens to people like me every day, seemingly at fucking random. you could be minding your business on a blog of 10+ years where all you did was post about, idk, your boobah fanfiction, and out of nowhere--relative to your own experience at least--you could be picked out of a crowd of tens, hundreds, or even thousands to become the new victim of a mass harassment campaign, simply because your art is considered (imo VERY arbitrarily) weird, cringe, or nebulously problematic. it just feels like there's a social divide that dictates whether you're "autistic <3" or "cringe"/"mean"/"problematic"/even outright "ableist", based purely on assumption and vibes.

one thing i liked tumblr for at first, though, WAS the fact that it was a blogging website; and then, over time, it became more and more punished to share longform thoughts, either socially or engagement-wise--because, on an engagement-based system, you do have to acknowledge how immensely discouraging it is to work for hours and hours, even months and months--YEARS AND YEARS--on something that gets 0 or few notes. this is one thing i mean when i may talk about how predatory social media websites can be; they're built around the notion that a 0 note(/like/share/whatever) post is a failure, after all, and i don't think it's fair to dismiss the psychological torment of that, because clearly it's encouraged a massive shift online towards short-form posts that get more immediate attention. in a capitalist society, where an increasing number of people are working 40 or often More hours a week for less pay, art pieces and posts alike do much better if they're shorter, feel-good, and easier to interpret quickly; so smaller, unchallenging, low-effort pieces and thoughts drive much better engagement! building a site around optimizing engagement (for ad revenue, for your data, etc) very much requires preying upon people's burnout, exhaustion, frustration, aggression, and insecurities--i mean, it worked for facebook, didn't it?! sure, there's lots of options to cut down on this--but why should i have to basically beat a website into submission with hidden settings and firefox extensions just to make it tolerable? can't a website just be a nice, pleasant experience on its own?

socially, though, Yes, i think there was a shift towards punishing legitimate blogging behavior; usually via "i'm not actually interested in reading your post so i'll just skim and get mad at you for no reason" types. i also saw a lot of posts floating around over the years to the effect of, Man, Nobody's Reading That Shit. nobody's interested in what YOU have to say if it means we have to put in effort to read it. if we have to put in effort to read something, you better have something damn fucking good to say. and i mean, that's one thing, seeing people say mean things online; that's a universal constant. but people really do seem to get ticked off if they feel like you wasted their time, when you never sat them down and forced them to read your post. it feels to me like it's taken VERY personally if someone invests time into something you made and they aren't actually into it--honestly, and i know this is already a term for the workplace but i'm recycling it anyway, it comes across to me as a perceived "time theft" issue, or maybe energy theft might be more accurate. it's like, if i'm going to invest 20 minutes of my day--for many or even most, a genuinely valuable amount of personal time!!! this is someone's entire lunch break!!!--you better be able to justify to me WHY i should spend this time on you. to be clear, i have a lot of sympathy for the issue; but it generates a lot of shitty behavior that i'm not super interested in subjecting myself to seeing anymore, wherever i can help it.

in a culture like that, even though i was largely on the blogging website to blog to begin with, i slowly became more and more convinced that my realest thoughts and feelings were not only not worth sharing, but actively dangerous to share. it infected every part of my artistic process in many cases, at one point or another. my writing became less and less fulfilling, more removed from myself, my experiences, and my feelings, more catered to what i thought others wanted to read, until i'd just give up on the whole thing--for at least a while, because truly, i can't stay away from writing. i tried to put myself--or "myself"--back into my works through Socially Accepted means, in the feel-good ways; simultaneously, because you can never TRULY remove yourself from your art 100%--even with an executive team picking the bones clean for you--if i realized anything too personal unintentionally made it through into a work, i'd panic and delete it; i'm still actively trying not to delete one fic in particular right now, actually, lol.

but here's the thing: i never actually stopped writing for good. as soon as i pulled off of tumblr, all these undesirable habits of mine, such as "making personal art" and "writing about things i'm passionate about" persisted, and even--gasp--got worse!!! i got back into the habit of posting Frequently on cohost, at first because on a new social media site that "nobody's on", for everything i said about engagement and all, i also feel like "dead"/slow sites need brave warriors to post as much as possible to fill up that gap and incentivize more use of the site, lead by example, etc etc--so, i wanted to take up that mantle to drag as many friends over to cohost as possible. but i hadn't gotten to the root of why i always felt so terrible about everything i ever thought and said and made, so i ended up kicking off everyone from my account and locking it.

even when i knew nobody was looking, i kept journaling and blogging. even when i was committed to never sharing, i still made art. my "undesirable habits" grew and changed and developed, and so did i. it hasn't been an entirely pleasant process, but when i removed my most crushing sources of fear of harassment, the actual process of creation and observation of other people and the world became a whole lot more enriching. and sure, maybe my fear seems completely disproportionate to how likely mass tumblr harassment actually is to happen, statistically, or maybe even if it does happen, it doesn't seem like THAT big a deal--i think the fear does stem from a deeper place in me, but given the nature of it, i know for a fact i'm not the only one with that particular sort of heart wound. on the other side of that same coin, my ACTUALLY undesirable habits--my small-mindedness, my unwillingness to admit i'm wrong or don't understand something, my bigotry--became a lot clearer, a lot less mortifying to look at, and a lot easier to start chipping away at.

and all the while, as i kept challenging myself and growing, i watched a robust community of people be themselves without apologizing for sincerity, for weirdness, and for unprofitability/unpopularity. i wouldn't even say i saw a community of people "just like me" and finally felt at home--it was far more comforting, actually, to see people behaving in all sorts of ways that weirded me the hell out, with no mass mockery directed at them to show for it. (of course, i know that's not 100% true, especially after the twitter exodus of elon musk fame, but for reasons discussed above, i didn't really see that.) that's not to say i didn't block people or decide i didn't want anything to do with them, but far more often, i got to sit with my discomfort and normalize about it--on tumblr, i certainly didn't get the time to do that because of how fast the constant feed of information runs. even when i wasn't trying to keep up with The Latest Discourse (lest i end up on the wrong side of it myself), it still felt like everything happened so much faster on tumblr in a way that's difficult for me to pin down. maybe someone else has phrased it better than i could; i certainly remember seeing similar sentiments in the past.

and, very importantly, when i did see conflict, it wasn't full of conversation-ending quips and mockery--at least not usually. there was a larger culture of legitimate interest in understanding the other person's point and making yourself understood in turn, and maybe this isn't totally true, but i also felt like it was encouraged to take your time. there wasn't an expectation to kneel down and grovel when someone decided you've said something egregious enough that you deserve to be belittled and mocked for their and everyone else's entertainment. people were genuinely interested in each other's thoughts and talking about it--not just making snap judgements and talking behind each other's backs. again, i know this isn't the whole picture; i know a lot of this existed in corners of cohost i didn't see, and i also know these nicer types of communities must exist somewhere on tumblr too. but this is my experience, and it informs my goals in what i'd like to get out of my next internet experience and the sorts of people i'd rather follow/associate with.

of course, not all of this has been related to cohost--hence why i call it a "social media" retrospective. some of these changes i've talked about in my life may sound like i'm giving way too much credit to dear sweet eggbug, to which i have two responses:

JOKE: don't talk to me or my bug ever again.
SERIOUS: yeah, maybe, lol

but, to bring it back around, my experience with cohost emphasized a lot of things that i wanna take with me into the future. being on most major social media platforms certainly can still come with benefits that i WILL sorely miss, i won't deny; but for me, it makes demons start to attack me through the computer. it encourages my worst, most miserable, and most maladaptive behaviors, and i don't want to be that bitter, super-reactive, irony-poisoned sort of person anymore; cohost showed me i'm not the only one who feels this way. putting effort into a better and healthier online experience is possible, worthwhile, and increasingly important. we deserve to carve out our own spaces to be weird, authentic, sincere, inconsistent, and unprofitable on the internet. hell, we deserve to shamelessly fail, or "fail" at things--we deserve to share things about ourselves and the things we've done and made without worrying about whether it'll do numbers, or even just severals. we don't have to feed the ravenous fucking beast of social media. we deserve to take things slow. we deserve to spend time on things online that enrich us, that challenge and inspire us, rather than hurting or placating us. we don't have to work ourselves to the bone to ramp it up after one success, make each piece better and better to satisfy the beast, or justify ourselves as worth spending the time on. creation is fun, important, and part of human nature; we might as well do it from the heart, as ourselves, instead of as a tiny cog in a massive corporate machine.

there are some very strict guidelines to make something profitable; even then, success largely amounts to luck, or at the very least, circumstances outside of your control. chasing that goal may eventually pay the bills, but it can far more easily become a heartless and passion-crushing endeavor, even if you succeed; and imo, just as much, the same goes for chasing engagement and popularity--the biggest difference to me is whose pockets are being filled, and whose aren't. i shan't deny that popularity comes with benefits; i guess it's just up to you to decide what's worth it and what's not! but personally, i'm done with it all. now more than ever, i plan to create only for me and my favorite freaks on earth. maybe i'll still get scared with this blog/rss feed, maybe demons will still attack me through the computer, and maybe i'll move on to some different methods of sharing my work--but it's worth a shot, right?

i've said it a million times already, but i'll keep saying it: the internet is for bad art forever. we can't let corporations like fucking patreon convince us otherwise. posting bad art is good for the online ecosystem. i'm going to try harder to do my part, so you give it a try too, okay? <3

to that end, quickly clarifying that i mean "bad" playfully and am by no means calling anybody's art bad with sincerity, i would love to include a spotlight for free/low-cost art i love in my blog posts. i might not do it for every post, but when i do it, know it comes from the heart. with that said, here's my first spotlight, if you're interested:

don't rock the boat by elliot degrassi is a horror webnovel/game (?? i'm interested in the distinction actually, lol) about women's sports that plays INCREDIBLY with point of view. read in any order (though i had fun working my way down the boat, first to last), you read the perspective of each team member, presented with new information and new biases in each POV that gives you a bone-chilling view of the dangers they face the more you read. not just that, but every character is written with so much detail and attention; the author gives us thoughtful observations about the sort of person each character is. it's incredible in both an emotional and a very technical sense--their biases and what they do or don't pay attention to is both incredibly well-thought out and works in perfect harmony with the nature and formatting of the story itself. i never felt bored with reading the same event over and over again, always presented with something new and grabbing each time until i finally had the whole picture--one that left me with a very compelling sense of horror and frustration, and i hope that comes across in the best way possible, and doesn't dismiss the nicer aspects of the story as well. without saying too much, it accomplished making me feel some very strong things about women's sports and more in a new and very up-close-and-personal light, and i love this story very much for that. something in particular i try to take inspiration from in my own writing is the phenomenal grip on character voice!!

anyway, wow, this ended up way longer than i thought it would. if you're reading this, thank ydou for checking out my blog/feed! next time, maybe i'll do a dive on tumblr fandom experience over the past decade-ish, or maybe i'll talk about babe: pig in the city. both are just as likely.