This post is mirrored on cohost as well and was written with it in mind. But also not? It's fine, don't worry about it.

Like many people in my age group, I think it's fair to say that I grew up online.

the pre-social media years

My "life online" really started in the mid-2000s when I joined the forums of Crystal XP. This name probably won't mean anything to you, but if you used Windows XP at the time, you might have seen their "BricoPacks". These were 1-click installers that reskinned your entire Windows installation. Their most successful one was the Vista Inspirat one. Pretty wild stuff. Oh, and also CrystalXP was "responsible" for that one Tux and its myriad of variations you might see on every other Linux fanboy's profile.

But like I said, they had forums. I joined those forums after reading CrystalXP's Photoshop tutorials and wanting to share my progress and get advice. I met a bunch of people, some of whom I am still friends with to this day, learned a ton about graphic and UI design.

I drew icons, wallpapers, all of varying quality that I would post to my DeviantArt profile.
I went hard into the Windows customization bit. At first, it was simple stuff, but around 2006-2007, I got enamored by Mac OS X's UI from watching a friend's Mac screenshots.
From this point on, my goal was to make Windows XP look like Mac OS X (Tiger and then Leopard). I wish I still had those "desks" screenshots because man, I was good at that shit. I made skins for iTunes, a skin for ObjectBar that mimicked the Leopard menubar, skins for Miranda IM that copied Adium skins.

A year later, I would get my first Mac. A 24" Aluminum iMac, running Mac OS X Leopard. That computer and its software felt like a candy store to me. So many good details, so much whimsy, and... dude the customization options were bonkers.
Sadly, ShapeShifter was already defunct. Even then, apps like CandyBar and websites like the IconFactory and their amazing icons, wallpapers and skins were incredible resources.
Obviously, like any Mac user of that era, I ended up on forums like MacThemes.net. I was still messing around with Photoshop, so I kept learning a lot.

But at that point, I was more into UI and web design than anything else. I made skins for apps like Bowtie and Ecoute, I made a theme for Leopard I can't find traces of ("Disinmaso for Leopard", if someone finds it), I made a mod for iTunes 10 that brought back the iTunes 9 colors back, and a skin for VLC media player. More on that bit later.

the twitter years

In parallel, I would join Twitter in like? 2009? Early enough that Twitter still:

• had a global timeline
• had no retweets
• had background images and personal accent colors for profiles

So whatever year it was, it was pretty early. It was early enough that I probably was around the first few thousands of French users on the site. Twitter was really nerdy and niche at the time. And it ruled.

I probably was too young (~16) to be visible on Twitter, but I was, at a tiny level but still. I got involved enough to personally be blocked by a semi-famous French tech blogger, I made tons of friends by just posting-way-too-much. Likewise, I also made enemies by just being a stupid teenager on Twitter.

Twitter also got me a ton of work. I got close with one of the friends I met on CrystalXP, and we ended up making a tiny structure to take web design jobs/projects from folks. I met and "networked" with many older folks in the design/tech space. Some of whom I admired, some of whom became friends, some of whom helped me get my current job.

Without Twitter, I wouldn't have met some of my closest friends.
Without Twitter, I wouldn't have worked with VideoLAN on VLC 2 for Mac OS X and iOS.
Without Twitter, I literally would not be typing this blog post 9,000 kilometers away from the French city I was born in. And of course, without Twitter, TweetDeck wouldn’t exist and... I wouldn't have started Better TweetDeck in 2014.

In the middle of 2015, I moved to San Francisco. A year later, Donald Trump would get elected president. Twitter died a first time on that day. Twitter suddenly became serious (derogatory), it was now the most powerful man on Earth's megaphone, and posting on it meant there was a non-zero chance of being noticed either by him or his army of bigoted fans. I would still use Twitter (and still do) for years to come, but a tone shift had happened. Twitter felt like it became a PVP zone.

mastodon enters the chat

In the middle of 2017, a new social media platform called Mastodon started picking up steam. Its main selling point was "it's like Twitter but with decent moderation, open-source and decentralized".
Being the nerd that I am, I joined it. I saw genuine promise in Mastodon. I would contribute to the project's codebase, I was on the Discord/Patreon for a while, I briefly helped moderate mastodon.social. I would get kicked off the Patreon/Discord for basically shit talking Eugen's direction of the project. Which is fair, I was being a jerk!
I still think that "well, you can fork the project" is an embarrassing answer to give to users who wanted to see Mastodon get better, but what do I know.

I still think Mastodon is a good idea and is something that needs to exist, but I rapidly felt that... its approach was kind of flawed?
Eugen will deny this, but I, and other folks, realized early on that his "Benevolent Dictator For Life" approach of managing the project pushed away many people who were willing to improve the software.

But all the code in the world cannot fix what was (and still is), in my opinion, Mastodon/the Fediverse's biggest hurdle: community and moderation.

Without rehashing how Mastodon works (thousands of articles do it better than I do): the main idea is that instances host their users and have their own moderation/content policies. On paper this sounds good because what may work for me moderation-wise may not work for you and vice versa. In practice? It was and still is a mixed bag at best and a fucking shitshow at worst.

Turns out, the people who can run a web server are usually not fit to run a community and probably shouldn't be trusted to take moderation decisions. I have seen dozens of instances fall apart or get cut off the rest of the network because of interpersonal drama, laughable moderation practices, malicious actors, bigotry, racism, and a lot more.

This whole structural issue and the fact that Mastodon has been, and still is, complicated to get for non-nerds meant that I had little hope that it would ever replace Twitter. This wouldn't be so annoying if Mastodon as a project wasn't so set on courting Twitter users and imitating Twitter. But that could be its own essay.

I would still use Twitter in parallel, and it would be my main place. Having TweetDeck and Better TweetDeck meant that, despite everything, I could shape my experience on Twitter however I wanted (to a degree).

If I didn't have that? Who knows, perhaps Mastodon would have become my "first website" instead of my "second website where most of the nerds are, and also everything is on fire every other week".

Despite all the shit I talked about Mastodon in the previous paragraphs, I still used it a lot and met a lot of nice people there. Some of them were running (large) Mastodon instances, some of them even contributed in big ways to Mastodon's codebase. Most of them would agree with me that "Mastodon existing is a net good, but Mastodon as it stands is kind of a mess" (to be charitable).

here comes an eggbug

Some people I met on Mastodon became close friends. As it turned out, some of them were close to ASSC.
In April 2022, I would get invited by jkap to try cohost. I'm genuinely grateful for that because man. I will miss that place.

I would say I was "hooked" right away but, as much as some of cohost's design principles were very appealing, I… didn't really "get" it right away? I was still very much into microblogging for a while. And the limited beta meant that the user base was still small. The place would get progressively more interesting to me after launch onwards.

But what really flipped a switch in my head was Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. We knew it was going to happen, but it still felt terrible. I didn't even particularly care about the website itself because it had been on a downhill trajectory for a while, but... seeing this fucking guy buy the company, fire 90% of the staff, and take the whole thing apart like a capricious toddler was disappointing.
I was disappointed to realize we lived in a world where this kind of shit could even happen, you know?

Suddenly, my first website was getting worse by the week, (some) people started flocking to Mastodon but... I had been on Mastodon for half a decade at that point, so I didn't have it in me to be starry-eyed about Mastodon again. I was happy people were leaving the hellsite, but still.

So I started using cohost a lot more. And, man, I should have done it sooner. It is now clearer than ever in my head now but: cohost fixed something in my brain that Twitter/Mastodon broke.

Cohost was the slow, relaxing, composed, and fun alternative to the "Player versus Player" environment of Mastodon, Twitter and Bluesky (when that became more of a thing a few months later).

the bluesky interlude

In March 2023, I would end up getting an invite to Bluesky from a friend who was on there. I was curious to check it out. I knew I wasn't going to fall in love with it because the "decentralization" story didn't interest me anymore and because it sprung out of Jack Dorsey's Twitter.
But man, I didn't expect Bluesky to disappoint me so quickly.

I know I am going to piss off a bunch of "Bluesky elders" (ugh) by saying this, but: Bluesky walked on rakes early, and still to this day continues to walk on rakes.
I have been on the website for longer than 99% of the user base, so I have seen some bullshit.
The invite-only system led to, frankly, worrying levels of "crabs in the bucket" thinking and some unhealthy levels of parasocial relationships because "invite-only = private, right?".

And I don't know, man, I refuse to fully trust a VC-backed social media company at this point. And my trust goes down every time they pretend that they "work for their users" and that they are "billionaire-proof". Your codebase/app being open-source doesn't mean a damn to me. It just makes it slightly easier for me to write a bot, but that's kind of it.

If you got millions in the bank, hire people to improve the thing instead of relying on free labor to fill in your own gaps.

I could go on about Bluesky's protocol (ATProto) or about how Bluesky's libertarian-you-do-it-yourself approach to moderation is appalling to me. I won't do it here because this post is already getting long but, yeah, I am not very enthusiastic about Bluesky.
I'm still on there, and I might use it more once cohost goes read-only. But man, I'm gonna complain the whole time.

i will miss a fucking website

I've said as much on my different socials already, but... dude, I cried so fucking much after the shutdown of cohost was announced. I don't cry that often! And yet! The week of September 9th saw me cry the most I've had ever cried in a very long time.

At first, I cried from sadness because it was going away, then cried from anger because it couldn't exist in our current system. Then the overwhelming feelings from the user base of "I will miss cohost" made me cry again. I cried because of a cute, reassuring, sweet, piece of art, I cried because of a "cohost meme song" that made me realize how many good jokes/memes the users made. I cried listening to a very bittersweet, yet beautiful song about cohost ending.

I cried a lot. For a website?!

But obviously this wasn't only about the website. I cried because I felt like I was losing a place I called home online.

I cried because I knew I was losing a truly special place in my heart, where I met wonderful new people, learned about so many interesting subjects, laughed at so many good jokes.

cohost at times felt like my little "internet oasis", it was where I would go when my other 3 websites felt exhausting. It was where folks I looked up to would be able to just... post? In peace?

cohost was a place where I saw artists, photographers, musicians, makers, and creatives in general able to just share their craft and usually get much better "return" on it than anywhere else!

cohost felt much safer to me than the other websites I used. I felt much safer in opening up about personal matters, I felt safer writing long form posts about my special interests. I felt safer knowing that, if a post sounded a bit too spicy, I could just not make it shareable and/or lock comments on it, and it would just be a blip in people's feeds. And it was great!

I know this wasn't a universal experience, I have met people who got driven off the site due to (racist) harassment. I wish it wouldn't have happened, I tried helping at my "level", but ultimately a lot of the issues were not for me to fix. And I'm sad about that because my experience of cohost was wonderful, and I wish it was for more people.

I will miss the Posting energy of cohost, the camaraderie, the mascots (not just eggbug), the "yes, and" spirit that lead to so many good jokes.

I will miss cohost's staff. I didn't agree with every decision they took, but I still have a massive amount of respect for them. It takes guts to stick to your vision, even if/when everybody tells you it's foolish or stupid to not build a social media platform that doesn't sell its users out while making them miserable.

The way they're handling the shutdown is, frankly, embarrassing for everyone else in this industry.
I know damn well that when the next Mastodon instance shuts down, when Twitter blows up or when Bluesky explodes that none of them will care as much for their users' content and connections as much as Cohost's staff cares about cohost users.

I will miss a fucking website, but damn, what a website it was.

what's next for me

Well. Chances are you might be reading this inside an RSS feed already, so this (https://damien.zone) is what's next for me.
My relationship to microblogging/social media in general is gonna change, I think.
I am still going to use Mastodon for the "tiny posts" stuff. I might try to use Bluesky more, especially since a bunch of cohost folks are following me there, but I am going to complain—I made that joke already.
My Twitter account is still up. I locked it a few weeks ago, and I don't think I will re-open it anytime soon, or maybe ever? Time will tell. Don't expect me to post there very much.

I want to try to use social media less if I'm being honest. I've been using Discord and regular-ass instant messaging a lot more for the past few weeks. It's been great to just be able to talk to more people. I am seeing a bunch of people from cohost and beyond in person in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to that. I collected some of my cohost mutuals' information, added them on Discord and other places. I know I missed some of you, I will try to do an exhaustive "sweep" when my data export with the "find your friends" page is available.

cohost reminded me that the best part about using a website was the people you meet on it, so even if the website goes away, hopefully the connections you made will stay around.

Thank you, cohost, I will miss you a whole lot.

Cheers, have a good life, wherever y'all go. I hope we meet again soon,

- damien