website creatures
Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.
Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.
For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.
You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.
Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.
I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.
It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.
I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.
Build your feed slowly but…Read more
Stealing the "link roundup" format from Jae, Shel and Dante and probably others I forget.
I want to try to make this a regular thing. I don't expect the frequency to be consistent or anything, but still.
As I write this, it has been almost two weeks since cohost went read-only. I still have many feelings about it. I do feel slightly less sad about it after having gone to the Bay Area wake, though.
I could link to a dozen cohost eulogies and retrospectives. I liked Shel's one, and anything from Dante's roundup was also good. But here are a couple that, I think, are neat.
The dissolution of a community is not value-neutral. I love my friends on Cohost’s staff and am glad that they get to move on to better-paying jobs where they will not be subjected to hideous amounts of stress daily. However, it upsets me when I think that the unique, joyous culture Cohost nurtured around porn might disappear when the site goes offline at the end of the year. It’s my dear, desperate hope that something about the experiences I’ve shared here will be useful to future porn community-builders.
i know i'm not the only one, i've seen a few artists who never posted online going on cohost and posted their art for the first time online. . i'm confident we're gonna see artists, writers, whathaveyou in the coming years who will point to cohost as where they started out.
Cohost meant a lot to a lot of people. To me, it meant this. A place I could see my friends art and not be bogged down with a lot of outside pressures. I don't know that I'll get that elsewhere online and it's honestly ok if I don't. I'm glad it existed. And if the closure results in tons of house shows (read: blogs and RSS renaissance) so be it.
sometimes it doesn't matter. sometimes it's good. for the better. moving on and into a better frame of mind. a different space. a better space.
sometimes it's just sad.
the people are the same, but the air is different. the imperceptible change in the intangible unreality makes everything feel slightly off. hairs raised just a bit. on edge. restless.
we'll probably be okay.
but i'll still miss it.
You have to be kind and empathetic and you have to love. God, you have to love something. Be a pervert, if you have to, I certainly am. You have to find joy no matter how dire the circumstances because otherwise this world will break you. It is such a beautiful feeling to love and be loved, and there is no way to achieve that through force, no matter how many people delude themselves otherwise.
Maybe the cohost spirit is not about the website, or eggbug, or the CSS crimes, or the memes, or the lack of metrics. Maybe the cohost spirit is simply about learning who you are, being true to yourself, and - most importantly, this is the part you should not skip - caring for others who are trying to do the same, so that you, them, all of us, can be a little more free to be ourselves. Be not afraid to care. You could mean the world to someone else.
Ticky made some lovely 88x31 buttons to advertise that your website has an RSS feed. They're great.
I am going to rotate content warnings around like an object, cast upon in different lights, and examine their various implementations, justifications, and effects on online spaces in particular. I hope to locate a balanced dialectic on content warning best practices.
Excellent article from Shel about content warnings. Like other folks, I realized, after the fact, that cohost's implementation of that feature was smart and man, going back to Mastodon feels archaic in comparison.
CSS crimes were one of these "features" that made cohost special in my heart. I hope other websites are implemented in a way that we might see this practice pop-up elsewhere, but in an age where customization and expression is limited on the Web, CSS crimes always felt like a breath of fresh air and a fantastic avenue for creativity.
This is a wonderful collection of some of the best crimes that…Read more
Cohost started to send data exports to users. As soon as I got mine last night, I went to look at my "find my friends" page. It's very convenient! But unfortunately, I don't really like looking at tables for that stuff...
So, of course, I wrote a tool to scratch that itch. It's called "Friends of eggbug visualizer"[1], it works in the browser, no data is sent anywhere, and it keeps your list in your browser's own storage. This way you can import your find-your-friends.json
file once, and keep coming back to the list later on to go through your list.
The source code is available on GitHub.
Cheers,
- damien
I still suck at finding names ↩︎
For the longest time, on cohost, I kept saying "man, I should try to organize something to meet up with the Bay Area folks".
It almost became a running gag because I would post about it, and never act on it for many reasons. So when the shutdown of cohost was announced, and after seeing the Seattle and Philly "cohost wakes" being planned, I went "fuck it, we ball".
I posted about it, people said they'd be interested, Nicky and Diane helped me actually find a spot and time, and I announced it. I was diligently keeping track of who had replied and how, to have an at least vague idea of how many people would show up.
18 days later, earlier today as I write this: we had 40 people show up!! I don't actually have a group picture to show because I wasn't the one who took them and not everyone wants to be visible publicly in such a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.
In fact, I barely had any time to take many pictures myself! The only ones I have are of Cohost 2, a huge scroll of paper that Nicky brought so we could make posts by hand.
It was a lot of fun, wish I took more pictures. But I feel chatting with people, recognizing folks from the website and having a good time was more important than taking pictures, you know?
People hung out, some of them played a fighting game with specialized controllers[1], people talked about the website, nerd shit, linguistics, and a bunch of other things. Emails were gathered so people could organize and try…Read more
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.
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…Read more
#now playing: BRAT by Charli XCX_
the past weekend, like the past week before it, has seen me go through a whole gamut of emotions.
the good, the bad, and everything in between, I feel I've gone through it all.
I keep telling myself that I feel very goofy for reacting so strongly about losing a website, and... I do still feel that way, but in the second part of the week, I realized that what I'm reacting to is losing the people I've interacted with, read and met on cohost. a space that truly felt special.
like I said in my previous article, cohost made me realize that I could just... do my little posts, be myself, cringe, sometimes annoying, loud, vocal about my interests and people would show up.[1]
I think it will warrant a whole section of the article I will write about my "story with cohost" and online in general but I've come to realize that microblogging really, really isn't for me any more dude. or at the very least, not the version of it that Twitter[2] presents as the "default".
for all its issues[3], Mastodon has always felt like a "quieter Twitter". but it still had Numbers™️ and was still very much trying to emulate Twitter, despite what its creator might say. so I will definitely keep using it. the fact that I'm now running my own instance is also helping me feel like I have more control over it. but it will be for the "I ate an apple today, it was very juicy" type posts.
for everything else, I had cohost, and now I have damien.zone.
at any rate! the "goals" or at least "guidelines" I want to set for myself in this space are:
So. cohost, huh?
If you're reading this, you probably know me from that place (or at least have heard about it) so I don't think it's really useful to try to give you the "elevator pitch".
what would a pitch be useful for anyway, right?
I have a lot I want to say about cohost. but I think the shutdown announcement is still too recent for me to be able to form any coherent thoughts yet.
the one thing that I will say about cohost is that it, as a site and "community"[1], taught me that I can "exist online"[2] without worrying about being "clean" or "proper" or "right".
most of my existence online was on micro-blogging platforms with short character limits and a high incentive to product the "One Good Take" about everything and anything. and I'm frankly done with that.
or at least I'm done with it being my only outlet for Thoughts online. and I have cohost to thank for for letting me experiment and find this out about myself.
I already have a website that I was planning on using as my new place for long/medium form writing but after trying (and failing) to get anything written there I came to a conclusion. my friend evie is right in that "you gotta make it easy to post".
as far as I can tell bearblog seems to strike a right balance between making it easy and letting me tinker with things while not letting me fall into what some might call "the developer's blog curse". so here I am.
erambert.me will still exist as "the website I give by default" both because I like the separation of "concerns" ('business card type site' versus 'just me writing') and also because so much is…Read more