what to expect on damien dot zone
#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 Twitter2 presents as the "default".
for all its issues3, 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 space are:
- be cringe, be free
- don't worry too much about it. what you gonna do if you don't like what you're seeing? not read it? big whoop.
- tinker and have fun with it
Those past few days I have seen a bunch of my online friends and acquaintances mess around with their online presence. make blogs on Bear (that this blog runs on!), and just have fun with it.
and I am excited to try this...for the first time? Despite being old enough (I think) to have known that era, I never actually experienced the "geocities and myspace" era of the Internet firsthand. and I think by the time neocities became a thing I was already tech-savvy enough to feel like it was a "baby's first website" tool, and I was A Big Boy Programmer who could do all of that shit himself.
I was maybe a bit right, but what good did that do me if I never made anything out of it? so despite it being more "limited" than what I had before, Bear really feels "small but mighty" in a very liberating way.
I am very excited about doing stuff I never got to do and that are coming back in fashion like buttons, have my site be on a webring, show off blogs I like in a blogroll. I am excited about maybe making a "now" page for myself, tinkering with the theme of this blog.
I know myself and there is a real chance I might do "too much too quickly" and burn myself out, but so far, Bear's defaults have been "sane" enough to only warrant tiny tweaks.
I don't want to worry about everything being perfect, clean, right, or any combination of all three anymore.
I just want my little space to make my little website and write my little posts on it. It feels both very nostalgic and new at the same time, and I think I will like it.
love you,
- damien