new links
hello blog on this autumnal equinox. ah, as the winds do cool, and so too how cooleth within us the poster's heart ..
i feel compelled. nay, obligated. to address the end of cohost in this post. and yet, hesitant ... ! this will be the first post to appear in the feeds of "several" new readers, who have subbed from there, since the news and resulting scurry. over the last ten or twelve days many such reflections have crossed my own burgeoning aggregator, on the experiment itself and all that it surfaces; where did "the internet," the thing in its present state, come from ? and where are we headed next ?
i feel lucky in the timing, in some ways - having established the momentum on here the way i did just before the announcement . oh, sorry, cohost.org is like, a posting website (mechanically tumblr-like) that a small, leftist1 collective of burnt out techjob queers made as an experiment in if there can be social media with a freaking modicum of chill. they have a whole manifesto and stuff. it's shutting down at the end of the month. it's the only posting website i've been on since i left twitter a couple years ago.
the vibe there was, imo, unique. by being ideologically opinionated about posting and social media as a project, it seemed to attract correspondingly "genre-aware" users, and the resulting style was heady, self-aware, and really thoughtful at its best. the site was frustrating at times, feeling mired in inter- and intra-community strife; especially notable, the majorly white demographics and some inadequacies in the moderation strategy resulted in an environment described as anything from unwelcoming to downright hostile by some posters of color, enough to the point where it constituted kind of a "reputation." this was only starting to be really substantially addressed structurally, in the wake of some especially painful incidents, in the form of a shift in moderation strategy, when the shutdown was announced. so we will never know how that could have played out - we just have to take the lessons forward.
i made friends on cohost, had great conversations, found art and writing and music and games that i love. i so enjoyed the jokes and goofs, cat pics and quotidian ephemera. in my old age i have recieved this wisdom - a place online where people are doing high-effort "volleys" of some kind, maybe drawing goofs in response to other drawings in a chain, or layering track after track on an mp3 file - is a place with heart. i did my best in those efforts, tho of course i wish it had been more now - some such feelings are unavoidable, i think. this is surely one of my finest contributions to the craft anywhere online, and like all great ones, its all thanks to the posters before me.
i relaxed into a new "posting voice" for me there, hinted at only in old private twitters. it was, kind of, an "easy website;" i could type "jailbroken girlfriend" and watch notifs all day if i felt like it. i guess like, it had a specific culture, for better or worse. and a relative lot of people were thinking and posting about that culture explicitly, and trying to intentionally guide it the way they thought was right. for me, it hit a lot of buttons - but it was easymode for me, a white person, to gel with it positionally, and i think its a shame that a few dipshits and general background-racism were allowed to ruin it to varying degrees for a bunch of people that dont have that luxury, who otherwise really did or couldve benefitted from what it had to offer.
anyway,2 so yea, here we are on the website, aloedotgay, which has momentum, which is lucky since im going to have noplace else to post in a week, and what if i feel like posting. since the shutdown announcement theres been lots and lots of discussion and construction around all kinds of online community infrastructure, from new social media projects like website league to several webrings to a sudden, almost algal proliferation of personal sites and blogs. like those blooms, the stage was long setting just below the surface - like, i don't think its a total coincidence that i joined cohost, left twitter, and made this site in that order. the indie web ethos is well represented for stewing-in. and this moment surrounding the shutdown has kicked that into high gear.
it honestly puts a big dorky smile on my face, having set up the rss feed of this site just months prior thinking it was more or less for my own satisfaction, to suddenly find myself in the midst of a miniature ant-farm smallweb renaissance about to break containment. helping a few other people set up their own sites and readers, even ! heartwarming. like, sure, its scary how google ate and digested the connective tissue of the old web3, but that was happening anyway - and if cohost's writing is on the wall in the eyes of the staff and funders, then it's on the wall. and i think the way everything that follows from that is going down has been charactaristcally thoughtful, almost-achingly-genuine, and seat-of-the-pants. so i think in a way it's right to celebrate this moment for just how much fun and interesting stuff is happening in this corner of online, even if its a touch frenetic. i think cohost was a really valuable experience, for all our successes and all our failures. i already see the way people are attempting to carry those lessons forward into new projects. and im grateful to staff (and even mr. moneybags ;) for their well-intentioned experiment in spinning this platform up and co-creating that experience with us, and for the huge amount of work and care they poured in.
SOOOO LIKE. what are you gonna do about it. not you reader, you me aloe. idunno, not much so far !! haha, theres not a ton of meat to this post in terms of a regular "new stuff around the site" #update. i guess the biggest thing is my likelinks page has perhaps doubled in size, and this is a direct consequence of the co-hostening. i realize i should categorize or organize it somehow now - perhaps with a really overkill system for "tags that only proliferate within a certain scope (probably one page to start with)." >:) perhaps im already planning something like that for my drawings and photo galleries, which are also planned. >:) >:) the only other post-host thing ive done so far is to fix my rss feed so that relative links render correctly, which i accomplished with another hacky regex because this only has to run for me on my laptop damnit. i put together this contact page and linked it in the footer so you have something to click on and send me an email at the end of the post ;) . and theres a few other little technical things i might write up in the project log, or not. as far as plans, i want to put a page on here for my cat. just pictures, clips, little text posts. because its my little cozy corner for things i care about, you know? maybe a broader sort of 'miscellaneous section' where i can lean in to hand-coded html more, have pages like snowday's, maybe a geocities style button/banner gallery ... i was thinking about starting a page with a separate rss feed called the "ringblog," where i just kind of collect and shout out the stuff i'm reading that week, maybe a bit of my own writing in response. idunno, like lots of us rn, im brainstorming ... !