The Place I Posted

"cohost was a place where i posted, which is more than i can say for any other social media"

My cohost wake post yielded this line, which is something that rattled in my head all day yesterday, but it's true.

I don't remember when it happened, maybe the early 2010s, but I started hearing stories of people getting yelled at, harassed, and all sorts of bad shit on social media (not that it wasn't happening earlier, but that's when I remember being conscious of it). Still happens today (even worse, I'm sure), and my response to that was to shut up.

Essentially, every social media was in "read-only" mode already for me. If I don't interact, the harassers won't find me. I'll just look at cool posts and art and news stories and keep my ability to dive as deep into a point of discourse as I want, without feeling the need to dive deeper, since i wasn't interacting. I never actually had troubles on other social media that people have. cause I just didn't talk. Or, what little I did talk was so small as to be unnoticeable (carefully crafted tumblr tag commentary, mostly).

Having a place where I felt safe to post was new. In a way, cohost was the first social network I actually used since Facebook replaced the "wall" with the "timeline" and statuses were no longer prefaced with "I'm feeling..." (or something like that). Turns out I have thoughts! And like doing creative things! And the bits of feedback I got here helped push me in the right direction! Or at least a direction.

I'm kind of still afraid to lose that space, since nothing else quite fills that niche, mainly by virtue of places being established and existing social media culture already spreading over there. I tried to get more talkative on bluesky, but there's always the specter of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or the much more likely feeling of just shouting into the void. Twitter's a no-go (except for some porn), and I still haven't gotten Mastodon cause of instance decision paralysis (thanks folks that suggested stuff on my post about it though!).

I'm gonna try to remember what I learned here and get a bit more bold about putting myself out there, even if I'll have to deal with the new experience of feeling like I'm putting a target on my chest when I do. And that's one thing I liked about cohost, I didn't ever really feel like that.

Like most things that end, it happened too soon. I would have liked to get even more confident in myself. I would have liked to work on and post more of my random creative endeavors (it's much easier when you have people cheering you on). But. that's the kind of spirit I'm hoping to take forward, and keeping up some connections in various places (mostly discord right now) will help with motivation, maybe?

Things are kind of a question mark once October 1st hits. Scary. But perhaps doable.

this was originally on cohost, and hopefully the archive.org thingy works after things go offline later this year.