been trying to figure out what to say about this website and my time on it.
fundamentally, i think it boils down to cohost feeling like the first social media i've had in ages where i can just be a person, in the weird and contradictory ways that implies, without having to fear judgment or total disengagement from the people around me. it helps that i fell squat into the site's dominant culture of "queer sort-of-furry techie", i won't dispute that, but it was a place where i felt like i was actually communicating with other people. for the most part folks commented and shared in good faith. people were excited to show off their interests and their lives.
i mean let's climb back up a few sentences to that "sort-of-furry" part. despite pogging out whenever a game lets you play as a nonhuman, despite wanting to smooch various anthro characters of media, despite spending most of this site's lifetime working on a novella about turning into an anthro dragon and kissing another anthro dragon - "furry" is not actually the cultural identifier i want to use for myself. it goes without saying that i have nothing against it, but at least at this point in my life it's not "who i am". but here it felt like something i could just integrate into the bigger persona i presented online and it wasn't a big deal one way or another.
like, ultimately the persona we present is shaped by the environment in which we present it. and when i look at the websites 'left' to me, what personae do they demand?
- Twitter: I make funny Ace Attorney jokes. I'm the Ace Attorney guy. I have a thousand followers from when I used to run an Ace Attorney fansite. If I ever get more than 10 RTs the odds are extremely high that someone will accuse me of being an actual real life murderer in the replies. If I try to post about other things in my life I either get no responses because it's not a funny videogame post or no responses because the algorithm will not show my posts to anyone unless it's a funny videogame post. If I tilt my head 0.5 degrees to the left or right I see the world's worst posts.
- Tumblr: Despite most of my follows being people I have known and been friends or friendly with for many years nobody ever posts anything about their personal lives. 99.9% of posts are reblogs. Those reblogs are about 30% cool art and 70% funny text posts or videos. The only time any kind of long-form text gets traction is when it's a misinformed screed about how watching a movie is the same thing as abuse (though the circles I'm in very rarely boost these now, thank god.)
- FurAffinity: putting aside the "I don't know that I want furry to be my primary identity" thing - what do you think happens in terms of engagement and making connections when I post long-form writing on FurAffinity and have it be strictly SFW? I wasn't born yesterday, man, I know what drives engagement there. I have nothing against adult work but that's not what I want my public online persona to be about. Also, as a gallery site primarily, I'm not really... communicating with other people, we're just posting our works.
- Mastodon: I haven't tried this but my friend who is very techie and was a big supporter of Mastodon for a while had to leave because even he got tired of how elitist techie big chunks of it are. Not a very appealing community!
- BlueSky: look man I miss the brief age of Twitter where we could all be friends and microblog as much as anyone else but it's 2024. That's not coming back. Everything I hear about BlueSky is either "they're crowing about how much better than Twitter they are" or "look, my account just sees nothing but furry smut! No discourse at all!". Neither of these are appealing ways of being online to me!
- AO3: A nice gallery but even less community than FurAffinity and ultimately focused on fandom, which is... not something I Care about in my 30s. Also, for understandable but disappointing legal reasons, if I ever post anything that's related in any way to me earning money they will shoot my account with a gun.
- Forums: The only active forum I have any regular interaction with is ResetEra, which is a hell I would not wish on my worst enemy.
- Reddit: oh word we've got forums but it's actually a million of them and every single one has to focus on a single, discrete part of your interests or identity? wicked. that definitely helps solve the problem this entire post is about
- Discord: the best of a bad lot, but unavoidably siloed. I see the people in the servers I'm in and that's it. Great for keeping up with people, very ineffective for meeting people or expanding what I see of the world.
losing cohost means losing the best way i had to be myself online and still see and interact with others. i can go open a blog on a self-hosted website or whatever, but fundamentally that raises the bar for me seeing other people and other people seeing me by 10x. yes, i know rss is a thing. i work in tech and spend hours thinking about type theory for languages and i still feel tired at the thought of setting up rss and gathering a dozen websites and trying to get the word out about my website and figuring out how to stay engaged and -
it's just tiring, man, and this is even before i get into the bigger picture of "hey, i would like to see my writing spread and be read by people, and maybe work on regaining the creative muscles i lost over the last decade, and perhaps build an audience someday to make it something i can do semi-professionally". it feels like there's nowhere to go. i'll make a "where to find me" post that i can pin, sure, but like many others here it feels like where to find me is... nowhere, in a very real way. yeah, you can find boltgsr on the above websites. you just won't find me, you know?