started writing this on cohost (a thing i have scarcely used) and then realized it is kind of pessimistic about cohost so maybe it belongs on a far more neutral service. i am also eager to hear what all the neocities friends think

twitter already feels empty over the past week or two compared to the way it felt like even a month ago. the mastodon instance i was on in 2017 or 18 died and i am waiting to be told which one to join now. a local artist and comedian who i like but am at least one degree of separation away from threatened making one and , well, i just paused typing this to go ask if he needs help setting it up. i am on cohost as of like 6 months ago but i kind of lost interest waiting for them to let me post. (it took like a month back then)

cohost to me right now at least feels like too Substantial. the thing i like about twitter is it is could be just 2 sentences of inconsequential nothing. i guess the history of the platform supported that, when it was text only and built to work from your nokia phone by SMS. it was very familiar to me, a child who grew up only socializing in internet chatrooms

cohost feels a little like tumblr in presentation, and i was always kind of intimidated by tumblr. i think this is colored by: back in the day i wanted to make my own website where it would just be a feed where i could easily post any kind of Media or Art i make, whether text, image, sound, video. this felt like a big deal for me, like a way of legitimizing the silly things i'd felt compelled to make as an adolescent or teenager on the computer. then tumblr made this and i found out there were already hundreds of brilliant multimedia artists using it to its full potential. and so for the few tumblrs i've had over the years they were kind of very curated because i was like, this feels like it has to be Deliberate.

many of my friends who were/are tumblr users either now or back in the day do not appear to have this problem. they use it to say jokes and repost stuff they like and have conversations constantly, and also as a place to post their Cool Creations.

i remember being much more eager to mess around with The Latest New Social Websites back in the 00s when i was like, oh I already have all my friends in this one chatroom, some of us will splinter off and try different sites but I know where to find everyone when I need them. i think i recently realized twitter mostly took over that role after my childhood chatroom dissipated, and it was nice because like that (quite public) chatroom, it was a place where you'd be introduced to new interesting people, but also sort of better than a chatroom because you can have very disparate groups of people all having their own little conversations on one Feed.

it's just sad because twitter death feels like it's out of my control and done entirely by a malevolent interloper, whereas the death of the chatroom was just like. natural progression of time. i feel like i put a lot of work into making twitter not just a tolerable site to be on (there are always more nazis to block) but a handy source of positive human interaction in my life. for example, i stopped trying to make facebook feel like either of these ways and quit in like 2017.

i am sure i will be back to normal once one more giant company emerges with the next big thing and literally everyone i have ever known is on it again. i just feel a tiny bit disconnected from all the weird little pockets of people i've grown to know over the past 15 years.