File Nine

thoughts

today i updated my website to remove the cohost link on my home page. that’s when it hit me again: cohost is dead. i loved that site. “no numbers” was calming. i didn’t know who was famous and who wasn’t, and i made friends there that i never would’ve on other social media sites. i also liked being able to write longer posts. i want to ramble, i want to say things, i want to keep saying them. splitting my thoughts up into multi-post threads and editing them to fit character limits works sometimes, but other times i want to stretch my limbs and let myself take as much space on the screen as i need. losing the constraint of length frees my expression when i write with other constraints, and having that be an option rather than something forced upon me is something i’m going to miss about cohost’s posting. tumblr? i could use tumblr, but that’s a hellsite all its own. i’d rather stick to my notebooks and my website.

cohost was supposed to go down at the end of 2024. on new year’s day, i started writing a blog post on it, trying to collect my feelings and process them into something other people could read. it fizzled out a few sentences in. the structured presentation i used for blog posts worked for technical articles, but it worked against me when i tried to structure my feelings. the site meant a lot to me, and i’m going to miss it in ways i won’t be able to put into words for a long time. so here i am, writing a deliberately less-structured stream of text, trying to both understand and communicate my thoughts about a dead social media site.

i replaced the cohost link on my home page with a link to bluesky. it’s a very different social media site, but it’s the one all my fighting game friends are on. a lot of people in the fighting game community moved there from twitter. i like seeing people on there who i previously only knew from locals or on discord. i hope it stays good for as long as possible!