We Don't Actually Need To Keep Being Exhausting About Some Things
Something that I'm finding myself having less and less patience for among those of us who used Cohost is loudly decrying the faults of all remaining social platforms. This is not, to be clear, because I think any of them are very good. They aren't. That's why I loved using Cohost, and why I remain very sad that Cohost is gone. But Cohost IS gone. It's gone, it's not coming back, nobody is making a Cohost 2 (at least not for several years, please don't make my dick laugh by bringing up the Website League). I understand we're all grieving a very good website, but it's hard not to see slagging off the remaining major social networks as a form of misanthropic tribalism, or just doomerism by another name.
Bluesky comes up frequently in these conversations, and it's not hard to see why. Bluesky was Cohost's primary "competitor", after all. Although I'd argue that the two services wound up being for pretty different subsets of disaffected Twitter users, it's undeniable that whenever the subject of alternative social platforms was raised, Bluesky ate up a lot of psychic real estate that might have been Cohost's otherwise. Members of Cohost staff were vocal about not liking Bluesky, their design decisions, their technology, or their executive team very much. On Cohost it was considered cool to make fun of Bluesky. Now that Cohost has shut down, "making fun" feels as though it's given way to "swearing off", performative declarations of not wanting to make a Bluesky account or hating various things about Bluesky's design or attributing various personality defects to people who regularly use Bluesky. I've come to find this rather tiresome.
I don't particularly like Bluesky either, I want to make that clear. But I don't mean that in a "I hate Bluesky" way, I mean, like, I just don't Like it. It's a website. It has a function and people who use it that I can use the website to communicate with. I think it's kind of cringe to say that you're a big fan of Bluesky when Bluesky is just Twitter with a tenth the audience and a twentieth the functionality, but even then I truly don't care.
Although Bluesky might be the most frequent target, it's hardly alone. Much hay is made of how bad Twitter has gotten since the Musk purchase, and yes, it has gotten truly dire over there. Many Cohost users have returned to Mastodon, but just as many have a lot to say about the myriad flaws and peccadilloes of the federated web. Pillowfort tends to get it in the gooch, mostly being treated as an unserious option for dweebs. Tumblr is brought up, but is typically discarded for some combination of bad vibes or feeling like a ghost town/dead mall. Again, I don't necessarily disagree with any of these. These are all pretty fair things to say about these platforms.
I think one reason I've started to find all this sturm und drang distasteful is that it's starting to feel a bit like a shibboleth for post-Cohost users of the world wide web, a way of signalling ascended enlightened big-brain above-it-all website snob in-group status. We were users of the BEST website, after all. We don't concern ourselves with anything so pedestrian as NUMBERS. Social media? What's that? Sorry, I was too busy festooning my hand-coded website with signifiers of The Old Web, a thing that is both possible and desirable to return to.
And, yeah, I get it, I do. We're in mourning. We're angry. I think, a little bit, we're embarrassed - a lot of us wanted Cohost to be the future, or at least A future that was open to those of us who believed. Maybe if we signal our disdain for other websites hard enough, if we show that we really GOT what Cohost was trying to do, we can wish Eggbug back to life. I really do wish things worked like that.
However, the world we're in is the world we've got. For me personally, both my professional ambitions and my own consumption habits mean that I've got to stay at least partially plugged-in to social media. I like knowing what people are talking about. I like being informed about current events. I like looking at art and seeing evolving trends. I like having a little platform where I can broadcast my work and boost work by people I like. I know there's bad stuff on there too. Did you think I forgot? Do you think I'm stupid, maybe? Is everyone who didn't use Cohost stupid? Do you think visible seething bitterness makes you easier to relate to as a person? Do you think it's good for your heart?
As I said in one of my last posts on Cohost, I'm optimistic about the future of the web in a fairly general way. I think there are a lot of good people with a lot of good ideas out there. I think that when those people share their good ideas, they'll probably do so on social media - and if they don't, social media is probably where I'll hear about it anyway. I'm still in the process of figuring out what combination of sites is right for me - currently I'm doing okay with the blogging stuff, but I haven't quite found my groove with posting on Bluesky and I don't know that I'll ever pick Tumblr up in any kind of real way. The Discord server's going pretty well. I also need to remember to reach out regularly to those people I added on Discord but who don't make use of/aren't interested in joining the server. I also have things going on in my life that are not all about websites. What I'm getting at here is that endlessly enumerating and relitigating the negatives of the place you are is more or less guaranteed to make you miserable, and will probably do a decent job making everyone around you miserable at the same time. I don't have time to add more misery into my weekly schedule, I'm swamped as it is. I also just had a fig-newton-sized chunk of skin cut from my leg yesterday and they didn't even give it back so that's why I'm grouchy in this essay. The web and my own life are exhausting enough, I don't need anyone adding more, thank you.