By the way, I'm on Cohost

I generally want to reserve this newsletter for larger-scale pieces rather than status updates or meta stuff. But considering circumstances, I thought this would be the best way to reach people who I know want to hear from me.

Lately I’m on Cohost. Twitter very naturally became a base of operations for me over the years, even though I initially had no intention of using it that way. I’ve made lifelong friends and professional connections there. I know from my data that most of the readership for this newsletter comes from Twitter.

Looking back, it has been impossible to overstate its value for me, and for a million other weirdo writers. Despite the intensifying negative energy of the platform over the last few years, if the lights were to go off tomorrow, I’d say we had a great run.

However, the site getting bought out by a clueless billionaire has thrown the internet’s golden rule into perspective: No one community lasts forever.

How communities die

In grassroots communities— message boards, fan Discords— a personal rift buried deep down can become a great schism that ends up tearing the place apart. A moderator snaps, the owner turns out to be a monster, the place gets hacked, a million other crazy things.

Corporate communities— Twitter, Facebook, Discord the actual company— are doomed to wither over time because the goal is not to make something that works well, it’s to make more money off the users than you did last year. Eventually the latter goal clashes with the former and the user experience starts to go to hell. And sooner or later people leave.

So even putting aside Twitter’s new permanent main character and his childish antics, I want to note that we have always been nomad communities. Community will always happen and it will always have to move.

Twitter has been unusually long-lived. It also has an all-encompassing effect that makes users— including its dumbass owner— think it’s the air they breathe. But it’s not. It’s just another place. It can be ruined, and we don’t know when that ruin might come.

The best that creators like me can do is have our eggs in baskets that we actually own, or failing that, a lot of different baskets.

And at the very least, shouldn’t we be in spaces where we can be unreservedly happy to be present?

The Cohost experience

I’m on Mastodon, or rather I have a cross-poster that posts my tweets to Mastodon and sometimes I look at people’s responses there. I think it’s fine for what it specifically seeks to be, but by its nature it is not an “everybody” space like Twitter. I think that’s okay, actually, but one of the things I loved about Twitter was I could find and friend anybody there.

Cohost arrives at a nice, comfy place between Twitter and Tumblr. It purposely removes the obsession with numbers and metrics, and that moves the culture over a little bit. On my main Cohost, I post thoughts too long for Twitter and too short for a fleshed-out newsletter post. I post on Cohost not because I think a post is going to grab a lot of attention— one-liner jokes still go straight to Twitter— but because the subject interesting to me, personally.

Social media is video games, and the meta settings change the experience.

Like for example, I do posts about my mahjong league results. This is obviously a rather niche subject. There are people who enjoy those posts, but I don’t make these posts with any expectation that there will be a lot of them.

Ditching the expectation to write about popular subjects and make the numbers go up, getting to write about what you want to write even if there are only three other people interested, is freeing.

The community is small and the line to get in is very long, but the people who are here are very interested in the subject of conversation for its own sake. Honest interaction is something I’m finding increasingly hard to get from the troll-infested, bad-faith, depression-poisoned Twitter swamp for years. So I’d recommend Cohost.

The Kawaiikochans are also on Cohost. I again have no intention of stopping the Kawaiikochans Twitter, but I also decided after a couple weeks on the site that KKC might be a good fit for this community too. Right now the account will post new comics and irregularly repost old comics.

I will stick around, but…

I will stick around on Twitter— you can see I’m still pretty active— because there are a lot of people there who I don’t want to see disappear from my life. And as a creator, it’s the only place where I have any reach. I’m probably not getting 3000 followers (a pitiful number by the standards of people I have known) again.

As a freelance writer— who after many years of underpayment is finally looking for normal work— Twitter remains the best and only way to get my work out there. And thus I have inadvertently tied a part of my livelihood to the self-driving car that runs into guard rails all the time.

But as far as pure enjoyment goes, I will be on Cohost. Hope to see you there… in a couple weeks, from the looks of it.