and if nothing else, that is a massive success. Twitter was part of my life for more than a decade, I met my wife on it for goodness’ sake. sadly, by 2021 it felt like the worst place to be on the internet. where you go to get in arguments with strangers for no reason

do I regret leaving Twitter once cohost became home, and once a certain billionaire took it over? in spite of the artists and acquaintances I’ve lost touch with, no, it’s done a lot for my personal health

so, for the short time it has been around, cohost felt like the place for me. assc’s manifesto still resonates in spite of their ultimate lack of success with it

the lack of numbers convinced me to turn off notifications for other platforms, and reduce the noise I have incurred by life with the ambient internet, I have no evidence but I would swear to you that my average resting heart rate is lower as a consequence

the comment structure made it feel like a place you could have conversations in context, with people, instead of shouting them out loud in a room filled with noise

frankly I always had anxiety around whether I was “mutuals” with people on Twitter, and on here? that wasn’t a thing, what a freeing experience

for all this and more I will be forever grateful to @staff for giving this a shot. I hope they can get the rest they deserve after all they’ve dealt with these past two years

so what are we left with, in cohost’s absence? a lot of people are retreating to Bluesky, some even to Twitter. hell, someone asked me for my Instagram the other day. none of those really strike me as home.

I’ve been on the fediverse the whole time. it’s still the fediverse. it makes a lot of the same tradeoffs as Twitter and its clones. it’s open source but in the way where nobody can practically steer it except one guy. don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better, but this doesn’t feel like home. perhaps the Website League’s vision will bear some fruit, we’ll see

there’s a movement to the archaic internet, of RSS feeds, weblogs, link buttons and webrings, and I am participating in that with some degree of hope. back to the days of going on the internet, rather than the internet always being a waiting queue of content. I hope it’ll stick, and I hope basic HTML can become a form of baseline computer literacy again as it was in the 90s

whatever’s next, I hope it can be ours, and I hope to see you there.

thanks, cohost