one week post cohost meetup
some photos i took of the event
it's been a little over a week since cohost shut down. i had the expected Day 1 experience of checking the site when i woke up in the morning to see what final posts i missed. turns out i was still able to like some posts for a bit and went on a bit of a spree simply because i could. my next time pulling up the site was an accident out of habit: quickly opened the site to remember "ah, that's right." the third time would kill that instinct, as i truly felt exactly How Dead the site would remain for the rest of the year before inevitably disappearing
having time away from having a tab that's Always open to check for updates (i don't have an RSS feed up yet) has been kind of nice. in the meantime, i still have my tumblr that i only lurk on when i want some Images and i still have my main twitter that i can look at whenever i want a reminder that it's a bad idea to do that. i peeked my head in very briefly and saw people 1) non-stop doomposting (i get it, i guess) and 2) getting apoplectic over shit i just cannot even bring myself to care about. like... yeah, i watched the first two episodes of Uzumaki, yes i did notice the animation quality drop, yes i know The Reason 1 for it, no i don't really care, if you care just read the source material again man...
however, at the same time, a lot of the "yeah! we're going to do it!" energy i felt about a lot of our neo-websites in the final days of cohost has faded, and i'm starting to feel a bit of what i imagine the future is going to be like: all of us mostly posting in our own little corners of the internet, occasionally checking in on each other, while the vast majority of people continue receiving the constand drip feed of... whatever it is you do on tiktok and insta and twitter and facebook(??? are ppl even using this still?) these days
i used to consider myself "good" at posting (embarassing thing to type lmao) but now i would like more than anything to get "good" at being alone and not needing constant stimulation, something that this switch away from cohost has prompted me toward. my downtime routine of checking cohost, then discords, then letterboxd, then cohost, over and over, the constant churn and cycle had grown really exhausting. i often found myself doing a full cycle of everything and finding nothing had changed, leaving me to think "well... now what"
sometimes in those moments, i would unintentionally just begin the cycle of Checking My Places again, which felt quite bad! sometimes i would just poke at some writing or language learning i'd been doing. sometimes i would just feel spun out with no idea what to do (classic of neurodivergence)
those moments are what i would like to Get Good at: just being okay with sitting and not feeling a deep pang of craving for content in a lot of the ways i was used to. cohost felt like the first step towards this. i started lurking more again, took a backseat to posting, unlearned some of the more negative attention-seeking behaviors i had picked up in a lifetime of being Really Fucking Online. it felt good, but this feels like the training wheels finally coming off
anyways, i don't know how to end this post so here's a photo of some ducklings
enjoy that post while you still can↩