Now what?
September 20, 2024
Last time I did a personal site, it was a side-blog about anime spun off from another blog about anime. It was a different time. Then for a while afterward, that domain, which was not ponti.club, was occupied by someone cranking out ads about home improvement. I think porches and windows sorts of things?
Weirdly, one of my first jobs was standing next to a kiosk in a mall and yelling at people that they should buy windows from the company I worked for. Now every living mall is half-dead and nobody can afford a house. Lol.
Re: Cohost
I liked Cohost. You might catch me being flippant about its shutting down, but that's partly because I'm allergic to coming across as maudlin and partly coping. The relative lack of metrics and other Skinner box maneuvers made Cohost the only social media site I could even bear to look at most days. Notably, I wasn't a target of racism there and I don't have major accessibility concerns; I don't want to be dismissive of people who ran into issues with the site as it existed vs. what it aspired to be. But I bought into what it aspired to be, both as a user experience and a space that encouraged longer-form writing about one's interests on one's own terms. At least it wasn't Twitter. Or Facebook.
I felt like I didn't post much, and was fine with that, but in going through my posts I found that I'd written more than I thought. This attests to both how the site didn't overtly pressure you to fill your account with undifferentiated content and how easy it was to talk about most things there. Like anywhere else, you may not've gotten a lot of traction if you weren't already popular, but it didn't feel like failure the way it does on microposting sites, it was just people doing their own thing, curating toward the mood they were after.
Not everything I did on Cohost warrants public backups, but I did edit some material into a few posts for the blog here:
From here on
My plan is to use this site for long posts and things that'd otherwise benefit from a high level of control over presentation. This means there won't be a lot of big updates here, but you can also count on the RSS feed not bombarding your reader. I'll lean on some kind of minimally awful social media platform for sketchy art and reactions to games I'm playing or whatever I happen to be reading. For now that's going to be goblin.band, which seems like a decent outlet for tumblr-sized posts. You can follow me there from any account within the Mastodon extended universe. If this changes, it'll be reflected by a different link on the homepage.
I don't have a dramatic mission statement or web 1.0 manifesto--I just hope having a website again will encourage me to make more things and share them. But here's something I said on Cohost once:
I like to spend time looking at random pages on Neocities. I remember personal websites; as a kid I was obsessed with the idea that you could just have a website, never mind that I had absolutely nothing worth saying on one, so maybe the experience shouldn't feel as novel as it does. And I won't swear the Neocities organization is perfect--they accept payments in crypto, for example. But sometimes a site feels totally uncanny, as if it's from the wrong timeline or dimension, and that's the feeling I'm chasing--the reminder that we can be very different for all our similarities, that we can still surprise each other despite the platforms' best efforts to flatten us into something they can sell.
So that's basically it. Let's continue to hang in there.