giwake
Perfect Butterfly Angelmore then anything I think we're seeing the end of the era of social media where the promise was that all you had to do was setup a blog and or post your art or make a YouTube channel or whatever and there would be reasonable ways to promote yourself and find people who wanted to see what you do. I think a lot of people my age grew up kind of assuming that would always be a thing when it was instead a very specific very rare moment in time
I don't really know what the Internet looks like without this, especially not our modern internet? I don't know where it goes from here. This isn't just about cohost either, it's about everything; there's no real spaces you can do this on anymore. Everything is more and more silo'd off and demands more and more buying into the ecosystem. The era of not selling out is ending, it's impossible to have a non-algorothmic audience.
I can hear all the criticisms of cohost and I have em too but like
idk. Unless someone else shows up to try and make cohost-but-slightly-less-ethical-so-they-can-make-more-money.com pretty soon, and very quickly somehow succeeds in every spot that they struggled on a project that took years to build
you can say 'oh well cohost fucked up by doing X" but they were, in fact, the only game in town, and the imaginary better more perfect game does not exist lol
Dio9sys@junebug even their main "competition," pillowfort, is operating at a loss/has to fundraise every year to keep the lights on. It's really sad :(
Local Dad, Ben Hamill@junebug Yeah. And you can say, like, "host your own blog at your own domain" or something, but that only solves half the problem (the "I can put stuff online" half). The "find and/or maintain an audience" part is unaddressed and is the part that is most, uh, like... under attack by the state of modern search engines and social media.
Like... in theory there is some world where someone makes a blog, has an RSS feed and/or email news letter, and manages by word-of-mouth or something to find people who will follow them and engage with that. It just feels like it is... so inaccessible. And I'm not someone who needs that. I'm just looking at it from the "outside" as it were.
Bleh.
Dawn Tåke 🌙 
This got me thinking of like, a co-op ad ring, like Hiveworks or Project Wonderful, but with a cooperative structure? I dunno.
Does make me want to make link page of things I like though.
@Tourma [-Junebug as I think she might not be in the mood for problem solving] I don't know a ton about those projects... Are they different from just, like... the 90's internet's webrings?
@benhamill
Yeah, I guess that is the closest thing. I do follow a couple of those.
In my head another method is more like, a link page of all your friend's links. Is it bad when fucking Xanga is a better alternative than what we got?
Sharpie@benhamill @junebug gaming has this, but no one is doing it (except me lmao)
fluffy 💜@benhamill @junebug I feel like a good protocol for discovery of stuff that's published via RSS would be a good start, but right now the closest we have is hosted-silo feed readers that happen to provide recommendations based on what other people are subscribing to on that same platform, and it's all at the feed level rather than the item level.
Lily Bunny@junebug I blame capitalism
@junebug i'm still in awe activepub lost
Panic! At The Mastocon@junebug living in cable tv world. everything feels like television now, the thing we tried so hard to escape.
Peter Butler@discographette @junebug I’m *begging* someone to please write vol. 2 of Amusing Ourselves to Death about the Internet era 1989 - 2024