alyaza | clean slate, or: the post-Cohost era (Reply)

Alyaza Birze (October 1)

Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors' Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels. festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants' needs than it had been before.
―Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

as we move into the post-Cohost era, and i turn my attention to the Website League, perhaps this idea from Calvino is worth considering. perhaps every website is, in a way, a Clarice: iterating itself, cannibalizing itself, until the only commonality between what was and what is are a few shared objects that can no longer be placed. this notion would reconcile well with Cohost as the ideal―a frame of mind that can be embraced, taken, and implemented somewhere else. i don't know that i'd personally go that far; but i do believe that the technical ideas of Cohost can be taken and implemented somewhere else, and should be. it is part of what we're doing with Website League, which in a sense is a Clarice of Cohost.

as of writing (but likely to change shortly after this goes up) the Website League is not formalized yet. but it will be, and we will begin the process anew. the huts and the hovels, the festering sewers, the problems that are and will be will take their forms again; they'll be forged into new things, better things, things with the same splendor, yet in some ways things still be predicated on the old. and the old will persist in a few forms: the cosmetic changes we liked on Cohost; the libertine ambience; the constant creativity; of course the HTML crimes and perhaps CSS crimes eventually too. maybe we'll do better about the racism, maybe the community will be more diverse. it can't be guaranteed, but nothing can be.

programming notes

i have manually archived all of my September posts on my website and updated the RSS links to them so they link to the right spot (/archives/2024/september). unfortunately, this has the side effect of duplicating them (and therefore making them unread) in your feed, which is a minor inconvenience but also extremely not ideal functionality. i suppose i have a month to figure out the best way to handle this again, or else make you put up with it again. we'll see. there does not seem to be a perfectly elegant way to do what i'd like here.

i'm also slowly standardizing/organizing the navigation bar at the top over there; if things change on you there, that'll be why.

what i'm reading

launching Website League has really eaten into my pleasure reading time, so i have little to update you on with actual books. but i have been reading, and i think today's reading cuts to the heart of a lot of what people loved about Cohost, want to see in the Website League, and are trying to rebuild with their own websites as a whole (i am among them!). earlier this month, Paris Marx and journalist/union leader (for Media Guild of the West) Matt Pearce sat down and had a conversation about Google and Meta, and how they're squeezing the life out of journalism. i did not happen to catch that conversation, put on Marx's podcast Tech Won't Save Us, but i did happen, yesterday or so, to read writer Philip Moscovitch's takeaways from it. helpfully Moscovitch transcribed a point from Pearce that seems unambiguously true: the hyperlink is being strangulated.

instead of allowing information to be effortlessly linked from one place to another, hyperlinks on the major social media platforms are increasingly punished explicitly, and generally deemphasized, deboosted, and sidelined in favor of algorithms and slop. as Pearce describes it, and the consequences of this active choice:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well...

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal… That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, “My God, you’ll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works.” I’m like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.

i'm sure many of you within the audience reading this can infer, but: this creates very real stakes to making archives, to maintaining public "good links" pages and documents, and to hyperlinking all the things you love when you talk about them. it guarantees them a visibility―or at least the safety of being indexed somewhere―that the major platforms are actively attempting to prevent and kill. they want their blackboxes and walled gardens; if we want to deny them that ability, keeping the links circulating is a necessity.

(for my part in this: i'll be creating a links page in the near future about all the cool stuff i find. i'm already a chronic link-keeper so i need to do some formatting, but i'll announce when it's up. optimistically? this week.)

blog roundup

Cohost eulogies and posts

there are a lot of these floating around. here are a few; some critical, others more positive.

It Was Like a Website In There: cohost Memories (Nicky Flowers):
I decided to open up my inbox to anyone who had any memories they wanted to share about using cohost, and have them help me make this post. Thanks to everyone who submitted something—you're part of why I'm so sad to lose this, dare I say it, community.
Yo, Buddy. still alive. And thanks friend. See you again. (Iro):
From my extremely selfish viewpoint, it was a nice place to load up when I felt like it. I could post what I wanted and people usually cared to interact with it. That instant feedback beyond likes and shares (and most importantly, instant feedback that was usually insightful and interesting) did a lot for me. The pace was not as breakneck as twitter or a discord server, not as slow as a full blog. I could read good posts and interact with them. There were so many intelligent, eloquent, hilarious people to follow. I don't think I ever quite felt like one of them.
to far shores (Kayde):
but cohost? cohost fucking fixed so much of my brain. it was a social media detox. i didn't just learn why numbers and mutuals and the whole engagement spiral of other sites fucked me up, but also learned ways to cope with that damage and even heal from it a little. ways to be more open and earnest about people around me. i'm still learning - we all are, of course - but i'm never gonna let myself forget the lessons i got out of cohost.
More Mindful Internet NOW - A Cohost Eulogy (Julian):
I feel the lack of visible notes and numbers likewise encouraged users to truly make it their own corner of the web, with little regard for other's opinions. Some people would say they want numbers because how else are they supposed to know whether people like their work or not? To me, that's exactly why I say good riddance. If you could get over the initial insecurity of not knowing, or lacking the constant stream of validation you've learned to expect from other social media, there was a chance to reconnect yourself with whatever you were sharing and *why* exactly you wanted to share it in the first place, because I'm sure most of us didn't take on creative endeavors simply because we wanted attention. Cohost uplifted me as a creative by reminding me of that, getting my mind off the numbers, and helping me realize again what truly mattered to me in my work.
A better World Wide Web can exist: What comes after Cohost (Ognik):
Cohost was… imperfect. I’m not sure if I’ll miss it as a whole, and not just the mutuals we had and the plural community which we owe so much to. But Cohost’s entire community… look, we’re white so we didn’t suffer from the racism, the overwhelming majority of the community was white, and that is the only reason why we and they can claim the website was good for our mental health. If you listen to the POC who left the website before it shut down, their opinions are wildly different. Some of them are bitter, and very understandably so. I won’t be getting very deep into it, I don’t want to, but I feel the need to be the voice of criticism here: the staff fucked up right from the start. I’m not sure what frustrates me more: the idea of initially inviting only your friends and family to join the website and then invite their own friends, and then being surprised that it’s become a place where people different from your social circle feel extremely alienated – or the idea of having one, single moderator, and being surprised you’re unable to properly deal with harassment against the most vulnerable users.

Cohost community roundup

outside of this week's retrospectives, here are some pretty cool posts from around the block by people from Cohost.

To The F-150s Disguised As People (Woodcutter): a humble poem to one of the world's most annoying and dangerous vehicles

Death Cab for Cutie - Asphalt Meadows (2022) (Everything Spins):
The songs on Asphalt Meadows are largely really good to excellent and the world-weary, oft-tense mood of the album is what gives it a flair of its own, but it's the balance of ideas from where the band are in 2022 and from where they were years ago that makes Asphalt Meadows come to life and connect as a piece of work. I don't know what's to come next, but Asphalt Meadows opens up the possibilities for anything.
Biking in the city is fun, actually (Laura Michet):
A lot of the social bike rides in the urban part of LA are about choosing weird routes--cutting through the street grid in ways you wouldn't expect. There are groups out there that play games with their ride routes, choosing roads based on strange themes... or even using a kind of basic choice tree that results in sorta-'procedural' route generation. There really is nothing better than grouping up to bike somewhere you're kinda-sorta not allowed to be... or not expected to be... or wouldn't choose to be, if you were by yourself. Almost every time I go out with a group or by myself, something weird happens. And I would be absolutely done for, emotionally and intellectually, if weird shit wasn't constantly happening in my life!!
Coffee Quest #34: 7-Eleven Convenience Store Coffees (Maddie Nine Coffees): No, I'm not engaging in self-destructive behaviours because my familial relationships are on fire. 😎 Why would you say that?