nearly 2000 words on a dumb idea I lay out in the first two paragraphs

I wanted to write a post trying to get everyone excited for the future. I wanted to write a rallying cry, some really practical advice on how to navigate social media with a kind of punk ethos, turning it to our benefit by piecing together the various sites into one whole healthier than any one individual piece.

And some of that's here. But this turned into a few reminiscences, a little bit of memoir. And the idea is simple and frankly kind of dumb. I'll tell you the idea right now: let's use microblogging sites as the sharing, commenting, and reposting apparatus for posts we make on our own long-form blogs and sites. We can have comments on posts but they're kind of isolated, so creating a community network within a social media site that goes outwards rather than inwards will help us to maintain our writing, css criming, art, and everything else, while using the sorts of services we'll always have in the medium-term because they are designed to discourage all that good stuff.

That's it. That's the entire thing. But I hope you think the rest is interesting.

We've all hopefully begun processing cohost's impending shutdown. We've all hopefully begun making our peace with it. But I know I am still uncertain about what to do now. It's not enough to mourn, in this case. We have to move on -- and I think I speak for at least a lot of folks on the site when I say we aren't satisfied with the other social media options available to us.

Social media is still kind of a new thing, unless you get freaky with it, and I do, but let me get to that later. I was born in the 1980s, and my family was poor in a poor area, so I didn't get home computer access until I was 15 or 16. I got about 50 minutes per day online, and I had to track that on yellow legal pad next to the pc, because the ISP certainly didn't put any rails in place. They would be delighted if I went over and incurred minute-by-minute charges. And they were the only game in town: if I wanted AOL we'd be stuck paying long distance charges for every single second, like any other phone call.

Sometimes I sit and try to think what the fuck I was doing online all day, back then. I didn't know about BBSes. I found out about IRC from one of the ZDTV shows, probably Call for Help with Leo Laporte. But all I did with that was make a chat room for my friends that no one wanted to use because we saw each other every day. I was on ICQ, but that's not social media. I think, anyway. I sat around, did my homework, and read whatever random things I could find, like Mil Millington's endless recitation of minor family squabbles, in hilarious prose that would lead me later in life to feel like a bomb went off when I opened my first Wodehouse. I read the transphobic Sushi story too, but I'm not linking that asshole. I'll admit I laughed my ass off. It was probably the first time I'd found out that was a thing people could do -- transition -- but I'd already buried certain memories.

At any rate, my first social media was Livejournal. I made a MySpace I never used. I sat on Facebook for hours, in undergrad and early grad school, and I'll be honest with you: like everyone else back when you needed a college email address to join, I was using it as a dating app. Twitter was where I made some great friends, even some of my best friends. And I'll be coming back to that, too. But we all know what's happened to twitter, even if, as I suspect, it happened far sooner than we all maybe realized.

OK. So I'm up to now, mostly. We have a lot of options now. They mostly suck. Cohost was the best, and it was apparently not sustainable and I'm not here to talk about that. Bluesky is less-bad twitter. It's fine. It's not good, but it helps people make connections that ideally radiate out and away from the site. Keep that in mind.

So, first, I want to get back to that "freaky" definition of social media. Have you ever read any old fanzines? I have. After I got my phd I had a very odd job, cataloging a personal library collection ahead of its donation to a university. It was a science fiction collection, and the owner was keeping it for her late husband, who'd been a professor of history with a lifelong love of SF and a tendency to keep everything. They'd converted the pool house in their backyard into an archive, complete with climate control. This did not prevent a bunch of the books from molding, but they tried.

So this lady contacted the school and specifically one of my professors, because he was the person whose name was on the Science Fiction Research Collective entry on the department site. We'd been running said collective for several years. My professor recommended me to go by her place and talk to her about the job. She wanted someone who could appreciate the stuff, not just file it away. So I did it, for several months, until right before Thanksgiving in fact, at which point I moved back home and got a job teaching and that's where this biography leaves the bounds of our topic.

This library wasn't just books. In fact, most of the books were just books. Most of it wasn't rare -- though I will admit to spending some time just holding the The Song Goes Ever On and marveling that I was getting to touch it. But it also contained hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of home-printed fanzines. Some dated to around WW2, in the regular serif font and tell-tale blue of the mimeograph. Others dated up into the 2000s, arranged in MS Word and printed out on a dot matrix or inkjet.

And you might be surprised to hear that they were the internet. But slower.

Some zines had an editor and contributors. Others had only one person doing it all. But they were all reading all of them. People would put in their zine of October a response to what they'd read in someone else's of August. They were mailed, handed out at conventions, and often free to GIs who needed something to read when they were away from home. They announced book clubs, meetups, book releases, and everything else. They argued over the merits of authors. They excoriated new books, lauded old favorites. They even trolled the reader.

I learned to read Germanic runes phonetically in high school -- one of the things I got off the internet of the time. And that summer I was going back to learn the runes magically, with a work of Diana Paxson's (yes, I've heard the news, that's just the book I had that summer). So when I found a little box set apart from the articles on one page of a zine from the 1940s and saw it had runes in it, I dropped everything to read it. And either they had a different source or I did, which is a joke, but some of the runes were different from what I'm used to, so on so forth. But I worked it out, and it essentially said "I can't believe you wasted your time reading this."

Oh ho ho. Ovaltine indeed.

I'm sure you see my point here, or at least this one point. People were doing with paper and the USPS what we do online. It was slower, but it was very, very similar. That's what I meant by a freaky definition of social media. I think old fanzines qualify.

People are, after all, people, and that doesn't change if they're watching movies in the theater and running home to type up their review or using Netflix and hammering away at Letterboxd.

So we can make do. That's what I mean. Even if the systems we use aren't really meant for it. And if you keep me honest, in a future post I'll write a little more about the circulars I looked at and their specific implication in our situation.

Anyway. Let's think about bluesky again. I said I made some of my best friends on twitter. I was in a community a lot like that old fanzine community. Via a friend, I sort of fell into anime-blogging in 2007-2013. I had my own site, and eventually I ended up writing for SuperFanicom. Pontifus ran that site, and we had several other writers, whom I've lost track of over the years, if they even maintained any online presence under those usernames. I think some of them didn't. But we did a lot of work I'm proud of. We had a real community, not like "the bluesky community" or even "the cohost community," but a group of people all intermingling, conversing, and growing friendships (and enmities, yeah). I always called it the Otaku Rhombus. And we did a lot of that on twitter, actually.

So we all used Wordpress back then. "AI" hadn't turned the company's brain to slop yet, and it looked much nicer than Blogger or Blogspot. And we'd leave comments on one another's posts, of course. But we also talked on twitter. And I genuinely think we were using twitter in a way that current social media hates. We spun outwards from the site, not inwards. It was a means of speaking, not the goal itself.

Think of the fanzines. Think of the US Postal Service, the circulatory system without which the blood can't reach the places where it's needed. The life of the system is not the point itself. It's the means by which the point is reached.

What the fuck am I talking about, you might be wondering? Well, look, a ton of us are all moving to sites that have comment sections but don't do any real social media ecosystem stuff, or if they do it's very light. I just learned over the weekend that Neocities has a social media aspect. Who knew? Retreating to one's Bear blog or Neocities site, which may or may not even have comments, can feel like retreating into the hermit's cave. We can write and write and write, but writing is mostly for an audience. And we don't need the "numbers," but we need to hear from people sometimes. So I have just a few pieces of, not advice, not that. I have a few recommendations, a few suggestions for everyone. I'm not the boss of you, of course.

If you're making a site, or a blog, make some kind of other thing too, a mastodon or bluesky account, whatever the hell. You maybe already have one or more of those, and you just don't care for them much after all the time on cohost. So think of those things as the conversation that happens when you share and comment on posts. Write your stuff where you want to write it. And then get on bluesky and share it. And discuss what you think of other people's posts on there. And you know, discuss the cute cat pics and all the stuff microblogging was actually meant to do. Stuff you wouldn't fire up the blog for, or in my case, arduously write something in Ghostwriter, drop it into a folder on my hard drive, run a script in my terminal, and copy the site's public file folder onto my neocities drive.

Yeah, that's the 11ty workflow.