I added the ability to automatically pull down and embed Cohost posts. I just paste the URL on its own line and my automation takes care of the rest (checking it in so it doesn't need to make a separate request each time the build runs). Hopefully this will be the first of many sites I do that with: I want to see if I can integrate the notion of the Tumblr-style "reblog" with a more traditional site-specific blog structure.

In celebration, please enjoy a post I still think back on and chuckle:

Look, I know only a handful of people actually experienced this first-hand^[1]. But I think it's worth remembering anyway, because it set the stage for everything that came after. We^[2] joined because we wanted to support our pals and we hoped this could one day really become our fourth website. But we quickly realized that we were actually using Cohost as social media. Most of us came from Twitter—it was still Twitter at the time!—and it was immediately viscerally clear that Cohost was better.

It had so few features at the time, no one had made any tools for it, and the stylesheets would just refuse to load with distressing frequency. But the posts kept rolling in, jokes and essays and so so much marveling at the unforseen positive effects of not having numbers anymore. I really think this early era both established the culture of the site and helped people understand how and why to spread the word among those who would appreciate it.

You might say "there weren't enough of those in the end", but I didn't think that's right. I really think given another five years of runway and maybe a payment processor with its head less to its ass, Cohost could have become sustainable. It's not for everyone, but the people it's for love it with a burning passion. These past few weeks have demonstrated that in spades.

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1. think I read 50 somewhere but I wouldn't swear to the accuracy of that ↩︎

2. Maybe other people feeling differently, but this is based on my memory of what people were saying at the time ↩︎

I've finally become sick enough of Firefox's horseshit that I've begun using LibreWolf. turns out it's pretty nice! you can even set it up to sync with your Firefox settings without much trouble

this thing has comments now! click through to a post to see 'em. maybe say hey

On a site that I've seen described as "a retirement home for the greatest posters of our generation"^[1], there's only shitpost that truly shook it to its foundations. It's not my favorite @willow post, it's the only post that went so viral on here that it seemed like the entire website was riffing on it for days afterwards. (not to mention permanently altering my vocabulary). You know it, you love it^[2], it's the obituary for Ryan Reynolds:

It's actually kind of shocking to me that the phrase "he is only carbon now" doesn't appear as such in the original post, because that's how I (mis)quote it constantly all the time.

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1. I am at best paraphrasing the quote and at worst lying completely about ever hearting it ↩︎

2. Or perhaps you are obscurely baffled by it, or even furious at it. I don't know the inner workings of your soul ↩︎

This is the first of probably a number of my posts that I'm directly porting from my Cohost. This was, to my knowledge, the first "CSS crime" on the site. I made it when I realized how broad the set of inline styles the site allowed, and this was the cleverest thing I could think to do with it. Others would quickly outstrip me, but I'm very pleased to have opened the floodgates.

I fully forgot about this until @authorx reminded me just now, but back in 2022 I ran an 80 Days race called "80 Days in 80 Days" where the conceit was that each player could only spend a single in-game day per real-time day (for a game that's only supposed to take a few hours for a leisurely run). It's not the sort of thing that could only take place on Cohost, but it's the sort of thing where only Cohost would get into it as whole-heartedly as it did. People were emailing me their updates in full character as Passepartout, with @Zandra even sending her updates in French. @RatBaby won the race in only 36 days. We had more than 30 participants, over a third of whom made back to London.

The website I made is still up, complete with an interactive globe showing everyone's routes and a bunch of fun achievements I came up with. What a lovely little moment that was. Thanks again to everyone who joined me for it.

When Cohost goes, with it goes the era of my life I spent on social media. Now that I've tasted the rich fruit of what's possible, I'll never be able to go back wholeheartedly to a site where my timeline is constantly deluged with the latest atrocity, where there's no room for me to write an essay, where I can't even see and share porn. I have loved ones I've followed since before we were even friends whom I won't follow anywhere anymore. It is, inescapably, a paradigm change in how I use the internet.

And in many ways, that's fine. Social media brought me many good things, but even before Cohost I was getting deeply sick of the Twitter model. This is not an intrinsically necessary mode of human interaction, and in a lot of ways it's better not to have it at all than to have it in an unhealthy form.

But. But. There's still a pandemic, deep as world may be in denial, and even with all the mitigations and precautions available it's still an order of magnitude harder to spend time with people in person and another again to enter new spaces and make new friends.

While I've been grieving Cohost, this is something my heart keeps returning to. This was the last great space where I consistently made new human connections. And the way the world is right now, I don't know what can replace that, not just in terms of technology but in terms of life as a whole. The world is so much smaller to me than it was five years ago, and so the loss of a deeply valued space hurts all the more keenly.

RSS^[1] was the original federated social media. RSS invented the "share" verb. RSS is easy, simple, and sustainable. RSS never died.

I'm sure a chunk of you already know what RSS is. Probably some don't. RSS is a protocol (really just a text format) for listing the posts on a website in a machine-readable way. Readers of your website post its RSS feed URL into their feed reader software, this reader periodically checks it for new posts, and it presents all the posts in a single unified list with useful features like "marking stuff as read". (Podcasts still^[2] use the same technology.)

Back in the day, everything had RSS. Any site that had anything that mapped kind of onto "posts", from blogs to webcomics to the nascent social media sites, would expose an RSS feed as well because not to do so was to cut themselves off from what was at the time a massive audience. Even Twitter had RSS for a long time. This was great as a user, because you could easily read stuff from all across the web in a single place. It was great as an author, because your self-hosted blog wasn't intrinsically harder for people to read than anything else anywhere on the internet. It was a kind of federation, but one that didn't require each node to rack up server costs and DevOps time. If you could host a simple XML file that only updated when you made a post, that's all you needed.

If you're reading this, even if you used RSS a bit in its heyday, you may think "oh I can see why that would be useful" but you don't yet understand. All of this is just preamble. What really makes RSS spectacular is the ability to share^[3] posts across feeds. Each post comes with a unique identifier as well as authorship information, which means my feed can just contain a post from my friend that I think my readers would be interested in. It can contain any post from anywhere on the internet! Before Twitter had "retweets" and every website had a "share on social media" button on every page, RSS had post embedding.

Not that most feed readers really took advantage of that, because there wasn't a particularly tight feedback loop between reading and authoring an RSS feed. The one major exception was the late lamented Google Reader, the first high-profile victim of Google's now-infamous penchant for devouring its children. Google Reader provided its own feed for each user, and for a moment there was a vibrant culture^[4] of sharing blog posts with friends and commenting and discussing. I want this back. I want to be able to share anything from anywhere, I want to see the fruits of my friends' excellent taste, and I want to be able to have a conversation about it.

I may not be able to do that yet (although I am hoping this blog can be something like…