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I've really loved my time on cohost.

I was never too attached to Tumblr or Twitter, but I love cohost very much. Lots of people here seem to share similar ideas around online degrowth. Degrowth as it pertains to economics is a critique on capitalism. Simply put, focus on economic growth causes ecological damage and is unnecessary to human wellness.

Online degrowth, whether that's through personal sites, smallweb, indieweb, the Fediverse—seems to be picking up similar criticisms of the sheer amount of capitalist garbage that gets in between us.

Some of us are artists, tired of the constant pressure to have an audience or produce content that drives us to be miserable while hanging desperately on to tips, monthly subscribers and GoFundMe campaigns to cover basic expenses.

Some of us are alternative folks online who are tired of being so reachable in this online age we want to disconnect—but doing so means we'll be socially alone, because we're the only person we know in our town who is queer/trans/furry/kinky/poly/etc.

Screw the numbers, fuck the algorithm, I want to actually connect.

And connect I have. In fact, here's some connections I made on cohost that made a difference in my—and other people's lives.

• Thanks to @ldx, I learned about bitsy. I made a paper template for people to hand-draw their own sprites and and co-built a bitsy game with the 35+ participants of our GGJ Tokyo site.
• I also made a bitsy game for my best friend's birthday to tell them how much I love them.
• Also thanks to @ldx, @Internet-Janitor, the creator of Decker, and @liananana, the creator of Narrat, I learned about indie engines and did a showcase of bitsy, Narrat and Decker. I built a little tarot-reading Decker prototype that's still unpublished. You can see the showcase on YouTube.
• Thanks to @highimpactsex's review, I played and cried my eyes out playing 1000x RESIST. It sparked some very tearful and heartfelt conversations between mabbees and I on the Hong Kong riots, our own families and personal generational trauma.
• Thanks to @melinoe, they connected me with some other queer indie game cooperatives and got their advice for starting Studio Terranova.
• Thanks to @renkotsuban, I was introduced to so many great games from Japanese devs—and got in trouble with our rabbits when I started clapping along to their Nice Gear Games livestream.
• Thanks to @whatnames and Game Dev Galaxy, I not only found out about an all transmasc dating sim, I learned about the Neo-Twiny Jam and made a little game about glassblowing.
• When I made the Interface Drama Master List I only knew what had been inside my own head. It was thanks to @morayati and @ianmichael I got some more long-term perspectives on interactive fiction and how it has played in this space for longer than I realized. Anytime someone sent me an ask about interface dramas, it inspires me to keep working on the list.
• Thanks to @wavebeem, @MeItsMe and everyone who sent me asks on my birthday. Over my birthday I was negotiating a very contentious client contract, and thinking about literally anything else helped me relax.
• Thanks to @geometric who let me play their Playdate at an event, mabbees bought me one for my birthday. I fucking love this console. I take it everywhere. And I'm planning on building something in Pulp soon.

To everyone above, and many others, thank you. You inspired me, gave me different ways of looking at the world, and enriched my life. I hope I could do the same for you.

Not everyone has had the same life-enriching experiences. Thinking about this has got me thinking about the things I want to dig into in whatever the next iteration of cohost looks like.

In @alyaza's post Cohost So White: A Comprehensive Record of the Matters of Race on Cohost.org, they catalogue cohost users dismissing racial discourse like this:

“well it's not technically accurate so it's not really a problem (so stop talking about it)”

To bring it back to degrowth, many institutions have dismissed the idea of shifting from valuing individual wealth and comfort to community care and collective action as a personal attack or attack on progress. From “The Future is Degrowth,”

"Any criticism of the present is equated to the dismissal of the advances we have made. 'If you don't like it, go live somewhere else.' This argument is the last resort of those who aim to preserve the status quo."

This dualspeak of community-centrism while also preserving a white and ableist status quo has no place in the future I wish to build in online spaces.

This applies to what comes after cohost, whatever that future is.

I hope it is a bright one. One that makes space for community AND collective action.

Thanks again to everyone who I've had the pleasure of meeting on cohost, even if you're going offline to live off the grid with your witch boifriend and never come back online. For those of you who are online, link me your websites/blogs, and your itch.io pages.

Shine on you crazy diamonds.

Yours truly,
CJ