Social Media
I've never made social media work. I like to read posts, but I suck at participation. I'm bad at giving compliments and bad at receiving them. I'm bad at keeping up, bad at posting. I'm also bad at being consistent enough in my interests to gel with communities that are focused on specific hobbies or fandoms.
I liked cohost because it didn't seem to punish lurking and inconsistent participation. There were fewer features with weird social expectations behind them. It was mostly just people posting and making comments, and that was good. With cohost closing, I took a look at bluesky and mastodon again, and I feel like I can't go back to either of those. Going back to a microblogging platform and the churn of thoughtless posts and manipuation feels like regression. I've seen what cohost people are doing with their websites, and that's where I want to go. That feels like the way.
I think we need to discover ways to interact with each other that don't involve bending ourselves to fit into platforms. We need to have more control over our own behaviors and incentives. We need to invent new ways to discover things and new ways to meet people. We need to bring back old stuff that worked and invent new things that don't funnel everything we do through four companies. That isn't going to happen if we all go back to twitter clones. We need to be a little more imaginitive than that.
I don't have any especially clever ideas right now. A few things I'm interested in for this site are rss and some kind of commenting. I also would like to build an automated way to share the source code for my projects. I also think I'd like to make the main template more fun. That's one of the coolest things about websites! They can look like whatever you want!