Cohost closes this week. It’s too bad. I thought I’d found a home there. It was “posting, but better.” It was social media engineered to not break brains. It didn’t tell you how many people had liked or reblogged your posts, or how many followers you had. It only showed you posts from people you’d chosen to follow, in chronological order. Most importantly, nothing about the business model or the social structure required you to be on Cohost all the time. If you visited once a day, read all your friends’ posts in half an hour, wrote your own post in another half hour, and then logged the hell off – you weren’t missing anything, and nothing nagged you to come back. Cohost was designed to be non-addictive social media.

(Also, the community was almost entirely queer lefty geek weirdos. The features were nice but honestly, it was also just a place for a specific subculture that fit me very well.)

But Cohost was expensive to operate, hard to monetize, and lacked the big-money backing that got the big social media sites through their unprofitable years. I don’t want it to be remembered as a “go woke, go broke” story of a site that was kneecapped by its own leftist ideals; the truth is that it lasted longer and built a more solid community than most new social media sites ever manage to. Go woke, spend two years forging friendships and helping people develop a healthier relationship with the internet… go broke.

So where do I go now?

I go here.

If you only ever followed pervocracy.com, it probably looked like I almost completely stopped writing for ten years. I didn’t. I couldn’t have. I have written something just about every day. But for a while after the Blogosphere stopped being the hot thing online, I wrote on Tumblr. Then they banned me for posting porn (I had not posted porn), so I wrote on Twitter. Then there was that whole global public health catastrophe that made it very hard to think clearly, especially when you are working as a nurse through the whole thing, and I became addicted to Twitter. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and the Nazi situation on there got so bad that I had to break my addiction. It took months but I finally got loose and started writing on Cohost. And then Cohost ran out of money.

And people on Cohost started asking each other “what social media are you moving to next?” Bluesky? Mastodon? Threads? (That one’s a joke. Nobody even mentioned Threads.) Pillowfort? Dreamwidth? And you know what, I’m sure a lot of those are just fine.

But I’m done. I’m done with “after reviewing your report, we found no rule violation” and I’m done with “due to payment processor rules we can no longer accept adult content” and I’m done with chasing the high of a viral post and I’m done with push notifications and I’m done with sponsored posts and I’m done with quote tweets and I’m done with cliques and vendettas and dogpiles and harassment. I’m done with pouring out my soul to make other people money.

I’m writing for me now.

I’ll probably end up using other sites for social/promotional purposes, blogging in 2024 is lonely work, but my “home” on the Internet? It’s here. On my own domain, under my own control. It’s a little more work, but it’s work that I get to keep and own, uncensored, with the only technical limitations being my own budget and skill. And it’s easier than ever to do CSS crime. Running your own site isn’t the easiest way to put words online and it won’t get you the biggest audience, but the freedom is heady.

So my new social network is The Pervocracy. It’s my blog, my digital garden, my archive. Any new writing or art or projects I do, will go here. A lot of my old projects from other sites will be reposted here. (I might even write about sex once or twice in a blue moon.) This is my digital home. I’ve owned it for a while, but today, I’m moving in.