#cohost collapse

[shamanistic-tendencies]

haven’t used this app in so long that I’m trans now

[misslaamb]

slides you my cohost and bluesky

[caffichai]

Food Bank Fundraiser

Hi everyone!

First of all, I want to say thanks to everyone who's been leaving such nice tags/comments on stuff I've posted! It's been really encouraging (o^▽^o)

Anyway, I think we all know it's very dark days on the economic front for many of us. So as such, I'd like to help raise some funds for Food Banks Canada! In exchange for you making a donation to the food bank, I will draw a character suggestion!

I know this is not really the sort of thing I normally do or post here but... many folks are struggling to put food on the table right now, and the food bank is a source of support for many and provides an absolute necessity. I've seen many people struggling in my own city, and food security has become an even bigger issue than it already was in the last couple of years with the food bank struggling to keep up with demand. Of course, food security is an issue across the whole country that's putting a huge strain on food banks, with nearly 5% of the entire population making use of food banks monthly, and 23% of the population reporting food insecurity (CBC, 2024; Global News, 2024). Unsurprisingly, those who are already most disadvantaged suffer the effects of food scarcity even more (Statistics Canada, 2023). To make matters more desperate, Canada's food bank system is on the brink of collapse (CTV News, 2024).

I know this isn't going to something big enough to change the world or anything, but being able to make even a small impact for individual people is important too!

✨Incentives✨

Of course, I'm sure people aren't just in it for a reward, but rewards make things all the sweeter, right?

For those who want to contribute, I'll take a character suggestion and add it to a poll (depending on the number of contributors, it may be split up into multiple polls), and then I'll draw as many as I can from top to bottom ranking! If you contribute, please send me a DM with your donation receipt and your character idea! They won't necessarily all be drawn in the same style, and they'll be done according to how much time I've got. (I know that commissions are probably the biggest incentive, but realistically, I struggle to get them done quickly and they're probably not that affordable to everyone)

If you prefer SFW or NSFW, you can let me know (But NSFW will be posted to Cohost). If you make a bigger contribution, I'll reach out to you and ask if you wanna see more specifics/details in your piece. How's that for sweetening the pie? :3

For those who can't make a donation (which is completely understandable), simply spreading the post is also helpful, and I appreciate that greatly as well!

Don't forget that giving a donation allows you to get a tax break based on the amount donated as well!

Alternatives?

If you'd rather donate to your own local food bank, that's great too! You can DM me and send me a pic of your receipt and I'll still add your suggestion to the poll.

If you REALLY want a commission, you can also DM me and I'll do my best to fulfil it! I won't be taking commissions for this till/if there's at least a couple of items on the poll though. The proceeds will go to my own local food bank. The commission will be done later though, and may take some time to fulfil. I take payment only after starting.

When do we start??

I guess once there's a good number of poll options? I have no idea how long that will be, but rest assured I'll keep you updated!

Where do we contribute?

You can make your donation to Food Banks Canada! They really need it!

Alternatively, you can make a donation to your local food bank or equivalent charity.

Other Questions?

Feel free to send me a message or an ask! I'll get back to you ASAP. If I need to include more details or clarify something, let me know! It's my first time doing this!

TL;DR

I want to help raise money for food banks! Anyone who contributes to Food Banks Canada (or donates to their own local food bank or equivalent charity) can DM me with their receipt and give a character to add to the poll. Poll characters will be drawn in order of their ranking, as many as I can manage, over as long a period of time as I can manage!

No pressure to donate of course, I just figured this would be a fun way of raising a bit of money to help out, and allow us to donate more than what I personally can

Current Contributor Count: 13

Suggested Characters:

Imagine your beloved, obscure or popular character here on this poll list! Oooooooh, how lucrative :3

Total funds raised:

780.36$!!!

[reasonsforhope]

Hi, where would you go tumblr does go (I doubt it will, the same has been said about twitter)? I mean, I have bluesky, but it gets too defeatist for me to check out often.

Hey!

If tumblr collapses or becomes too unusable, I'll be moving to either Mastodon or Cohost, barring some kind of big change in the social media landscape.

Why those two? Because they're the only other (afaik) social media sites of any prominence that don't have an algorithm. And algorithms on social media sites, as it currently stands, have a strong tendency to suppress good news and push bad news (because anger and sadness get higher engagement), so as a good news blog, I don't think I'd do very well anywhere else!

(Also because the big social media sites routinely hide users' posts from said users own followers to try to force people to buy ads, and I would like people to actually see my good news posts, weirdly enough!)

Sources on the social media bs things: x, x, and I can't find verification of the hiding posts from your followers bit, but I promise it's a thing - it's one of the reasons I stopped running a page for my business on facebook a year or so ago

[olderthannetfic]

Most of my dash is people moving to cohost or mastodon or bluesky over the photomatt thing and posting goodbyes. I don’t know if *tumblr* is dying, but the specific community I love here appears to be leaving. This isn’t my first time seeing a social media community crumble, but I feel particularly adrift rn, especially with the collapse of the NaNoWriMo forums, which were my main social platform for years and years.

Any advice as to how I can find a new social platform that fits me? Ideally it would be a space that supports longform text and back-and-forths in the comments.

--

The key thing to realize is that lots of platforms we loved in the past had absolutely garbage features—at least at the point when we set up camp there. Both LJ and Tumblr had features that were absolute ass and then somewhat improved before tanking again in various ways. The next hot platform will also suck, just like the last 10.

If you want longform text and discussion, start by posting longform text and responding to anything even remotely response-worthy that anyone sends you.

Granted, twitter clones directly prevent longform text, but a lot of the time, the main sticking point is culture. Everyone told me that Tumblr wasn't good for longform text, that it violates social norms to post it without a readmore, etc. Years of How To Tumblr posts discouraged this behavior. Tumblr haters pining for LJ still constantly tell me that discussion is impossible here due to the lack of threaded comments...

To that, I say it's only impossible for cowards who aren't willing to fill people's dashboards with 37 of the same post and all its chatty reblogs on the same day.

Cowards, I tell you!

Who says I can't post 90% text-only and a million long-ass posts to the gifset-and-no-commentary website?

--

The actual features are only marginally important. Social conventions like linking to the ask you're referencing or snipping irrelevant stuff from the prior e-mail chain can take care of most feature issues.

The important part is either following a community or making the community come to you. Being consistently active is a huge part of it. If you're publicly findable and friendly, people will come hang out where you are or invite you places. It can take a while to get visible enough, but it does work. It's a matter of having the energy and time to invest.

Another key is to recognize that a lot of people feel adrift. If your blog/forum/discord server is the logical place for them to collect, they will do so. They have to know it exists and they have to find it welcoming, but that's all it really takes to collect up people who are feeling lonely and unmoored.

[awellboiledicicle]

i was gonna make a post like "so cohosters, we're just gonna come back and be queer as hell and horny as hell right?" but then i remembered that tumblr doesn't have a built in 18+ filter and was suddenly back in the "well i sure hope no one who could kick me out of the house sees porn over my shoulder because i dared scrolled my for you page when my beloved mutuals got horny" times

So basically, it's bad! Very bad.

Like i need ppl who didn't wander over there to understand that the op would mark porn as porn and it got to exist, but like. you had a toggle. it would collapse the post automatically and you had the option to open it, but didn't automatically get stuck scrolling at the speed of light because other people exist.

Porn was tagged. Artistic nudity was tagged. Fetish art was tagged properly.

And it was great! It was functional!

Then i come back here and its like "porn is allowed so long as you never tag it as porn bc then staff can't catch you hehe!"

No, bad! That just means people can't filter their dashes properly! ugh

[funwalker]

Rigging....

[Another crosspost from cohost. The original was posted on Feb. 17, 2024. I forget to post about them here, but I do make vtubers as my main source of income. I figured more people might like to see this.]

Complex mouth rigging + Added in some animation smears.

Since @Isa-ah asked how I did it, I'll just do a quick breakdown here. The mouth is made of three layers: the line for the top lip, the line for the bottom lip, and the mask for inside the mouth (which the tongue is clipped to). If you use the deform path tool to draw a path while multiple meshes are selected, it groups those meshes together so that they all move together. It's pretty difficult to get everything to behave the first go round, and your mesh needs to be set up in a particular way, which is why the mask for the mouth has very limited geometry in a sort of zigzag pattern so that any vertices in the middle wouldn't get left behind. This geometry can be further subdivided later, but it works best fairly low poly to start with.

I basically just drag the corners of the mouth in so that the geometry collapses in on itself to be really small. I use both the deform path and also the temporary deform tool to collapse the faces pretty tightly. So the widest mouth has the full geometry, the mid-sized one has the outer two lines collapsed in to the corners of the mouth, and the smallest one has the next two lines collapsed in.

Usually this can create a "tearing" effect on the exported model (where the smaller faces are collapsed, the more white bleeds into low opacity or anti-aliased faces), so sometimes I cover the collapsed geometry with another mask, but it can probably also be minimized using vtube studio's "get rid of white outlines" feature.

There's also still a bit of cleanup required since the deform path usually forgets about some vertices, but it really does feel like magic when you learn to do it properly. (Also sorry if some of this explanation was confusing... I did my best without just making a whole tutorial video. Haha)

[beesmygod]

do you think tumblr has a chance to keep existing for like, idk, at least 5 years? it feels like every website is collapsing (i've been on cohost for 2 years and am really bummed out at the prospect of having to go to, god forbid, mastodon or bluesky). i would swear off social media entirely if i had a better way of promoting my art

i genuinely have no idea. i think its hard to predict the life of any website anymore

[koboldfactory]

not that it's really relevant here but since twitter is actively decaying I went ahead and set up a cohost. it's "kobold-factory" I probably wont use it unless twitter fully collapses but it's an official backup space at least!

[dyrewrites]

Pale Blood -- now on cohost

They let me make pages, this is their fault.

I bring you more monster boyfriends with this first book (of a trilogy), it's not all about them...but they do take over often.

And, in case this story is new to you, here is information;

**The pitch(?)**

Urban Fantasy//Cyberpunk//LGBTQA+

Monsters and men live side by side in a futuristic fantasy world of magic and mayhem, aware and begrudgingly accepting of one another, with no idea their world is on the brink of collapse.

---

The link

The excerpt -- our narrator is unwell, but doing their best.

The city of Dolor reached, with all its metal fingers, for the bright hot eyes that warmed it. Eyes too weary, too ancient, to worry of the lives that scurried under their gaze. But those lives worried of them and of the grand and terrifying wyrm that bore them. Or they should have. On the whole, those desperate to avoid the wyrm’s glare were the ones to take note of its sinewy, slithering sky long enough to be concerned. And it is one such desperate soul that our tale begins with. Well...half of such a soul—though fully desperate—as through no fault of his own he was born an abomination. Half bloodsucking fang, half man, and entirely too tired to care which one had decided to make him their doormat on any given evening. But we jump ahead. Let us roll back a step or two, explain a bit. Delmas Olren was famous once, beloved even—if the rampant infatuation born of complete separation from reality that his fans possessed could be deemed love. Larger than life he towered over all others, projected in brilliant, flickering holographic clarity for those in the lofty heights of Upper Dolor to witness. And what granted such fame, such fortune, such privileged status in the glittering haven of those towers? A simple sport, if a brutal one.

This book is in revision and will get that revision when I finish with the big dark monster fantasy and the other monster boyfriend book. But I love this world, and these characters, so it's getting a page until I can get back to it.

->more art under the cut, to prove it's not all these two (and also that it kind of is because I have a problem)<-

[shamanistic-tendencies]

uhhh ok intro post time :3

hiii im leslie

she/they/it, transfem//genderfluid, furry, canine/puppy therian

(Formerly of cohost dot org)

things i like

Collecting physical media (CDs, movies, and books)

Music (neutral milk hotel, they might be giants, talking heads, ect ect there’s a lot of them)

Magic: the Gathering

furries/aeromorphs/robots and other such things

Horror movies and books

[mapsofnonexistentplaces]

the thing about all these sites people are moving to is like. the current climate of social media is just utterly collapsing be it because of giants buckling under themselves or because there’s like a dozen microcosm sites all with shitty moderation and it’s kind of like. well do i want to move to bluesky which has optional racism toggles instead of unequivocal moderation or do i want to move to cohost which is made by creeps or do i want to move to spacehey which i literally can’t use because the font size outright makes me squint and most of its populace is scenecore kids who Will have the most migraine inducing profiles in the world. no poison’s good enough to justify its ingestion personally

[onemillionfurries]

on one hand i love cohost with it being a co-op run social media site with better policies than most, no algorithm, chronological feed, tags you can follow, etc.

on the other hand it's a social media site. it is not immune to running into the exact same problems that other social media sites have. if it grows, it will eventually get to the size where it is impossible to properly moderate with human beings alone and they will have to turn to auto moderation. that or tickets will start piling up.

speaking generally: a single team of people, no matter how large, should not be moderating what could be hundreds of thousands of people. not to mention hundreds of thousands of people under one single rule set. no matter how well-meaning it is.

with the social media mode of operation slowly collapsing before our eyes, unfortunately so will well-meaning sites like cohost.

[s-dei]

Cohost looks nice, wish I had more energy to run blogs on several media 🙄 Like I know internet sucks balls now, so I'm trying to follow any available platform people do recommend on my tl, just in case. But I hate making the same post for 10 times. So for now I'm stickin with the old platforms, but ready to move when it collapses. I don't want to be just an art-poster, I want to have fun time and silly things, collecting them by crumbs from 10 different socmed is tiring.

[penultimate-step]

jokes aside though my big takeaway with the cohost collapse is that it's just another reminder that a lot of digital infrastructure is much more fragile and temporary than we think. Most sites could collapse at any time; places we may consider long-lasting parts of the internet environment are not immune from being built on a foundation of sand

[insufferablemod]

cohost has been around for a few months, its definitely a viable alternative

yeah ive heard iits the closest to having tumblr vibes of all current social media sites so ive been curious even outside of the fear of a tumblr collapse