#tumblr won't lemme tag more than 5

[inthecemetery-a]

Shuffle your on repeat playlist and list the first ten songs, then tag ten people tagged by @hexgh0ul ♡

bless the telephone by labi siffre

mother by shiv

comfortable by victor ray

de selby (part 2) by hozier

los narcos by master peace

from the start by laufey

northern attitude by noah kahan ft. hozier

mood swings by little simz

this hell by rina sawayama

i bet on losing dogs by mitski

tagging: @calxypso , @devilsskettle , @crawlingbetweenearthandheaven , @gayofficial , @vjecitiapril , @mydearlonelygrave , @usercannibal , @exalibur , @thismustbemyexits , @aesterea

[ameliapples]

I see people on other platforms talking about cohost going down and I generally see the same few complaints being trotted out over and over as the reasons why it failed and was doomed to fail from the start. "It kept logging me out", "there was no app", "my timeline was always dead", "I got so little engagement", "I had to wait how long before I could post??". It's the stuff people have complained about with the platform forever, and while I think these complaints are generally a bit silly, they do arrive at what's probably the real reason we're all mourning the impending death of eggbug without realizing it.

A big part of what made cohost so different from other social media platforms is that it was the only platform where you had to actually want to be there. Every other platform is basically designed to hold you at gunpoint and force your attention and engagement 24/7. The gun in this situation being mostly fomo - everything is happening so rapidly, there's so much to keep track of, what if you miss something? what if it's something really big and you don't tweet about it within the first 5 minutes of it happening? what if you miss the next Main Character? there's a new one every day and they're forgotten as quickly as they arrive, but a month from now someone's gonna bring it up as a joke and you won't get it and you'll look lame and cringe! you don't want to look Lame and also Cringe, do you?

cohost never felt that way. If you were there, it was because you genuinely wanted to be. The site was designed to ensure that, even. You had to wait about a week after you made an account to ensure you weren't a spam bot before you could post at all. Once you could post, there was no algorithm. None. Nothing was fed into your feed that wasn't directly posted to a tag you follow or a person you follow. If you wanted to see something outside of that, you'd have to do the legwork browsing tags yourself. For budgetary reasons, there was never an app, so you had to either learn to set up a shortcut icon on your phone or else open it manually in a browser. It also logged you out every 30 days as a privacy and security measure. You had to want to jump through all these hoops to use cohost.

And what did you get for doing the effort? Peace. A social media environment that didn't feel like you were constantly stood in the center of Time Square with all the noise and marquees and heckling voices focused directly at you at all times. It didn't try to be a news site, or an advertising platform. No algorithm meant you only got what you actively chose to see, and nothing more. You could say in your head "lemme check cohost real quick", and you could be up-to-date on your timeline in under 5 minutes. It was a place you would willingly go to check in on friends or look at cool art or play around with html like it was 2004 again, not get sucked into for hours doom scrolling. Because there was no algorithm, no push for engagement, no numbers that publicly went up, no one was competing for attention or clout. No one I ever met on cohost was immediately antagonistic, or rude, or trying to dunk someone. People were chill, FRIENDLY even, in a way I have never seen on twitter or tumblr even back in "the good ol days". The adversarial, cliquey, petty nonsense we all expect from social media was almost entirely absent. It was peaceful, quiet. It was the only social media platform I've used to not give me anxiety, or a migraine.

So of course it fell apart. We live in a world where things require money to simply exist, and cohost was designed basically not to make any by virtue of having virtues. It refused to advertise, sell user data in any way, open a weird shop where you can put microscopic pngs next to your name, or force people's worst impulses in order to keep them on the site for as long as possible. It ran off merch purchases and cohost plus, which was meant to give you premium features but never got the chance to do much more than upping your file size limit on uploads. It was essentially a $5 a month donation. It wasn't enough, clearly.

So now it's going, but I don't really think saying it "failed" is right. If anything, it's made it clear what a failure the rest of the social media ecosystem is. Usually when a platform is dying, or looks to be dying (in the case of twitter, or tumblr post 2018), people immediately make plans to jump ship to a new one. But upon hearing that cohost was shutting down, my reaction, as well as that of a pretty large portion of the user base, was that we'd rather spend time on other things. Cohost was so different an atmosphere it seems to have had a healing property on people who used it. It wasn't perfect, moderation was spotty at times due to the limited staff, people had their blind spots and biases they sometimes struggled to work through. But it was better than what we've grown to expect. It made you realize how tiring the rest of the internet has become, and that you don't need to deal with it. You can better spend that time, doing things you enjoy with people you enjoy. Maybe even outside, if you can muster it. You might even meet some cool people out there, wearing cool patches, eulogizing a cool little website, with a funny lil bug shaped like an egg.

[kevin-day-is-bi]

i feel like i wanna remind ya that like, there are people (me) who enjoy the Bruce&Dick as father&son because it's not wholesome and can be rather fucked up, esp in fics that really focus on their interactions

idk like, i dont have a ship in particular in batfam, but it feels like you keep getting deeper into the "any interp other than sexual is stupid" and :< it's fun to explore the fucked up non-sexual things...

I'm guessing this is largely about my tags on this post.

A couple things right away.

1. I'm in fandom to ship. I have been in DC for the sole purpose of consuming and creating ship content for almost 8 years at this point. When I first watched Young Justice at 12, I had ships fully formed by episode 7. I watched episode 1 and started shipping Dick and Wally. I think they have an interesting friendship, but I personally have no interest in exploring their relationship platonically. While I understand that 2017 isn't super long ago compared to the entire history of Batman, please do not explain shipping within the DC fandom to me. I have been doing it a very long time.

2. that doesn't mean I in any way look down on or think that people who enjoy consuming media in another way (platonic or familial etc) are not consuming it "correctly"

3. I had several unpleasant experiences, both personally irl and in fandom spaces, with people who were anti-shipping (I'm not saying you are) which led to me being overly cautious in fandom, so for a while I didn't reblog anything ship related. I rebbloged non-ship content and just didn't tag it how I wanted to. I have finally got over that and have joined spaces where I feel more confident and welcomed.

4. Without going into too much detail, I live a pretty fucked up life. I have a lot of complicated emotions around sex and sexuality in relationships and I use fandom to explore that. I have been in platonic sexual relationships, romantic asexual relationships, situationships, unhealthy crushes, QPRs, and a lot of other situations that I also explore in fandom. I am aware of the fact that I have asked for life advice on this blog and in DMs before and clearly have the fact that I'm 19 listed in my blog description, but I have lived a lot of life and am pretty mature about fandom. I've been reading Bat smut since before I got my first boyfriend, and my life has very much shaped how I view media.

5. Finally, I am aware that there has been an uptick in blood and gore (and other more physical) kink things recently. That would be because those are genuine kinks that I have that there has been an increase in for me recently. I have those because I am disabled and my relationship with being disabled has led to me sexualizing certain aspects of it. I'm not going to tag for this or other things (NSFW, shipping, etc). I understand that some people want or need that level of control. I am not the person to follow in that case I use Tumblr's fast reblog feature liberally. I am on this site to distract myself from the fact that I am in pain 24/7 and my life is a mess. I do tag content I create and have always done so.

normally I wouldn't respond to this level, but this is gonna replace my current pinned post for a while. lemme again just say:

this is a non-issue. I don't care what anyone does or does not ship. I don't care what people think about what I do or do not ship. we are talking on a site where we don't know anyone's real name about things we want fake people to do that a bunch of people in a board room created. I am on here so I don't think about how I have been displaced because I almost died in a hurricane for the second time in 6 years. who I ship is such a low priority to me that it is functionally non-existent right now.

if any of my followers don't like what I am reblogging, unfollow! I won't be heartbroken! I'm not going to stop talking about ships that I have on my blog. and if your automatic go-to feeling when you see someone being positive about a ship you don't have is to think they are anti-not shipping that thing, do some internal examination as to why. because it's not true, and I never ever said it was.

feel free to dm me to talk about this more! but you are wrong, and I'm not going to change how I act on here.