but on macos you can delete whole words with alt+delete, and delete whole lines with cmd+delete.

you can also use this when selecting or navigating through text, so

• shift+alt+left selects everything between the cursor and the word to the left
• shift+cmd+left selects everything between the cursor and the start of the line

this small thing has made my life significantly easier just by alt+deleting whole words

i don't have the time to make a long-post for this (at least not while Cohost still exists) but: as site retrospectives get written people will probably say shit like "you should have just blocked people more" and "you should have curated your timeline better" in response to much of the criticism that does exist of Cohost.

the problem is this: as an idea applied to this context, you're basically just arguing for Bluesky-ass libertarianism. it sucks over there as implemented, and it wasn't good advice over here either. stuff like that does not really address many of the fundamental problems minority users felt existed here,[^1] including but not limited to:

• a lack of founding diversity in the userbase;
• a lack of diversity on staff;
• a perceived hollow commitment to things like anti-racism;
• a perceived lack of moderation, or poorly responsive moderation;
• a perceived favoritism in certain staff moderation actions;
• actual moderation failures that led to racist outcomes (that even Cohost's staff will admit to, and which is reflected in the late changing of rules);
• certain features exposing minority users to disproportionate risk of harassment, leading to them not being able to engage with it;
• the often disproportionate level of vitriol minority users often experienced on here from other users;
• and the amount of disrespect for background, heritage, culture, language, religion, etc. minority users often experienced on here from other users

it just hides it from you. but it's still a corrupting influence on the site, its culture, and its userbase. it functionally treats many of these problems as missing stair problems where you become the problem for objecting to that state of affairs, and the actual thing or person causing that state of affairs skates. and unsurprisingly: several of the people on this website who did actually raise problems became identified as the problems themselves for doing that.

we also literally and collectively tried a "block and curate" approach with @usernamenotrequired11 and it didn't fucking work! the failure to remove them--which left the community to work around them--ended in harassment against Renkon months later! so i don't want to hear it!

[^1]: you can agree or disagree with individual details here if you want but that'd be missing the forest for the trees—the issue is the pattern.

🤡

Since the closing announcement alot of folks have shared their memories of cohost, how good the site was, and how it's improved their lives in various ways. Ranging from getting more healthy about the internet to all the wonderful aid people received here.

I also have very good memories of cohost and can attest to feeling some good mental health benefits myself, but i can't give a eulogy that's a full throated endorsement of the website due to the racist harrassment i witnessed in its last days.

I'm not sure how much of the userbase actually engaged in this racist harrassment, maybe it was only 10% of the active userbase, maybe 1%. Maybe it was just one person with alot of alts, but it was enough to drive a substantial number of minority chosters off the site.

If you're reading this and werent one of the dickheads im talking about, great. I dont wanna hear shit about it. We have a saying in the south: "a hit dog will holler.", so any dogs hollering in my comments, replies, shares, asks, etc. I'll just assume are racist ones. If i catch anyone carrying water for racists. anyone trying to argue nuance, or edge cases, I'll just assume they're repping the home team and move on with my day.

And i wanna explain the racism doesnt just include sending harrassing anonymous asks, but also reducing this sorta of racism to "gay internet drama" or playing devils advocate as the enlightened centrist. Alot of these aggressions, micro or otherwise really hurt of quality of enjoyment many of us got from this app.

Because we all saw. Even if we werent in the crosshairs, we all saw. We all saw how our fellow minorities were treated, and all saw the price for speaking out too much about certain topics in eggbug's domain.

I know 9/11 was tuesday but that kind of treatement is something we'll never forget. As others are taking good lesson about healthy online use and opening your heart to strangers online and being a good person with them, a good amount of minorities learned that there's probably no real place to safely be themselves online. That even the most wholesome spaces require some amount of minimizing yourself to exist peacefully.

I had hope cohost would turn itself around on the racism, and i still think we wouldnt have needed infinite time and monkeys to do so, but for alot of folks, their otherwise positive cohost experience was bookended by racism. Their experience ended on a sour note that wont allow them to join in the reminiscing with everyone else.

This isn't meant to attack Kara or anyone else on staff. Running this site was hard and even if they took the right action with the right timing everytime, theres still small stuff that isnt obvious enough to necessitate a ban, but still ruins the experience.

A part of me has to wonder if cohost's reputation as a cozy lefty queer friendly space made the racism all the worse. Getting attacked by racism makes sense on twitter. It's not good or acceptable, but you expect it at least. You know what to expect from the nazi nest. You dont expect that from a group of folks you would otherwise consider to be progressive. I know the left isnt a monolith, but there are some bare minimum competencies you would expect at least.

Again i enjoyed cohost. Probably the most positive website ive been apart of, and i have cried about its shuttering and will cry some more. Im really glad i joined here and made the connections i did. I was able to learn new things, and become a more complete person imo. However, the racism will remain a dark stain on its reputation. I hope another lesson the alumni of cohost take with them is how the pervasive whiteness of the internet can harm minority users, especially if its not intentional.

it's cool that some civil libertarians seem to think civil libertarianism means "the right to ruin someone else's day and potentially life" in addition to their own day and potentially life—this is why i don't identify as one

'what if you could do something about it'¹ is a real powerful question for dystopian fiction to ask

_{and not to keep going on about this, she said, keeping going on about this, but getting people to not imagine doing something about it was where a lot of conventional writing advice came from}


¹ even better, 'what if you did something about it', because at least in the broad, fuzzy, generic sense of 'you' and 'we', there are things we can do about the dystopia we live in - not that this undercuts the value of imagining doing things that one cannot (materially, practically or safely) do

bluesky's head of trust & safety has no idea how to moderate himself out of a wet paper bag, much less manage a social network. he just posted a thread that started like this:

The inversion principle is a powerful tool I use to shift my perspective and uncover blind spots. Consider this example: "I was repeatedly rude to this person because they are bad." Here, user A labels themselves as good, justifying rudeness to user B, whom they've labeled as bad. 1/7

People who agree with user A might think it's acceptable to be rude to user B due to their "bad" views. To check for bias, flip the model by inverting the users. Is it acceptable if user B does the same to user A? If not, there's a bias favoring one group over the other. 2/7

T&S policies should focus on behaviors (e.g., treating others with respect), regardless of the direction of rudeness. Otherwise, policies could be weaponized to favor one group over another repeatedly. 3/7

it is obviously not worth continuing the thread so i'll end it there. basically, as long as you aren't rude, you can say whatever you want. if you're, for example, a nazi? just be scientific and polite about your racist belief system and you're good! and if anyone is rude to you about all the slurs in your handle, that's bad says the head of bluesky moderation! wouldn't want to treat one group better than another! doesn't matter what the groups are! great plan for a healthy social media platform

quacking in my boots

I hate pulling the brown person card because it's so much easier for everyone to assume I'm just white like they do with everyone else

If ever I show up at a convention Ima have to wrap myself in barbed wire and carry around a giant “Fuck you” knife or something cause the amount of people who just assume I’m chill with their touches or hugs will always shock me.

Like it takes two seconds to ask first. That consent is super duper important to someone who has had their skeleton crunched up by an ogre or two.

Two seconds. Tops. Love me some hugs, love giving hugs, but d a m n people need to learn some personal space.

Goblin Gal Pal and the razor wire ouch jacket

and the time before that

(this is a pamphlet from 1888 arguing against smallpox vaccination)

they say "domainjacked", and are emitting contradictory statements about the site's safety, redirecting to their shop, then to their twitter, while staff has visibly no clue what in fuck, and the backend continues to serve the app, with some guy on the discord going "don't worry, the worst that can happen is [attackers] get your cookies" as if that's not, y'know, kinda catastrophic

(non-Cohost .pdf export, if this would make for easier reading—will work on better formatting later)

This is a document which attempts to weave, to the best of my individual abilities, the record of racial issues on cohost.org into one singular document. The optimistic intent of this document is to enter into the communal record a definitive account of the website, its racial issues, and what it can avoid in the future. I have, to the best of my abilities, attempted to get permission from major participants—in some cases however this was not immediately possible. Accordingly: comments, requests for redaction or removal, amendments, and so on can be sent by way of Discord (alyaza), Matrix (@n0tagryphon:matrix.org), via ask box, or by flagging me down in another such way.

I must also caveat this immediately on a number of accounts. Firstly: this is assuredly an incomplete picture; Cohost is (for some intentional reasons, others unintentional) antithetical to discovery, archival, and discerning a coherent timeline. It is likely that several foundational posts to these discussions are unavailable or were overlooked because I could not find them. Secondly: I am relatively old to the site but not anywhere a near a founding member. As a result I am unclear on when the first racial issues with the website began to manifest, although largely familiar with those that came after my joining of the site c. November of 2022. Finally: there is the matter of being a participant in a number of these conversations—I am not a neutral observer. To a degree this will reflect judgements or prioritization on my part that another writer might not make. Still, I consider this a fundamentally sound document and I hope you agree with that.

Early racial issues

I am not clear on when exactly racial issues began to manifest on Cohost in a negative way (at least in the way they currently do). My join date means I was not around for the first nine months of Cohost—and as mentioned above the site is largely antithetical to discovery, precluding my ability to uncover any early relevant posts. Any issues in the beginning may also be lost to time and entropy at this point—or, of course, they may not have happened at all.

But I would assert that even in the absence of receipts, inference is on the side of racial issues beginning in the website's early history and laying the groundwork of contemporary problems. This can be inferred by way of the demography and culture of Cohost, and through the existence of whisper networks about Cohost.

Demography and culture of Cohost

While there has never been a Cohost census to my knowledge, it can be trivially inferred that Cohost is incredibly white. In all probability—taking into consideration Cohost's contemporaries, and the demographics of even mainstream platforms like Reddit—any such census would find a userbase that is at least 80% white by self-identification.[^1] Among active membership the number of visible minorities is likely in the low-triple digits, if that.

This presents the most obvious vector through which racial issues might develop: the few minorities in an environment like Cohost's are effectively tokenized and are likely to be tokenized for the duration of their using the site. It can obviously be quite lonesome and alienating to be the only minority in a room full of white people. Any issue you might discuss is likely to be overshadowed by the opinions of majority groups—and even when you are given a platform through which to speak, the rationalism, ignorance, or malice of majority groups that often follows from speaking is even more alienating. Many small, alternative social media platforms have struggled with this dynamic,[^2] and it is unlikely Cohost was ever an exception to this.

In terms of peer websites, perhaps the most one-to-one comparison with Cohost demographically is Mastodon—a service which is clocked as overwhelmingly white, queer, leftist, and techie. Cohost, in fact, has many former Mastodon users among its ranks. But this presents another vector from which racial problems could eventually develop—not only demographically but culturally. For about as long as it's existed, Mastodon has been criticized for how its adopters handle minority issues and minorities speaking about those issues. Racism, bigotry, and all-around fumbling of minority issues is such a consistent pattern that anti-racist courses exist for instance admins and multiple "running an instance"/or "moderating your instance" guides linger on how to handle such situations. The overall culture of Mastodon on this subject is, in short, quite bad—and seems little improved from when serious complaints began in 2017.

So I think this follows quite simply: Cohost is a very white space, which is likely to beget a very culturally white community, which is likely to ultimately result in alienation for minority users. Moreover, Cohost has similar demographics to Mastodon. If Mastodon's demographics result in a culture where minority issues are in a never-ending struggle to be taken seriously, we would expect similar issues to eventually occur on Cohost. Particularly, we would expect this to occur given Cohost's userbase not merely being demographically similar but also having a degree of cross-pollination with Mastodon.

Whisper networks

Less demonstrable—but evident in how visible minorities speak about race and Cohost—are the existence of whisper networks about Cohost. These are largely disillusioned to actively negative about the site, and they generally imply a history of people being alienated from Cohost due to its disproportionately white demography and how the userbase speaks about minority issues. As just one illustration, @renkotsuban (Renkon) noted in a June 19, 2024 post that:

Getting anonymous asks and Discord friend requests and Masto follows from Asians/Asian diaspora telling me that exactly this happened to them when they brought up Orientalism #onhere, right down to being accused of being a cop and trying to "cancel marginalized people" and reverse racism and "the silent majority disagrees with you"

A lot of them left cohost.[^3]

Other networks like this have undoubtedly been alluded to or can simply be inferred from both on- and off-site posting. There are many old friend groups on Cohost or which previously were on Cohost—and public Cohost meta can be readily found on Pillowfort or Mastodon due to cross-pollination between these platforms and Cohost itself.

The Nazi incident (May 13, 2023)

But even if you disagree with some of the presumptions and premises advanced above—or even disagree categorically with all of the above—the history of racial issues on-site is one that still dates back at least a full year as of writing. The first of these to really challenge the site was the Nazi incident, which occurred on May 13, 2023 and bears a striking similarity to subsequent failures.

In short: around May 9, 2023, Jewish user @YuushaRuby (Ruby) began to be viciously harassed offsite by Nazis. By May 12, one of these Nazis—a "Mike Moore"—made a Cohost account in an apparent effort to harass Ruby on-site. Ruby reported the account, and then subsequently posted a public screencap of said account with the observation that "One of these people from the “freespeechextremist” instance just tried following me on cohost, I guess I’m getting stalked everywhere by nazis now, oh to be Jewish online!"[^4] The account's linktree page included other accounts on Gab (neo-Nazi Twitter) and Parler (a now-defunct "free-speech" Twitter alternative almost exclusively used by the broader far-right); plainly, it did not make any attempt to be plausibly deniable, nor hide that its owner was a fascist attempting to harass Ruby.

Nevertheless, Ruby's initial report led to no action against the account. On May 13, @kaara (Kara) closed report for the following reason:

I worry about the links for sure, and it's something we want to keep a close eye on, but absent any evidence on Cohost, I don't think that alone quite constitutes action. Please let us know if anything comes up.[^5]

Ruby—obviously surprised and extremely upset by the lack of action—then took to Cohost, posting the closed report and adding the commentary that "...I tell you people from this clearly nazi instance have been calling me a kike and tranny for 72 hours and someone from that instance follows me on cohost and that’s not actionable? Okay, whatever, I think I’m gonna leave cohost, see ya!"[^6] (Ruby later reversed course on leaving the website, but the incident has clearly served as a disillusioning one.) Her post quickly gained circulation, and the failure to ban Mike Moore was widely panned and criticized—albeit with charitability to the staff—in one of the first "sitewide discourses" I was present for.

It seems probable that community backlash led to some sort of reassessment of this decision (although it should be noted Kara disputes this). Approximately one hour after Ruby's post the Mike Moore account was banned permanently, with Kara stating under Ruby's post that "After some internal discussion we decided to take action and remove the user. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. ... Purely off-site behavior is a difficult thing for anyone to assess, and it's going to be an area where sometimes we won't have a 100% hit rate. ... Cohost is not a home for antisemites, transphobes, racists, etc..., or really any fucking extreme-right chud."[^7] Kara, on its blog, also acknowledged that "It's not my place to tell anyone how to act, and I think it is more than reasonable to get a little upset at us if we make a bad call and to call us out for it." but still pled for good faith and grace from the community on moderator decisions.[^8] Other users largely concurred with this assessment and that call.

Perhaps the most exemplifying quote of this period is one from @ShugoWah, who stated: "we have to got to unlearn the arguably-valid trauma response of assuming that every tiny mistake is the first step down the slippery hill to bullshit. at least here, on this tiny website made by a group of pals." At least two users—one of whom was Ruby—actually apologized for some of their conduct toward Kara during the incident,[^9] and Cohost as a whole came out of the affair seemingly more confident in its staff than before. But a closer examination makes it clear that the event shook the confidence of several minority members. Renkon, for instance, seems to have first lost confidence with reporting here. In a reply to @lori (Lori) they write in part:

[...]I got a reply from support the next morning saying that I shouldn't join in on mass-reporting, which I thought was a bit unfair since 1) it makes it sound like [Ruby] was calling for people to report when she hadn't and 2) how the heck was I supposed to know that's what was going to happen. It makes me hesitate to report stuff in future since it might get a ton of reports and I just don't know it (or in this case, anticipate it).[^10]

"Neotenous" Asians (June 5-6, 2023)

Much of the grace the community gave to moderation would be erased less than a month later when, on June 5, Cohost published the extremely controversial "community guidelines update june 2023" which delved into the website's position on cub/lolisho. Amidst a broader, venomous debate of where the guidelines should fall on these came a series of now-infamous posts by @a-lot-of-buckets asking such questions as "how do you fairly account for some people being more neotenous, like Asians?"—essentially, as Renkon put it over a year later, "[...]going 'but what if the artwork is of Asians, who are neotenous? what if I get dinged for CSAM when really I just fetishize the Orientals?'"[^11]

These phrenology-like posts, it must be stressed, did not go unnoticed at any point. User @thewaether (Kate Barrett) called them racist and directly argued against them, while user @dieting-hippo called the person making the posts a clown at the time they were made. They were remarked upon by Lori in July 2023—a month after the cub/lolisho debate—in a series of Mastodon toots where Lori also said they were reported several times. According to Renkon, they were reported at least twice more in 2024. But none of the comments were removed (nor the person making them apparently banned) until one year later on July 13, 2024. The only moderator action taken in the moment was to hide @dieting-hippo's comments plus one parent comment, and to admonish @dieting-hippo for insults. In part because of this he apparently left the site. Renkon, similarly, gave up on reporting things as a result the exchange.

Kara, speaking retrospectively to Renkon on the subject, stated that:

[...]at the time, we were skittish about removing comments that had anything to do with either side of the argument, even if they sucked. the topic was extremely controversial and we were afraid to take action on anything due to the vitriol we would inevitably face if we seemed like we were censoring or controlling the conversation. as for why it took us a while to get to it this second time around, I don't have an excuse. it sat in the backseat while we dealt with some other things.[^12]

It is hard to disagree with this assessment.

The cowardice toward these comments—and conversely, the moderating of pushback against them—was undoubtedly harmful to the visible minority community at the time. Renkon's belief was that as a result, "A lot of [POC] didn't want to stick around to see if things would get better. They just left." And my own anecdotal experience supports this assertion: on February 4, 2024, I observed that "i've only seen my own BHM posts, which is sad because i do remember seeing other contributions circulate last year when BHM rolled around." But due to a lack of data we can only speculatively infer this. What we can observe, however, is that this situation dealt a crippling blow to confidence in the report system. Cynicism and outright suspicion that reporting did little—if anything—was confirmed by this debacle and would become a theme with future blow-ups.

Racial Interregnum (June 2023 - February 2024)

For a significant period following the "neotenous Asians" debacle there were no major incidents that I am aware of—perhaps in no small part because of the damage that event did to the visible minority community. Actually, in my limited examination, race seemed to come up seldom if at all on the website for a period between June of 2023 and February of 2024. But this should not be confused for the absence of racism; arguably it was the most visible byproduct of it on Cohost. Many visible minorities seem to have either left the website, started avoiding racial posting, or ceased to visibly identify themselves racially. (My own experience during this period was getting scolded for not content warning my experience with racism—and then getting blocked for explaining why—which I noted still irritated me several weeks after it happened.)

As far as I can tell, the initial catalyst for change was my widely-circulated Black History Month series, and several additional race-related posts I made during the course of that series. In particular, my aforementioned February 4, 2024 post and its follow-ups (in which I posited the site selecting for "a certain variety of white tech queer" and other such factors influenced the site's whiteness) seem to have led to a visible minority revival on Cohost. My observation prompted a noteworthy addendum from @chimerror and a proposal from @TrashBoatDaGod (fleshed out further by @Malusdraco (Malus)) which became the genesis for the @cohostminorityfeed account. Because these posts gained a significant amount of traction they also served as a major networking opportunity for visible minorities—many active Cohost users who are visible minorities seem to have become aware of each other through the posts.

Unfortunately, this revival of visible minority posting also coincided—through no fault of its own—with another landmark case of Cohost's racial issues manifesting.

Cohost so White (February 6-15, 2024)

Late on February 6, 2024, as my race-related posts circulated, @Keeble posted a fairly unremarkable and wholly unrelated opinion that "people join social media sites to scroll, not to post." The next day, February 7, 2024, this opinion became a fully-fledged essay on the subject of user retention, Cohost, and its lack of user diversity. This essay was remarkable and almost immediately became controversial on the site—but largely not for reasons related to its main argument.[^13] Instead, large swathes of the website took issue with Keeble's assertion that Cohost's primary audience was "tech-oriented furries/queer tech people/the sorts of people who incorrectly assume all trans girls are programmers because they always end up in places where they meet programmers." This despite the fact that I and others had made a similar point just days earlier without pushback, and that this critique from visible minorities was certainly older than my own distillation of it.

There is no way to be certain that race being omitted aided the explosion of opinion on the topic, but it is noteworthy that—now lacking the racial component which had previously been vital to the subject in the first place—debating the validity of this assertion only here became a "sitewide discourse". Nowhere in the angry posts about Keeble's assertion; confused posts about why a website needed to be "for everyone;" or in the one liners about nerds dunking on other nerds is it apparent that this same subject, just days earlier, invited discussions about how to make Cohost less white and more visible minority friendly. The subject was quickly and collectively—in the words of @sharksonaplane (Shark)—"[run] through a bleaching process until it's a completely different topic."

This was so apparent even at the time that self-identified white users observed this phenomenon; @virtualmarmalade for example scolded users that "deflecting criticism by saying 'well it's not technically accurate so it's not really a problem (so stop talking about it)' is extremely white people shit." But much of the effort to reinsert race back into the conversation was, unsurprisingly, done by visible minorities. Beyond Shark's observation of topical bleaching, @AtFruitBat (Mae) attempted to explain the importance of connecting white and techie in talking about the site's demographics:

[...]I think "tech" as a background in the current site discourse about why Cohost is so white, is a factor because many tech-related industries still skew white. Many other industries too, but we're on a social media platform in particular, which is an environment that depends on tech. Whiteness is still what most people know of the culture of these industries.[^14]

@ImplausiblyJosh (Josh), similarly, speculated on the reason why the topic rhetorically shifted in the way it did, saying:

it's extremely clear when people are dropping the "white" from "white tech" userbase. when the dialogue shifts from "how can we retain and encourage non-white tech users" to "how could it possibly be too tech, you make your own feeds!" or responding to someone's scarecrow of the topic, the shift is so clear. [...] maybe it's too hard to argue against the site being extremely white. maybe the reality makes you uncomfortable. maybe you don't care, and would rather talk about something you care about. maybe you only saw other people make that shift, and have started talking about their scarecrows. any number of reasons for this funny little shift in dialogue![^15]

Users like @maddievision (Maddie Lim) opined at lesser-length that the situation "feels very fedi/masto-esque", and @atax1a (alex tax1a) mused that "watching y'all argue about whiteness around us, when this has been our perennial criticism, sure is a very cohost experience". @hydrochaeris pointed out that "the thing ppl seem 2 be in opposition to is the 'ragebait' and 'doomscroll' aspects of twitter rather than say the racism and antiblackness of twitter.". And there were of course my own annoyed posts on the matter in which I lamented the mass-conflation that was taking place and attempted within my own sphere of influence to steer the conversation back toward something generally productive. But as is true of many Cohost blow-ups, the topic simply becoming 'played out' is what eventually settled the matter down. By February 10, few if any posts were made about the subject—at least, objecting to Keeble's point.

Instead, the broader discussion shifted to other issues. On February 12, users on Cohost noticed that this debacle (and other Cohost debacles before it, some of which were not related to racism) was being chronicled on Pillowfort. Much of the subsequent discussion around this—which was its own "sitewide discourse"—is of no significance to this post. What is, though, are the concerns visible minorities in particular had about this type of chronicling. @ratslap perhaps best summarized these concerns on February 12, saying: "idk how i feel about someone linking a bunch of poc's posts about racism to talk about site happenings or w/e, because that has the potential to end pretty bad. it seems so careless." @hydrochaeris concurred the next day, February 13, writing that "those kinds of posts will Always garner more backlash, judgment, and vitriol onto the black people and poc being roped in without their consent, regardless of what u think op's intentions are or whatever op posted in the past that u might have agreed with."

Despite the widespread backlash, a number of accounts on Cohost—some cross-posters to Pillowfort, some not—nonetheless attempted to defend the chronicling. And amidst this, one particular account that ostensibly sought to express solidarity with Cohost's visible minorities stood out: @usernamenotrequired11 (Usernamenotrequired). Subsequent events would later reveal this account already had a negative reputation and had likely already been reported,[^16] but the account's weird behavior became particularly clear to visible minorities on this occasion. Over the course of several days it attempted to play users of Cohost—especially visible minority users—against each other; in one breath it called the website "so white" but in another breath vehemently defended the Pillowfort chronicling and called the backlash to it racism.

@hydrochaeris was seemingly the first to note and block this account on February 13, pointing out that it was "v funny to be making fun of liberals for being anti poc bringing up their fears and anger and then when poc bring up their fear and anger suddenly ur chill defending the person whos made them afraid and angry???" Shortly thereafter Shark also noted, blocked, and shamed the account in a longer post that concluded "Sharing that is practically an admission that his stake in this is just to play both sides." I concurred with both of their assessments on February 14. Finally, either late February 14 or early February 15, @zlchxo (Zilchexo) coaxed out of the account demographic information: Usernamenotrequired's owner was white, but asserted "at least I know my place, unlike some of the bigoted fucks on here." This obviously cemented the block-and-ignore approach from the visible minority community (which became common guidance thereafter).

Given its suspicious nature, its clear history of notoriety, and its conduct during February 2024, the Usernamenotrequired account probably should have been permanently banned. It is now known that it was reported at least once (probably more) for its shitstirring behavior around discussion of Pillowfort—and this is in addition to presumably being reported prior to February 2024. But unfortunately (and for reasons that are not clear) no action seems to have been taken against the account. That failure would have ramifications in the future.

Unlike the "neotenous" Asians debacle, this incident did not seemingly have large ramifications on Cohost's visible minority community. The actual discussion eventually bent back toward a community blind-spot about race issues—a productive point to talk about that could be fixed with time and effort. But it does appear that, to some visible minorities, the lack of action on Usernamenotrequired affirmed or reaffirmed that attempting to resolve things through official channels was pointless.

Orientalism (June 16 - July 12, 2024)

Despite the revitalization of visible minorities on Cohost (or perhaps because of it)—and even with the formation of a loose nexus of minority posters on the site—instances of racism or flatly weird behavior toward minorities continued to take place. Just limited to my own personal experiences, having an open ask box invited comments like "A thinly-veiled lashing out at white people for being white and having an opinion is, in itself, a type of racism." or unsolicited trauma-dumping and white guilt that eventually obliged me to turn off the anonymous ask feature. Other visible minorities including Renkon and Shark did likewise at various points for similar but not identical reasons.

There was also the highly-publicized instance where @jesncin (Jes & Cin), a friendly comics artist on the site, was called a "fragile picrew weirdo" for politely requesting a white user not be so condescending with their feedback. (This same white user, perhaps a month later, would go on to arrogantly talk over myself and other minority users in an unrelated conversation. My potentially incorrect recollection is that they analogized calls to listen to non-white users to a form of "ethnonationalism".) Barquq, who recently left Cohost, also documents a number of examples of racism or weird behavior including: "spending more time being smug about not keeping up with racism on a website than dealing with it [and] Describing a POC's criticism about a website as wielding a gun". Assuredly there are other incidents like this I am missing.

This all perhaps foreshadowed what was to come: the over-month-long Orientalism fiasco, prompted by an innocent post Renkon made on June 16, 2024. That post, spring boarding off an already-ongoing discussion of orientalism of Japan in gaming, used the initial example of Wholesome Games. As Renkon observed, the studio had:

published two games so far, and they both

• have Japanese titles
• use a lot of Japanese imagery (Shinto shrines/torii, outdoor onsen, Japanese writing, etc)
• are super cutesy and childlike, if not outright designed for children
• were made by non-Japanese teams And I'm not saying these games are bad or horrible (I played and loved both, and even recommended them to people!) but boy oh boy Wholesome Games having 100% of their output be This sure is a STATEMENT.

Renkon added that to even speak about orientalism—even in such an obvious case as this one—made them nervous, because:

[...]in the past this has never gone well because everyone wants to tell me why actually their pet game is the exception to the rule, or that because Japanese media is also racist (it really is!!!) then racist Western media about Japan is Fine Actually, or "Japanese people LIKE being objectified in this way, YOU'RE the racist for deciding they should be outraged," or whatever other annoying shit. [^17]

Unfortunately, and while reception to the post was quite positive (especially from other visible minorities, who appreciated Renkon speaking on the subject), the lengthy "sitewide discourse" that followed proved this fear very correct. Within hours of the post visible minorities received dismissiveness and racist harassment. One post, sent to a white user for feedback and intercepted by Renkon, argued among other things that "Many asian aesthetics have been commercialized for centuries now, and have become part of the liberal global exchange of cultures. [...] you are not going to be able to reverse any damage there, in the end it's just a video game."[^18] Elsewhere, Renkon posted an ask sent to a Japanese user which asserted Japanese culture had become "so public" and that Japan was "an Imperialist nation not long ago" (as if this had any relation to Renkon's post).

Subsequent responses proved even more upsetting and disillusioning—not only to Renkon but to other users who had responded positively to the initial post. @BunchesofBees, the "technical co-director at KO_OP," all but insinuated Renkon was acting like a cop and that people were "fed up with a vision of social justice where they constantly have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing, expressing themselves in the wrong way or it's going to become a call-out post." Game developer @notnull (Miles) went to the mat for his opinion that "I just don't really see why using [non-English] gibberish would be harmful on its own" even as others patiently attempted to explain that to him. And @Lilith-Rose—in one of the lowest points of the "sitewide discourse"—opted to "play devil's advocate" and argued at length that much of the orientalism Renkon identified was not orientalism at all, and was instead an overreaction. All the while Renkon continued to be bombarded by anons trying to catch them in some contradiction or trying to find circumstances in which orientalism would be "good".

Elsewhere on the site, @yrgirlkv (Kavita)—who had very little with Renkon's post and only briefly touched on the subject—was harangued by one anon over the matter. A similar ask, likely from the same person, was apparently sent to at least three other Asian users unprompted. Mae, presumably seeing Miles' posts and the general vicious backlash to Renkon, also felt obliged to explain—at length and through personal experience—why non-English gibberish was so hurtful:

A thing that has happened to just about every East/SE Asian diaspora person/immigrant I know is you'll come across some people who look like they're going to speak to you, and then they open their mouths, and they say "ching-chong, ching-chong, ching-chong", like it's a made up version of what they think your language sounds like. [...] Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. And then some random white person comes up to you on the street, and it's "ching-chong, ching-chong, ching-chong" again.

[...] If you don't feel your language is disrespected or devalued when someone does that kind of thing with you (if they even do! I can't think of a time when I've seen white people randomly subjected to that kind of behaviour), I would suggest that that's because there isn't a power differential in operation. You probably aren't in a position where you're minoritised, or where there's a serious social demand on you and your people to continually prove that you're also equally human, that you also have culture, that your culture also has value, and so on. [^19]

And still other users posted their personal stories and complicated feelings with Japanese-inspired media, such as this post by @MobileSuitLilah (Lilah) and this one by @ninecoffees (Maddie)—all to, in essence, justify their fairly tame criticisms of orientalism in Japanese-inspired media.

In this light, Renkon's exasperated comment on June 16 that "If you've ever wondered why you sometimes see posts complaining about cohost being a super white place, here's why." seem something of an understatement. Other users concurred. @yumeirochaser called Cohost's progressivism "surface level". @TrashBoatDaGod wryly called those objecting to Renkon "concerned citizens white." And @psilocervine, a white user, expressed anger at the site's inability to maturely handle racial discussions:

[...]asian posters are getting shit on because they dared to go "hey there's a pretty big orientalism problem in indie games" (there fucking is) and black posters are getting shit on because they dared to point out the overwhelming whiteness of this site's culture (which there fucking is) and this is a pattern that has repeated enough that it's no longer a coincidence?

[...] I've seen people leave this site over this shit a whole fuckin' bunch. I've tried to keep up with a lot of them because they've largely been cool as fuck people. but they're cool as fuck people who are being pushed out of cohost because of some real fuckin' nasty site culture issues that nobody seems to want to address[^20]

Despite all of this, only one ban was apparently levied against a user involved with Renkon. That ban went to @Lilith-Rose—the worst offender, and someone with a prior record that apparently included a post to the tune of "We should move everyone out of Israel/Palestine and then nuke the entire area so people stop fighting over the land". And examining her case makes it clear that the perception of reporting things as pointless allowed her to skate for so long despite posts of that kind. Shark, for instance, noted that she simply blocked Lilith instead of reporting her because—as a result of previous reports—"I guess I didn't have any faith that [Cohost staff] would do anything about it."

This belief would become even more understandable when some days later on June 26 or June 27, 2024, Renkon began to talk about why they had not reported the awful anonymous asks they received.[^21] In short: back in 2023 they saw the lack of action from multiple reports against the "neotenous" Asians poster (refer again to Lori, who corroborates this) and it disillusioned them with the reporting system. At the time of this June 26/27 post, all of the offending comments were still up and the user who posted them was apparently not banned. Renkon ultimately reported them again—and again, no action was taken until July 13, when Kara (as mentioned above) acknowledged the cowardice and removed the posts and the poster.

This discussion was also revitalized by an unusual turn of events: an unrelated and brewing discourse about the accessibility or lack thereof of "yingletspeak"[^22] The number of posters who came to the immediate defense of yinglets served initially as a stark contrast with the experience Renkon had just a week or two earlier to begin with (which I commented on a number of times). But what drew the yinglet discussion into the racism discussion was an ill-advised post making comparison between yingletspeak and AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) or patois languages. This post read, in part, "A closer analogy [to Yinglish] might be something like AAVE, which is still English, rather than a separate language."

Needless to say: already upset visible minority members (and several fellow travelers) felt quite affronted by numerous aspects of analogy. Posts by @wgwgsa, Renkon (who implored people to "stop appropriating the real oppression of real human beings for your right to post like a fantasy character from a webcomic"), and Barquq (who simply found it morbidly funny and absurdist) personify the general feeling. Lori, perhaps speaking more bluntly for many, explicitly called yingletspeak "people posting in a made up accent some fictional little dweebs speak in a webcomic" and resented the incredibly disrespectful nature of this entire segment of the incident.

Renkon's conclusion in the aftermath of all of this was bleak, writing:

I would simply like to use this webbed site the same way everyone else does: to post cat pictures and talk to my friends and reblog cool stuff. But now I can't, because I've outed myself as Someone Who Gives A Shit About Things. [^23]

Angela Carini, White Tears, and the one mod system (August 3-10, 2024)

This notion was also vindicated in an unfortunate manner on August 3, after Renkon made a number of posts about Italian boxer Angela Carini's white tears, her position as a cop, and the far right's support of her transphobia toward Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Although Renkon was quite specific in these posts, they were immediately confronted by a fragile anonymous ask which seriously attempted to argue Carini was neither a cop nor a white person. (Both assertions are false and frankly ridiculous as far as I could find.) The anonymous ask in kind was followed by user @nyktv, who took exception to Renkon's statement that "white women and queer ppl will always dismiss accusations of racism!! Always!" and demanded Renkon not make such "sweeping generalizations."

This was once again exasperating for Renkon, who blocked @nyktv and explained:

If you are white and you are queer and your first impulse when reading this post is to think "hey I'M not like that, #NotAllWhiteQueers," rather than jumping in my notifications, I implore you to instead explain this to your fellow white queers who rather demonstrably do not get it. [^24]

Likewise, other users such as @naidje (Naidje), @virtualmarmalade, and @shel (Shel) made posts pushing back on or outright calling out this type of behavior. But the situation continued to escalate anyways: @nyktv ultimately changed her username and profile picture, falsely accused other users of transphobia (which Renkon continued to have to see because of how blocking is not retroactive), and decried the site as a "hyperdesperate gaggle of elitist judgemental couch activist larping clout chasers." Both usernames are now a 404 so it seems she either deleted her account or simply changed the name/swapped to another page to go incognito.

Renkon ultimately concluded in a series of posts that:

I need to log off but this situation has left me genuinely shaking. White people weaponizing their tears are so fucking violent, and it is terrifying how they don't even seem to think much of it. [...] The violence of heaping racist shit in my notifications and expecting me not to start posting screenshots after telling you repeatedly to stop. The violence of throwing your hands up in the air and going "okay you caught me I am in a meltdown" which is not EVER, NEVER, EVER a thing that POC are allowed to do lest they get brigaded to hell and back for not speaking with a cool and level head at all times. The fuckin, VIOLENCE, of letting the accusation of misgendering hang in the air, knowing full FUCKING well the kind of hell that would bring down on a queer non-white person's health and safety #onhere.

I am fuckin MAD lmao. Here's MY meltdown. White people, COLLECT YOUR TRASH [^25]

This served as the end to one matter, but the beginning of another. In the replies to one of Renkon's posts, a discussion between Mae and another user turned to the matter of Hong Kong. This brought Usernamenotrequired back into the fray, who swiftly denounced said user as "openly admitting you pal around with fascists." Renkon noticed this on August 7, 2024 (but seemingly was not familiar with the account), denounced their post and was once again exasperated by a white user speaking on such issues, and then seemingly blocked the user without thinking much more of it.

Two days later on August 9, 2024, I noticed the account and Renkon's post—and remembering my own very negative interactions with the account (and @zlchxo's revealing of the account owner as white) began to question how the account was not banned. I was, over the course of the next day or so, inundated with negative stories about the account; experiences that led people to block the account; affirmations that the account should be banned; and receipts that they had—as noted previously—been reported for their conduct during the February discussions of race on the site.

Surprised by the totality of issues with the account but their continued presence on the site, I made a third post expressing my feeling that the situation was [...]reading more and more like the racism/phrenology posts where action intentionally was not/has not been taken, rather than a case where this person has just slipped under the radar." Evidently this series of posts (and the widespread community affirmation that the account was a negative presence) was sufficient to finally have the account banned. But the experience galvanized many people—and especially visible minorities—into loudly expressing issues with the site, from a lack of visibility given to minority issues, to questions of the structural sustainability of one full-time moderator, to the utility (or lack thereof) of blocking. Others emphasized that the issue was one of reports not being answered appropriately, and that moderation practices needed to change.

Of course for other—white—users, the whole discussion served as "gay internet drama" that was everyone making a big deal about nothing and worthy of being dismissed with (now deleted) dissertations. For once these dismissive and insulting comments were dealt with in a timely (and actively impressive) fashion. But for at least two users that I am aware of even the sentiment was a last straw of Cohost's whiteness problem that saw them exit the website or commit to doing so.

An Epilogue, of sorts (August 10-)

On August 10, 2024 Cohost notified users of A brief update to moderation policies. In an effort to restore trust in the website's report feature and to address the longstanding concerns that prompted this document to be written, more transparency in reporting and how reports are handled is forthcoming. More importantly, the website implemented what it calls the "broken stair policy (aka "get the hell off my website, asshole")"—which they summarize in short as meaning:

If you are frequently reported for or found to be shitstirring, getting into arguments, or otherwise being routinely unpleasant to others, we will ban you from the website. we don't need assholes on the website.

These changes have been met with cautious optimism from some, but pessimism or outright cynicism from others. In my observation the remaining visible minority community is about 50/50 in terms of split between these camps.

Certainly I think it's difficult to fault the cynical; the consistent pattern here has simply been one of "not good enough." Most of the failures here seem to not be on the userbase for failing to report things (even as visible minorities openly lose faith in the report system), but on Cohost itself for failing to act on these reports in a timely or proper fashion.[^26] A variety of white and nonwhite users alike have also speculated that the workload assigned to the site's one full-time mod is too high; or that only one full-time mod means staff may be insufficiently diverse to address the nuances of certain situations. I think that these are reasonable assumptions (although Kara's recent words on the lack of a backlog do complicate the first prior). But even more simply: it is hard to see why cynics should grant the charitability and good faith that Kara once asked for. In too many cases, the outcomes simply have not been as promised—too many times has community backlash seemingly been needed to get any result. It's not that Cohost sometimes gets it wrong, it's that it consistently does so and often has to be hectored into even reconsidering that wrongness. Fool me once applies heavily, in other words.

For the more optimistic, I think that charitability/good faith still exists in some form: we acknowledge it is a small team, and that while many visible minorities are on the precipice, not all is lost. The moderation is still receptive; the demographics are still at least theoretically favorable. For all its faults, Cohost is also still far and away more visible minority friendly than Twitter, Bluesky, much of the Fediverse, etc. But I think it is also true that we agree with the cynics in a few places. Far too often it seems like the only recourse is to make a big fuss—not to go through the official channels—and if the website is to get better then it must fix this aggressively. It also remains to be seen if the one mod system is a tenable one.

Ultimately what the future holds is anyone's guess. The remaining visible minority community is precarious indeed, and as mentioned some have already fled or are clearly withdrawing from the site. Several users have flipped between staying or leaving. Others still make their home here, however pessimistically; and some precious few are still true believers. Whether there is an eventual exodus of posters—or whether there is a second revitalization of visible minority posting—seems largely out of the hands of users. But this is assuredly not the last time race will be of significance on Cohost.

References

[^1]: The only data I know like this is a Google Form done by @alloyed—and its self-selecting sample finds exactly 80.6% white.) [^2]: The author of this piece found this to be an issue with Tildes, for example, and cofounded a website similar to Tildes to address perceived issues of this sort. [^3]: Getting anonymous asks and Discord friend requests..., June 19, 2024 (archive) [^4]: One of these people from the “freespeechextremist” instance just tried following me on cohost..., May 10, 2023 [^5]: This is the response I got from Kara just now, this is… not great in my opinion..., May 13, 2023 (archive) [^6]: Ibid - Yes, we're doing this. [^7]: After some internal discussion we decided to take action and remove the user...., May 13, 2023 [^8]: a brief note on good faith, May 13, 2023 [^9]: It appears this post has been subsequently deleted. The post is quoted as having said "Sorry if it seemed like I was acting in bad faith or something." [^10]: I fully agree. I saw the original posts (which at the time had very few comments other than "wow that sucks") and reported that user...., May 14, 2023 (archive) [^11]: why didn't you just report the horrible asks and replies you were getting, June 26, 2024 (archived by screenshot) [^12]: Hey Renkon,, July 13, 2024 (archive) [^13]: This argument might be best summarized as "Cohost's current audience largely remains its founding audience because more 'normal' interests are largely absent from the website, while niche/injoke-y interests that its founding audience enjoy constitute the majority of posts." [^14]: Whiteness and homogeneity, February 9, 2024 (archive) [^15]: i only have two things to add to current discourses. one serious and one funny., February 9, 2024 (archive) [^16]: Users—both white and non-white—have variously related their initial blocking of the account for its bad vibes, for its lashing out against users, for its apologia and support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for its general support of authoritarian capitalist regimes that happen to be oppositional to America, and it calling residents of Hong Kong fascists for opposing China's efforts to end the one-country-two-systems policy. This is not an exhaustive list. [^17]: The infantilization/fetishization part of Orientalism is very important and I've written about it before..., June 16, 2024 (archive) [^18]: The author of this post subsequently acknowledged it as "careless and badly written" and apologized to Renkon, which was accepted. I've opted to not link it accordingly. [^19]: A thing that has happened to just about every East/SE Asian diaspora person/immigrant I know, June 21, 2024 (archive) [^20]: I know it's been said a bunch but, June 19, 2024 [^21]: Note that reporting is only easily done if the ask is never published. You seem to have to report the post they're in if you opt to publish an ask and then want to report it. [^22]: So named for the eponymous yinglet fictional species and characterized most prominently by its substitution of < z > for < th > (so "zhat zhing" for "that thing"). A significant number of Cohost users are yinglet therians who type as a yinglet would actually talk. [^23]: Anyway if you were wondering if I regret talking about Orientalism etc on cohost, the answer is still yes (archive) [^24]: I am tired, August 5, 2024 [^25]: See, this is where white supremacists give the game away..., August 5, 2024 (archive); The violence of heaping racist shit in my notifications..., August 5, 2024 (archive) [^26]: There are likely dozens of examples of this which I could have covered but did not. Throughout the entire process of research and clearing this post with community members, I was alerted to report after report that resulted in no (apparent) action—even when the offense was clear.

and yes, some of those friendships were with popular posters here

ram stick consisting of a flexible PCB wrapped around a plastic bar. this allowed them to put chips on the inside of the board, doubling the density.

Spanish-speaking coyote therians who are out as transfemme are la trans

idk about Linux but I know Windows basically killed screensavers but macOS still has a "culture" of screensavers and it rules:

• just last year, in macOS 14 Sonoma they introduced those "wallpaper+screensavers" combo that animate when the screen is locked and morph back into a wallpaper when you unlock. It's delightful. video
• the next version of macOS is already goated IMO because there's a screensaver/wallpaper combo that's entirely programmatic paying an hommage to classic Mac OS source

Also also if you want more cool screensavers, the xscreensaver (Linux/macOS only) collection has some great ones, including reproduction of classic Windows screensavers Microsoft cannot be bothered to include anymore.

i hate the fetishization of weaponry across the american political spectrum and i wish more people romanticized protecting each other from danger with the same level of ardor

this is not me advocating for strict pacifism, this is me wishing more people were willing to do work that excited them that doesnt involve violence

trans monoculture posts are always doing this kind of hegemony. it's a form of play and identity-making, things every immature person needs the time and space to do, but they happen in public fora at scales when it's no longer just their problem anymore. i sincerely hope that stripey-socks programmer-types have space to experiment with definitions and labels with their friends; once their play happens in public it becomes, however harmless their intentions, propaganda of race and class. it is world-narrowing in a fun way for the participants, and world-narrowing in a cruel way for literally everyone else. no white girl with a blahaj should try to suggest, even laughingly, the supremacy of the way she is; that's just white supremacy.

off the top of my head, this list includes: corn, tomatoes, pumpkin, chocolate, avocado, vanilla, probably half or more of the beans we take for granted, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pineapple, chili peppers and other spices in that family, amaranth, quinoa, (modern) strawberries,[^1] papaya, peanuts, pecans, cashews, tobacco, (modern) blueberries,[^2] squash, cranberry, (the good form of) cotton,[^3] and rubber

[^1]: existed in the Old World but modern strawberries are often crossbred with New World ones and other weird stuff like that [^2]: existed in the Old World but modern blueberries are often crossbred with New World ones and other weird stuff like that [^3]: although it was domesticated both in the Old World and New World, modern cotton is almost exclusively one of two cultivars from the New World (Gossypium hirsutum or Gossypium barbadense)

there are several people we cannot talk to directly, on account of them having said wildly offensive things to us, and the overall response of those people's friends and comrades is to put more work on us by leaving it up to us to do the mediation and resolution.

like idk man. Following people whose guts you hate or that surface people you hate and act as though they’re representative of a website’s population is bonkers to me. Block, unfollow people that annoy you even for the pettiest reason and move on. There’s no special prize given to the person that tolerated the most assholes in their timeline.

what i find particularly odd is the extent to which people are just organizing like it's business as usual, and not like there's even odds of a guy who will attempt to turn this country into an autocracy winning in six months

people—especially on the left—have been warning for years that fascism is on the rise, and now a former president is campaigning on literal Nazi policy (saying for instance that immigrants poison the blood of our country) and... it's like that's not even happening? where is the urgency to oppose this or to organize against it pre-emptively—who is making contingencies if Trump attempts to realize these goals? i barely see leftists talk about this stuff currently, but if this stuff kicks off we're going to be some of the first to go and Trump has made that very clear

This is even broader than tech IMO. The whole trend of MBAs and bean counters treating employees like identical, replaceable cogs is colliding with reality as institutional knowledge disappears and employee loyalty changes to employee hostility

genderfried

(the one on airplanes, not the metaphorical one)

We were taking off out of Jackson Hole and the plane hit horizontal wind shear like a quarter mile past the end of the runway; we started falling almost out of control; altitude above terrain measured in three digits and dropping fast. The wind shear was probably something to do with the mountains, never found out.

Anyway the plane was being driven incredibly hard towards the ground in what would almost certainly have killed us all and the pilot hit the “don’t fucking die” button and the plane made a noise that planes don’t make and successfully corrected then started to climb.

the pilot came on the intercom to inform us shakily that the plane was no longer legally safe to fly but that he was diverting to Denver instead of turning around a quarter mile to Jackson Hole because the plane literally wouldn’t do that again if it had to and he thought Denver was less likely to require it.

That anxious hour flying on a plane that technically wasn’t legal to fly - especially when (apparent) safety was visible out the window - is probably the best metaphor for This Thing I’ve experienced so far

looking for a good name when you're trans is hard but finding multiple names for systems[^1]^,[^2] is even harder

[^1]: system as in "linux system" [^2]: system as in "plural system"

in case you ever wanted to know how privileged tech nerds think about other people

Next year, none pizza with left beef will be old enough to drink 👽

do you think this is a good or ill omen

honestly all the suspiciously wealthy furries just need to join funds and start a new payment processor that explicitly allows porno

IS IT FINANCIALLY STABLE? no. IS IT COMPETENTLY CODED? hasn't been in years. IS IT ETHICALLY MANAGED? buddy, people have been making memes for ages about how it isn't. the management has been COMICALLY unethical at times, it's one of the site's defining features.

but competing furry art websites and social media titans alike keep falling, and meanwhile for 20 years FA has kept swimming along, an online coelacanth. motivated not by promises of venture capital, but solely by an idealistic dream (get mad convention sex from internet clout and hot art of your digimon fursona)

I never actually got into this when it was new, but I've since developed some fondness for it. It's a bittersweet reminder that computing really has been taken over by the cops and snitches, people who really are very much like "The Plague" and who perhaps even regard his arrogance as a model for their own sneering superior personae, the way that cutthroat entrepreneurs genuinely admire Patrick Bateman or Michael Corleone.

~Χαρά

(btw "The Plague" feels like he should be acted by Robert Carlyle, except he isn't)

what is even the point of a compiler. what's a type. fuck it, peggle write directly to memory

please notify me if you run into any stray coyotes

oh hey the woodpeckers are back, my "woodpecker management strategy" is that when i hear drumming i go bang on the wall to scare them off

As someone who has been masking every time I go anywhere for the last 5 years, yeah, it makes me feel extremely crazy that no one else seems to care at all about protecting themselves or others. We have a choice every day between illness and the mildest of inconvenience and by and large society has chosen illness

AND I WANT A WHOLE FULL LIFE I WANT EIGHTY GODDAMN YEARS AND I WANT ARMFULS OF LOVE AND FISTFULS OF GAY TRANNY SEX AND A HOCKING THROATFUL OF MY MORNING ASPHALT VOICE AND I WANT A KEEN EDGE FOR THE KITCHEN AND A KEENER EDGE FOR THE ROAD AND I WANT SHOTGUN AND I WANT YOU IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT WITH GERARD WAY SCREAMING THAT THIS AIN’T A ROOM FULL A SUICIDES AND I WANT A HUG AND I WANT A HOME AND I WANT TO ROAM THIS WORLD WITHOUT FEAR I WANT THE TERROR TO NEVER FIND ME AGAIN AND I WANT TO WATCH THE TOWERS TURN AND I WANT TO WATCH THE CASTLES QUAKE IN THE BREEZE LIKE A MINNOW IN THE GRAY MOUTH OF SAND LAKE AND I WANT SOMETHING VICIOUS AND SOMETHING RED AND SOMETHING CRUEL AND SOMETHING DEAD I WANT THE FUTURE WE WERE OWED I WANT TO KNOW MY FATHER HURTS I WANT THE POUND OF A STORM OVER THE CAPITOL AND I WANT HOT BUTTERY PISS ON THE AMERICAN FLAG AND I WANT A BODY THAT LOVES ME BACK AND I WANT A WORLD MADE FOR US AND I WANT EVERY KING SLAUGHTERED AND EVERY DAUGHTER RAISED AND I WANT THE CONQUEST OF RATS AND THE VICTORY OF MICE I WANT THE JUSTICE OF ROACHES AND A KINGDOM OF DOGS I WANT A WAR WITH HEAVEN AND A BLESSING FROM HELL I WANT A BLACKOUT CURTAIN AND A FALLOUT CURSE I WANT SOMETHING GOOD AND I WANT SOMETHING WORSE AND FUCK I WANT US ALL TO SURVIVE I WANT TO BE ALIVE I WANT TO LIVE I WANT TO BE ALIVE HERE WITH YOU

[originally at https://beestungmag.com/issue18/two-poems-by-nora-hikari/]

this kind of shit is why i laugh when i hear someone is vegan because of the way animals are tortured in the process of extracting their goods. what? and we don't torture our plants? lmao

we have exited the information age and entered the age of noise

• ManifestOS
• Nick’s OS
• Cheery OS
• Archangel Linux

Who else on here a """rationalism""" / """effective altruism"""" hater?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240213140708/https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/02/13/covid-isolation-guidelines-cdc-change/

Leaving legos unattended on the floor to be stepped on is now a punishable offense. The punishment is the removal of all lego on the premises to be forcibly donated to the nearest lego store. From there, it will be freely redistributed.

humans have fairly consistently optimized away from subsistence farming whenever that's possible, because subsistence farming fucking sucks. 95% of the people "doing" this return to the land shit are actually lying completely or going out to the farm like once a week to get their shots of them "doing stuff" for the internet

im SORRY if i ever make FUN OF YOUR JOB i am just carrying a LOT of STUFF from my LONG CAREER in FOOD SERVICE & being CONSTANTLY TOLD to GET A REAL JOB but EVERY TIME i LEARN MORE abt what "REAL JOBS" are LIKE i'm like FEEDING PEOPLE MIGHT BE ONE OF THE ONLY REAL JOBS WE HAVE LEFT & i may YEARN FOR THAT FEELING FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE

something can kick ass or suck ass. that's it

And yeah of course be cognizant of where you’re going and what your goals are if you’re new to visiting a large city and keep your head about you but avoiding new experiences because it’s in Philly or Detroit or something is obnoxious

There is little that makes me feel more like a separate species than seeing everyone nod in agreement at "oh it's so lovely to see one another's faces again" like what are you talking about

and i can only ask internally: how do people think these work or happen, exactly. do you think you can just demand a general strike/global strike happen from random laborers without the buy-in, support, and infrastructure of a million unions. this feels like the most obvious current example of left-political illiteracy where people need to read theory or just any information at all before making pronouncements

back in my day we had 4 viral videos and we liked it that way. we had star wars kid. we had numa numa guy. we had crazy frog bros. and we had all your base. that's all we needed. it was simpler, it was humble.

the reason i loved it, mainly, is because i have been working with laptops a lot since i got into tech, and i fucking hated wiring up a dozen cables every time i wanted to go from desktop to portable.

so then my office got these amazing new Thinkvision panels from Lenovo. They essentially have a built-in dock, running on USB-C/TB, and on pretty much any decent laptop going these days, you can run one cable to it and it will carry video, inputs, audio, and charging, all at once.

living the dream. one cable to connect and disconnect, no worries.

but my personal "gamer" laptop was starting to get a bit cranky for reasons, and foolishly believing i was in a more permanent living arrangement, i decided to go desktop this go around.

then the fucking nightmare began.

just shopping for a damn motherboard was a nightmare. this board says it has TB and then you look it up and no it doesn't, this board has a USB-C at least but is it TB? the Thinkvision also supports "alternate mode", which is a non-TB protocol for USB 3 gen something or other that can do the magic without TB. Will your board have that too? who fucking knows. you just have to buy one and fucking pray.

So I pick one that's reasonably priced, and proudly comes with all of one (1) USB-C port on the back, which it is so proud of it even has it's own special label on the breakout.

Get it home, plug in my one magic cable, and of course it doesn't fucking work. Fine, OK, I'll just add a fucking thunderbolt card, those exist right? After all "Thunderbolt is just PCI-E over USB-C!" right?

Wrong! They don't fucking exist! There's no such thing as a standard thunderbolt card. Every TB card is proprietary to a specific motherboard, and if the mfg'er does bother to make one for your specific board, you're just fucked, forever. And even if one does, they cost insane amounts of money. Hundreds of dollars, and often only have one fucking port to boot.

So my mfg'er doesn't make a TB board for my chipset/board. So no TB for me. Forever.

I end up just cobbling together some bullshit with a USB-switch so I can still have the inputs going to both my personal and work machines, until a friend tells me about Synergy and I can finally have a usable setup again.

Fuck TB. The Tuberculosis of Inputs.

eh, there's a few friends that we can make squirm at the thought of dream invasion, at the very least

I've given up Netflix and Spotify how do I pirate my phone bill

you are now in the presence of someone who has done something widely considered impossible in the IT field: speaking to a responsible party, at Google, for Gmail, getting them to acknowledge an issue, and work it as a P1 ticket.

warning: these are going to be actively mean for the sake of comedy. I actually enjoy quite a few of these, although I won't say which ones. If you're going to read me going "your comic SUCKS" and get mad move on to another post this is not Serious Criticism.

this is only the the ones that people actively sent me; so if your favorite isn't on here that's because nobody would admit to it. do it, coward. admit your secret shame so i may add it to the board

Dumbing of Age

-jigsaw voice- You claim you're a respectable webcomic reader, someone who just wants to watch characters get shoved together and pulled apart like action figures in peace. Someone who just wants to read a middling soap opera with an above average number of gays without being accused of webcomic crimes.

That's why all you have to do to avoid punishment is stare directly into this camera and not flinch at all while i repeat the following words:

Ahem. "Shortpacked." "It's Walky." "Roomies." "Transformers Lore Argumen-"

Questionable Content

Your ideal form of comfort media is "what if the big bang theory was gayer". You have also forgotten the first 500 or so pages of QC, which is a good thing for all of humanity.

Gunnerkrigg Court

You started this journey because oh look, a cool adventure story with some girls, it's got interesting art and some neat plot hooks.

Since then you've spent over a decade trying to squeeze yuri out of a stone, and this fruitless pursuit still makes more sense then the plot of the comic itself.

Girl Genius

See above, but for yaoi.

...Although, I've been told that some people also read Girl Genius for reasons that AREN'T frantically gripping the arms of their chair trying to make the boys kiss. I'm not sure I believe that. What other reason is there to read it, like, are you that into steampunk that you'd continue to stick with a comic that hasn't progressed it's plot in 10 year-

Oh god. Oh god you ARE. Do... do you need a hug? I can like, glue some gears to my jacket if it would make you feel better.

Order of the Stick

When you're in a really good TTRPG game, you end up with a portion of your brain permanently dedicated to it's world and story. For the rest of your life you'll have those characters lodged in your brain, unable to escape the story you've seen and the good times you had playing with your friends.

You have an area like this in your brain, except it's dedicated solely to remembering the lore of a 20 year old comic about stick figures and dnd. It's not worth it, man. For the love of god, go scroll down to where i mention Unsounded, become one of THOSE fantasy guys instead.

Prequel Adventure

I want everyone to know that this was the first nomination to make my physically recoil from my seat.

You are capable of staring at a pile of red flags, reaching into it, and pulling out a hyperfixation. I'm impressed! Either that or you got tired of seeing a character you didn't know in all the porn you were looking at and finally looked for the source. Anyways, "still reading" is stretching it when the comic hasn't updated in this long. Maybe by the time the new elder scrolls game comes out you'll actually get another panel, eh?

XKCD

I want to be a huge dick, but I can't actually be that mean. XKCD is the sensible chuckle of webcomics. It's done a solid, 6/10 joke almost every day for the past decade, and you've barely lifted up the sides of your mouth for almost every one of them. It's the webcomic equivalent of a sprite; nobody is out here proclaiming it's glory, but it's consistently Fine Enough.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

It's not easy to get a degree in a STEM field while managing your own neurodivergent brain, but you did it. Well done! Now you get to read a comic by someone as bitter as you are about it. I hope this reward is worth how much you hate every single class you took in college.

Real Life Comics

Oh yeah, I rediscovered this when the author came out as trans too! It's fun to see like, the old school webcomic format being used to talk about transition, haha. Kinda charming, even if the art isn-

Wait

Wait you were reading it the whole time???? Oh god. Okay that's completely deranged and I have questions about your taste, but I have to ask: how did you read a comic with that much FFXIV content for that long and not @ the author at least once about their gender, i gotta know how hard that was

EGS

Saying something like "you have a tf fetish" or "you are transgender" or "so tell me what else you found on literotica way back when" would be too obvious, so instead...

Every day, you turn up to watch someone stare story progression and thoughtful pacing in the eye and go "what if instead of talking about that, i tried to FIX that LORE MISTAKE I MADE about TEN YEARS AGO" and write their way into 5 new corners. Is the fact that they keep making everyone gayer while doing this really worth it? Are you that desperate to watch someone stumble into queerness in between their 90th baffling lore dump?

Sluggy Freelance

It doesn't matter what I say to make fun of you, because you're probably immune to it at this point. You admitted to being a fan of sluggy freelance, a webcomic so old and weird and bad that I both cannot remember a single thing about it and actively refuse to google to learn what's up with it nowadays. The fact that it's still going scares me, and so do you. I'm moving on.

Penny Arcade

You know, a lot of these I can understand people sticking with out of fascination or love. Maybe they care about the plots, maybe they want to see the characters, who knows.

But you? You're not here for that. You're here cause of inertia. Your rssfeed or bookmarks bar hasn't updated in 20 years, not since you were a teenager yelling slurs in call of duty multiplayer matches, and that's exactly how you like it.

Three Panel Soul

Basically the exact same thing as above, except you're more likely to feel really, really bad about the fact that you used to call people slurs in call of duty. Also you get mad at people because they read penny arcade instead of your comic, and your art's WAY better, so there.

CTRl-ALT-DELETE

Basically the exact same thing as above, except you don't feel bad at all about the fact that you used to call people slurs. Honestly, you probably still do. Also you get mad at people because they read penny arcade instead of your comic, and your art's WAY better. Unlike the three panel soul guy, you're so, so wrong about this.

Dresden Codak

Listen, no matter where we started out... I'm glad you eventually found the strength to transition! It's a hard thing to do, and involves hard work and self analysis. I know you spent a lot of time staring at robot girls online, and I'm proud you were able to eventually realize just what you wanted to do. Maybe even this comic helped you realize that!

Here's my advice for you specifically: whatever you do, don't ever admit how much time you've spent online talking with people about harry potter and the methods of rationality. Just let that part of you quietly die, for the love of god.

OGLAF

See, the fact that you admitted that Oglaf is the one you still read means you're already beyond the sort of shame I could insult you with. You're the sort of guy who keeps sex toys on a proud shelf in his apartment. What am I gonna do, say you're a pervert? Of course you are!

But also, I wouldn't, because oglaf is great lol high five you win this round

Cat and Girl

Aw fuck yeah 2 for 2 on the winners how could i say anything bad about you. This comic's great. Here, hang on everyone else leave so we can talk about it.

Everyone gone?

Okay so like I don't understand 70% of these comics at all lol i'm just faking it so people will think i'm smart. You too? Really? Oh thank fuck, I thought I was alone.

Skin Deep

Skin deep is a great, well written comic, you monsterfucker. It's got interesting plotting and some cool stuff going on, you monsterfucker. And the creature designs are really fantastic, you furry, furry monsterfucker.

I'm not saying that's why you're reading the comic, i'm just saying we both know what you are. We both know you'd commit any number of unspeakable atrocities hitherto unknown to man or dolphin to get inside this piece of media. And that's because you KNOW what you are. And as long as you're stuck on this side of the inked page, that means we call you a monsterfucker.

Paranatural

You're like a lesser version of a homestuck kid. No matter what the comic turns into, no matter where it goes, some part of your brain will always remember reading the earliest parts of it and having your mind blown. It's inescapable; 10 years from now you'll be working your assigned government job in the united communist republic lazily filing documents and your brain will stop and suddenly go "dang wasn't paranatural great".

Yeah, it was.

Homestuck

I'm so sorry. You won't remember this comic occasionally, like above. You're going to be thinking about this comic until the day you die. There was a chance for you to have a happy, peaceful life, and it was ruined when someone sent you that godforsaken link. I'm so sorry. And unlike the paranatural kid, when you someday think back and go "dang wasn't homestuck great" you'll instead be met with 200 different opinions, most of which you'd rather shoot yourself then hear.

You're here forever, kid.

Unsounded

How many people have you told about Unsounded? How many people have you excitedly told about your favorite webcomic, tried to get them to understand this fantasy story? How many times have you excitedly explained the plots and stories of this graphic novel?

And how many of them have actually proceeded to read it? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Listen, I know this is weak, but unsounded is actually pretty good and it's hard to make fun of you. Believe me, if I could see your comic book collection though I could hurt you. We both know that shit is chock full of trash.

The Assorted Works of Evan Dahm (Rice Boy/Order of Tales/Vattu/Third Voice)

You fuckin webcomic hipster, going "well TECHNICALLY they're all vaguely related" so that you can talk about rice boy again. What other "obscure" stuff are you into, want to tell me about how good Bone is, i'm sure nobody's EVER heard of that comic. Cmon, tell me about-

Wait, "Third Voice"? There's a new one? Oh fuck i got tired of vattu but i'll check that out fuck yeah Evan's shit rules. Sorry for being mean I gotta go read something

Freefall

Hi (name of friend redacted to protect the innocent)! Listen, I know you desperately, desperately crave sci fi from someone who's as autistic as you are about everything, but have you considered getting it from a source that progresses at more then 1 day per 10 years of comics? I'm not going to force you, just saying I know plenty of people with that kind of brain who can draw any number of furries for you, instead of just the one doggirl they've been desperately sweating about for 30 years.

Goblins

Wow you're really that much of a masochist, huh. Jesus. I don't know what to say. Do you need a hug? Do you... want a hug? Christ.

Misfile

I cannot describe how much I hate you for making me remember that misfile exists, and more then that, finding out it's still going. Fuck you. You don't actually still read this, you just said it to hurt me. Well two can play at that game, you bastard.

DEPLOYING_MEMETIC_KILL_AGENT

Kevin and Kell

The fact that you still read this means that you've read most of it, and that's a horrifying, horrifying feat. How much of your brain is just jokes about animals eating each other at this point? 60%? 70%? Please, find a way to make that part of your brain useful again, at least get yourself a vore fetish.

Wondermark

I don't know how to make fun of you for this, it's just so... boring. Going to go into the chat to proudly announce I still look at internet memes, how scary and threatening. "Look at me, i think that videos where guys do cool trick shots are fun to watch" yeah man. Wow. Cmon, hit me with something that hurts. Hit me with something that makes my soul regret making this list, hit me with

Dominic Deegan

I WAS JOKING OKAY I WAS JOKING PLEASE I'M SORRY. I'm so sorry. Who are you? Why??? Fucking christ.

Wait no, this one ended, it doesn't qualify! Haha, you fool- you're reading the sequel? Oh. I deeply regret the fact that i now know that is a real thing. Fuck you.

Widdershins

OH SHIT YOU READ WIDDERSHINS? Dm me dude I love this comic nobody ever talks about it, it's not like Great maybe a solid b, b+ but i like the characters a lot we should talk about it hell yeah

The Assorted works Of John Allison (Scary-go-round, Bad Machinery, Giant Days, etc)

When I was a kid, I read a whole bunch of one of these comics and then later realized I didn't remember or understand a single thing I had read. At the time, I thought I had just skimmed too fast or something, but now i know better: I just wasn't extremely british enough to get it. Someday I will return, fish and chips in one hand and union jack in the other, and finally understand this eldritch tome.

The people who do understand it seem to think they're pretty great though, so aside from being British you're probably alright.

TO ALL OF THESE, AND EVERY OTHER ANCIENT COMIC STILL RUNNING

As much as I love being mean, I do have to give you credit. You survived the death of ads, the death of blogs, the explosion of social media. You thought you could make a living off t-shirt sales and adspace, and then the internet continued to happen in the worst way imaginable, and somehow you're still here. Very few industries have changed quite as much as trying to make weird content online, and you've somehow survived long enough to tell your little story. You did it, and that's admirable. Everyone both on this list or still toiling in silence deserves at least some credit for that.

Unless you're ctrl-alt-delete tho. Fuck you.

It's been frustrating how slow the games industry has been in abandoning Twitter. A lot of other scenes I follow such as indie musicians, artists, the animation industry etc. are slowly moving elsewhere, but games does not want to budge.

Example: I apply to a lot of opportunities for diverse individuals such as game jams, scholarships, and events. Many of them do all their open calls on Twitter. So if you're a marginalized person that's decided Twitter is an actively harmful place for people like you, you're shit out of luck.

When you fill out applications it's just as bad. The only social media they ask for is Twitter and maybe Linkedin. If you get any of these opportunities, your congrats will come in the form of a tweet. If you want to be bumped and promoted by this big organization you better have a Twitter account they can tag!

Like I don't know, if my org was centered around being inclusive or helping people with their careers, I wouldn't want to advertise on the nazi bitcoin site. I know I'm picking on organizations, but a lot of my connections can still only be reached through Twitter.

I feel like the era of sharing your opinions to further your career did a lot of damage. People/orgs/etc are aware they won't be able to repeat their followings elsewhere because other places don't prioritize having hot takes. But should your industry prioritize hot takes?

At some point people in the games industry are gonna have to reckon with the fact that they need to move on. You can only use the nazi bitcoin site for so long before you become complicit with nazis & bitcoin.

I assumed it did because I thought that was a GDPR thing that any site accessible to Europe would need to have.

It's Doctor Who, 2 Doctor 2 Who, and Doctor Who: Tokyo Drift

fictive source: your memory of yourself

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-46747

This vulnerability may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses to execute arbitrary system commands. There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only.

https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000137353

We are still trying to process how, when we posted about how, due to (white) fragility, the externalization of the preservation of individual personal comfort becomes entrenched, and how this means that content-warning discourse is used as a silencing tactic against people who don't conform to white culture, that one of the wrote-the-book-on-rust trans people on Mastodon/Fediverse responded to being indirectly criticized on a non-mastodon/fediverse website by accusing us of being bad at consent.

Like... they went to another website, where their most recent post said that they weren't going to use that website until the website revised its terms of service, saw that we quoted them without tagging them (because we didn't want to pick a fight) and they picked the fight for us, turning the discussion from us trying to talk about weaponized white fragility, into casting us in a bad light for "not understanding" how content warnings are consent.

This happens to us fairly often: we mildly criticize a white person or their culture and their immediate response, in yet another instance of a white person evading the issue and blaming it on us, making it once more our problem, is to imply, with varying levels of clever dogwhistle, that we're a rapist!

Then when we try and talk about it around other white people, we are told things like "that isn't white fragility", "you both escalated" and we get accused of picking fights and holding grudges when we went out of our way to not. We had no quarrel with the individual in question until they did this.

How are we meant to talk about this? When we went to another website and didn't tag them in, we got told "youre obviously subposting me, why didn't you tag me into this", but if we did tag them in, do you think we would have gotten a better response? I don't think so.

Then, the core of the argument that they posted was this:

What I am not interested in is having essay-length posts about how a space I really like is Bad, Actually be half of my [non-fedi website] feed with no way to avoid seeing them other than not using the website or unfollowing the people who repost them, which I don't want to do, because I like and respect those people.

a) look at how this is framed: "I don't want to see posts about the space I like, on the space I don't like. I have no way to avoid that, because I don't want to unfollow, and I don't want to not use the site." This is exactly the weaponization of fragility that we're complaining about. b) Super cool silencing tactic! They weaponized their fragility, demanded that we tag them into a discussion that wasn't meant to be about them, making it hazardous for us to directly quote them because doing that got us yelled at in the first place, and if we paraphrase it, that opens us up to accusations of passive aggressiveness!

It is always the white person's right to say "this makes me uncomfortable and i don't want to see that" and cast suspicion on the person provoking the discomfort, and this puts us in an incredible double-bind. We now have no safe response, because anything we do will be interpreted as escalation, even though what just happened is the other person just recentered the discussion on themselves, and away from their weaponization of white privilege, putting the onus on us to de-escalate, and portraying us as potentially violent and dangerous.

And then this doesn't even begin the processing of what happened the day after: this same person, on fediverse, subtooted us without tagging us in, for criticizing fediverse software! Do you think it would have been appropriate for us to barge in there with "you're obviously subtooting me, why didn't you tag me"? No?

Being mixed-race white-passing sucks because of shit like this. White people, you need to do better. If this post made you uncomfortable, then this post was for you. If you're friends with anyone like the person we're describing, you need to do the work of calling them in, to better the lives of your non-white friends who would otherwise be subjected to white fragility.

Thank you and good day.

Found out that "faggot", "fascist", and "fajita" are cognates (that's the word that means they share the same origin, something I also didn't know)

There's nothing wrong with telephones. There is everything fucked up and broken with society and somehow the phone managed to be the most easily-visible nexus of the societal fuckery we deal with day to day.

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