Cohosting Along
With the unfortunate closure of Cohost, the internet is once again looking a large and unknown land where it is very difficult to find your way. However there is some amongst us trying to fight that and bring back the classic 88x31 personal link buttons.
We went through an era of forgetting about linking to personal websites, because everyone was all on Twitter or the like. There was no buttons - heck no RSS either - Twitter took that too. It's so bad honestly - I went looking for new button images to use and some webcomics that I know did have buttons to use no longer do.
So for some of the links on this new page, I have taken it upon myself to make buttons for sites that don't have them. I will of course update them with official buttons if I have the opportunity. As an aside, the buttons on that page are all randomly ordered within their respective categories. (Javascript allowing.) My hope with that is to avoid it feeling like any one page has any more importance than the others.
When it comes to Cohost, I don't really have anything I think I can say that anyone else hasn't already said. I found its longform blogging much more flexible than the state of much of the internet. Its lack of "numbers" also, while not always effective, was at least an honourable endeavour.
The place wasn't without its bullshit drama and discourse, but it contained familiar faces that I enjoyed seeing around. I'm not fond of this internet where we're all shoved into the same places using the same formats, even as I myself am not immune to pushing people to join X or Y service with me.
I dearly want the smaller personal internet back. We can't all be on websites with the same millions of others. Not only do these singular websites slowly take away the things that make things feel homely and welcoming, we simply don't all have the same needs or wants out of those websites. Having personal websites can help that.
I may in the future backport some worthwhile posts from there to here, or at least the game-dev ones. But for now I wanted to get the links page going.
... I ought to work out the best way to add comments too.