At the Mercy of Social Tides - One Year of Obsidian Moonshine

(or, Having A Website Has Done My Social Life No Favors)

Where I Reminisce about Cohost

TL;DR: I miss Cohost. I wrote a whole post at the time about how I miss Cohost. That probably sums up most of it.

I made this site overall a bit earlier than one year of whenever this is going live, but I also got the "your domain is going to be renewed are you sure you want to keep paying for it" email so we're within the "launch window" at bare minimum.

When I started Obsidian Moonshine during the back fourth of 2024, I was going through some of the most difficult months of my life for various weird reasons of which only a few I will list here:

During all this I rescued most of my Cohost posts and managed to put this website together. By my own admittedly limp standards this was a downright heroic feat. I suppose it's something I should have done ages and ages ago anyway. And yet I kind of still wish I was just posting on a social media feed.

Cohost lowered the posting barrier and hit that perfect sweetspot where you could do a big effort post or you could fire a shot from the hip, and it all just worked. More importantly, that specific rhythm meant that people commented and replied. That is undeniably is the most important thing that has been lost in the transition. I get occasional comments on my posts here, but I'd say 90% of them are from the same half-dozen people. I deeply appreciate and value that, but I miss when the barrier to such things was low enough that I'd just be able to discuss things rapidly with people whom I might not have ever met before.

I felt friendly with a lot of people on Cohost, but now that we're all decoupled from that and I only post my writing on my own website, it's hard to say that I've made more than three or four friends. The relationships simply have not been maintained in a post-Cohost, Bsky/Discord centric world. I'm willing to accept primary responsibility for that. I could be DMing way more people just to chat, but I also have deep social anxiety about DMing people unprompted. I'm still scared to DM people I've known for 15 years. People I've known for like, 18 months? Out of the fucking question for my broken brain.

(A couple dozen people added me on Discord in the wake of Cohost closing. Please DM me whenever if you'd like to talk. I genuinely appreciate it every time, even if I appear to have a somewhat cold countenance. I want to hear all the shit you've been up to.)

I did join a bunch of larger servers during said wake, but there's something about a big discord server (by which I mean, more than like 20 active participants) that just causes my brain to shut down; I feel like I need to keep abreast of every channel, even though I certainly don't. It becomes overwhelming in a way. I'm still in many of them but keep them perpetually muted.

The shift in mindset that's come with the shift in format of how I interact with people online is just kind of disheartening. Even if I follow folks on bsky, its inherent format makes it so that replying or quoting just feels wrong compared to Cohost. The micro-format encourages me to quip when I simply want to talk.

I miss it. I feel like I have to cull or moderate my thoughts more because they are Blog Posts and not simply Posts. Like, my Sea of Stars review probably would have never happened if it went down in 2025. I'm trying to be nicer. I'm afraid of being cancelled or harassed in a way that I wasn't on Cohost, even though it's not like I'm saying anything particularly unhinged. My understanding is that this is called "moral scrupulosity".

Where I Actually Talk About the Website

As for more specific reflections on Obsidian Moonshine, it's been... weird. The "digital garden" format arguably isn't built for a "blog"; in an ideal world I'd be putting out way more random, smaller thoughts that all interconnect in a "zettelkasten" kind of way that more comprehensively communicates how my ADHD brain works. I probably should! But that's a big shift in mindset for how I learned to write things down on the internet. Obsidian Moonshine being "a website" as opposed to "a social media feed" raises the barrier of the kinds of thoughts I feel like posting. On Cohost I would probably be just saying shit about Gnosia or Digimon Beatbreak or whatever else I'm up to, but here it doesn't feel like it's worth saying anything unless it's A Whole-Ass Post. And that clogs the hell out of the proverbial pipes.

As of this writing I have at minimum three full blog posts that are sitting either half done or barely within the planning stages that I want to write but simply haven't summoned up the executive function to be able to do so. The biggest millstone around my neck right now is a post about Gundam GQuuuuuuX, which I genuinely still intend to do but also feel like I still haven't worked through my feelings completely or coherently, which is weird because my friends who have watched substantially more Gundam and care more deeply about it than I wrote their posts about it long ago. Posts which I still haven't read because I don't want my thoughts to be directly colored by theirs.

(Aside: Am I a lesser friend for explicitly avoiding their thoughts on something? I don't know. Maybe. I want to be a good friend who does not deny other people's feelings on things, but I also want to be able to assert my own feelings on things. Is this contradictory? Perhaps.)

Cohost and Obsidian Moonshine turned me into "a person who writes posts about things". This is troublesome, because I do not think I'm particularly intelligent or observant or even very good of a writer. And yet because now I'm "a person who writes posts about things", there's the pressure to, well, write posts about things. I get asked, "Are you going to write a post about that?" I feel bad when I play something and don't write a post about it, because it means I'm missing an opportunity to increase my portfolio of posts. I'm not hustling. Which I suppose is nothing special; just the constant enforced guilt we all feel living in this capitalist hellhole.

...But if I was hustling, then I'd probably be doing better, right? RIGHT?!

If anything, putting posts on my own website has substantially reduced my credibility compared to the Cohost days where I could coast off the proximity of more skilled/famed individuals. Now I'm just another dipshit blogger. One of the rejection responses I got from an outlet said they had "several dozen experienced, talented writers who applied", with the somewhat comical implication that I qualified as neither. Ouch. And yet I can't disagree.

It isn't as if I'm not keenly aware of my own weaknesses. I don't often have an "angle" for my posts; I'll simply talk about something rather than talk about it through the lens of how it applies to something else. I over-assume how much the reader is familiar with the specifics of what I'm writing about. I overexplain my thought processes out of an imagined obligation for those who might disagree with me. Compared to the stuff people get paid to right, I'm downright amateurish.

My friends tell me they like my writing, but (through no fault of their own) it always feels a bit hollow. It feels good to be acknowledged, and I deeply appreciate The Usual Suspects sharing and commenting on my work, but some fucked up part of my brain wants to be acknowledged by strangers. I want proof that I've got it outside of my circles. Again, Cohost's specific in-between nature meant I got at least a bit of that reach. These days, not so much; I'm almost entirely reliant on my substantially more famous friends RTing my stuff on bsky out of the goodness of their hearts.

Which surely puts undue social pressure on my followers; I wonder if they feel annoyed at the theoretical obligation of sharing my stuff. One hopes not. I do not want to spread negativity, despite everything (I say, writing a mostly-negative post in the background).

...And so, here we are, a year-ish out. I still write my posts, still privately sighing at The Numbers, still knowing that I could be doing such better work if only I was a better person myself. My chances feel long gone, and I persist out of an antiquated belief that surely some people still prefer it this way. Alas. I suppose that's just being online in 2025 for you. We'll see if I make it another year. I'm not dead yet, as I say.

Here's some of what I consider to be my best work. If there's something I missed or that you particularly like, dear reader, sound off in the comments.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you again.

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