The End of Blaugustegelion
Blog's in its flow state, all's right with the world
Photo of Possum unrelated, she just wanted to be here
It's August 31st which means not only are we wrapping on Birthdaversary Month but it's also the end of Blaugust and I have some thoughts about the whole project.
For a long time, my primary social media platform was Twitter; I lived there, networked there, collaborated with other musicians there, existed there - Facebook was in its death throes and Instagram was being more akin to it each day.
With the Musk buyout I knew those days were limited and it was for lack of better term scary knowing how many eggs I had in that basket - but Cohost appeared as a herald of what social media could be and (learning nothing) I wholesale abandoned twitter in favor of making Eggbug's place my new home.
Keeping in mind, I've had a website (curiousquail.com) this whole time, but it's primarily been for the band, about band news etc. Now, ostensibly so was my twitter account (@curiousquail) but that quickly evolved into a 'me' thing in the mid 2010's since I'm the primary face of the band; it's worth saying that I'm by no means some musical auteur because the stuff I make with my bandmates is made better by all of our involvement, but at the core I'm the majority songwriter, it started as my solo project, I'm the lead singer, I can do a solo show if needed etc. None of my bandmates fault me (if for no other reason than they didn't wanna handle the social media marketing of the mid 2010's and beyond) for basically being 'the face' of the band and going off label with the band's online platforms.
But when I started using Cohost, I didn't start it as 'the band's page' - I started it as an account for me. Still using my same alias because I've been @curiousquail since before there was a band proper, but it was just me posting for me and it was freeing in a way that I hadn't really experienced elsewhere...outside of memories of early 2000's livejournal and experiments with self hosting wordpresses.
I am still sad to this day about Cohost's demise (I even wrote a goddamn song about it lmfao). I truly think that was the pinnacle of social media in terms of design; I know it had major friction points for a lot of people and I'm not gonna 'what if' the incredibly small team's decisions to imagine a world where it could have thrived, but something about it was exactly what I needed and when I needed it.
I thought we were talking about blaugust tho
We are!! Cohost shutting down started a small but pivotal (to me at least) renaissance of people making blogs, curating RSS feeds, sharing CSS tips, hell, even helping out in more direct ways; my comentario instance is hosted by an incredible person who I predominantly got to know through cohost.
It felt like the sky was the limit - and then as expected, not everyone kept up with the effort. Some people posted less often, some stopped entirely, many migrated to threads, mastodon, bluesky etc and a thing I kept going back to was Palm Trees Every Day, a several year's-long twitter thread I had where I photographed a palm tree every day while living in the Coachella valley. By deleting all of my tweets (as part of trying to avoid Musk having any access to my data) I'd effectively lost that as a shorthand link (wayback machine tries its best but c'mon) and that alone was a sticking point for switching to the "POSSE" mode of social. "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere".
I don't mind Bluesky turning into Twitter 2 (it was inevitable tbh) but I don't want to risk it shutting down or descending into terf city and having something I feel like sharing that's exlusively there - so as I shifted off Cohost mindset I wanted to make sure I blogged first, and then shared those links to masto and bluesky.
As a sidenote, tt's truly fucked up how social media companies have instilled in us this "keep it all in the platform" (especially by devaluing off platform links algorithmically) and I'm committed to avoiding that by all means necessary.
No but seriously, Blaugust? At some point?
WE'RE GETTING THERE FUCK OFF
I'd already made up my mind about the above and felt that maybe I still wasn't using the blog enough - and then Blaugust hit. I'd never heard of it. I knew nothing about it but shit, I've done a fair amount of inktobers and the like over the year so it wasn't that hard to kick off. Post a blog before the day is out. Easy.
If anything, I thought my trip home for family emergency was going to kill that but it ended up inspiring several posts I might not have otherwise done, and being off-timezone sleep cycle which contributed to being able to write more.
I had two, maybe three days in the whole month where I had a worried "oh no I haven't blogged yet" but rarely was there a "damn gotta squeeze one out today" mindset; had there been I likely just wouldn't have posted but I'm happy to look back at 31 days and see a lot of posts I'm proud of.
Highly doubt I'll commit to doing an every day blog outside of blaugust but on the other hand why not try, right?
Anyway, thanks for sticking with me for the month. If you missed any posts they're all in order on the #blaugust tag
To close it out, I (as we all must) say:
No it's cool, Possum. Make yourself at home up there.
