With Cohost Now Read-Only...

[onlyknownothing]

This is a reminder that dreamwidth is (as far as I can tell, intentionally designed to be) only a part of the wider internet. People may have divided out between places like Bluesky or independent websites, but you can still follow them on your Reading page here (which seems to be dreamwidth's equivalent of the "dashboard"). Just use RSS! RSS or Atom feeds can be applied to the Feeds page, which will give you a link to the feed's page (if it already exists) or allow you to create one (if it doesn't). A lot of former cohost-users have integrated RSS into their websites, and if they've moved to a different service you can also follow their RSS feeds if they're using Bluesky or Tumblr (although this only applies to Tumblr accounts that have a "site" associated with them, in the original form, because of Twitter-like changes which try to keep people on the service). If they're on another service without an inbuilt RSS feed, you can use RSS generator sites like Open RSS to make one.

One of the important legacies to carry on from cohost is that, if you don't want a corporate algorithm deciding for you what you're going to see and experience, you need to curate your experience yourself. Put the things you want to see on your Reading page actively, to give you things you want to interact with there. The Feeds page already has the top 1000 most-subscribed RSS feeds right there for you to look through, but here are some I've followed myself in case you're looking:

• A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe - A blog about early-medieval European history and artifacts.

• Egypt Museum - Feed from the Egypt Museum in Cairo. Semi-regular updates of Egyptian artifacts and archaeological information.

• Astronomy Picture of the Day - NASA's own daily posting of images or photographs of some astronomical phenomenon or observation, with small and interesting explanations written by astronomers.

• NASA Earth Observatory Picture of the Day - Instead of being pointed out into space, this is pointed back at us. Daily pictures of some image or photograph of this planet of ours, often taken from orbit.

• Earth Science Picture of the Day - A daily picture posted by the Universities Space Research Association nonprofit, centered around interesting images created by the interplay between physics, geosciences, astronomy, and art. Every picture comes with a summary explanation for what scientific phenomenon is in focus.

• 70s Sci-Fi Art - A Tumblr that does nothing but post art (comics, book covers, magazine covers, as well as other forms) from the 1970s depicting science fiction scenes or concepts.

• Public Domain Review - A Tumblr posting public domain images collected from the British Public Domain Review non-profit. The feed for the main site's blog, which goes significantly more in-depth, can instead be found here.

• Yesterday's Print - A Tumblr posting scans from vintage newspapers alongside vintage illustrations and photos taken from print sources. Often quite odd, often very entertaining.

• Wikipedia Pictures - A Tumblr posting nothing but images found on Wikipedia. Exceedingly random in what shows up, but that is compelling in its own way.

• Night Images Flickr - A feed of peoples' submitted pictures of... things photographed at night. Very random in subject, composition, and focus - but that makes it very interesting to see what appears.

• Colossal - Art and art information from a Chicago-based member-supported art collective.

• Yatzer - "Digital magazine" focused on travel and the arts, with a focus on the Mediterranean due to being founded in Greece (though it is produced in English).

• MusicRepublic - A Blogspot blog cataloging world traditional music captured from cassettes and records. Includes Soundcloud links as well as direct downloads in MP3 and FLAC via Google Drive.

• Daily Knowledge - Direct successor of the same creator from cohost, now on Bluesky. Interesting facts and information delivered regularly.

• Dungeon Junk - Direct successor of the same creator from cohost, now on Neocities. Weird RPG loot delivered regularly.

• Making Up Adventurers - Direct successor of the same creator from cohost, now on Neocities. Fantasy (or fantasy-ish) protagonists delivered semi-regularly.

• Sortition Social - Created by former cohost user suricrasia, this feed is a random selection of updates from RSS feeds submitted to the Sortition Social site. It's a great way to get a sort of "feed of feeds" from former cohost members without being immediately and utterly overwhelmed, because it's intentionally limited in size/scope of what it delivers. Great way to find people to follow, and you can submit your own RSS from your dreamwidth if you want to participate!

Comments

[dismallyoriented]

Hey, thanks for making this collation post! I kind of want to recommend people make their own, on the newcomers community page (ooh learning new html code to make posts). You surfaced a bunch of good stuff for me, and I hope encouraging others to share what they've found will make it easier for people to populate their feeds and really set up shop here.

[onlyknownothing]

You're welcome! If you find you need help on the HTML side of things, I find w3schools to be an amazing resource. I technically have a degree in web front-end, but I still find myself going back there on the regular to verify information or look up particular CSS formatting bits for things.

[dismallyoriented]

Hilariously that's exactly the site that turned up for me when I googled "html links". Websites like this and stackoverflow are a fucking godsend. Nobody makes anything in coding without the exocortex of other people's reference work.

[lovelyangel]

omigosh. How can you possibly consume that many feeds in your reading circle? You must simply be an information sponge. I have to keep the number of feeds in my circle to a minimum; I already have too much to read each day.

That said, these are the feeds I have in my Reading Circle:

• xkcd_feed
• questionable_content_feed
• scalziwhatever_feed
• breakingcatnews_feed

I haven’t looked at the List of Feeds in a long, long time. It’s a little sad how few subscribers there are for each feed. Things were sure different back in the day of LiveJournal.

[onlyknownothing]

I have to say, most of them don't post daily and those that do tend to be image-based instead of long-form text. That said, I enjoy reading. My feed list is actually longer than that, I just didn't include the ones I consider commonplace or "ordinary" like Ars Technica. That's just a basic website, anybody can follow it if they want. 🤷