Reinventing a Fourth Website Piecemeal and from First Principles Using Junk Found Lying on the Side of the Road

Obviously I've been thinking about blog and the IndieWeb a lot these days. We are not very far from the two year anniversary of Cohost shutting down; maybe I'm thinking about how to build some of that social experience up again brick by brick, using the web as a substrate rather than a silo (or a federation of silos, which is the approach some others have been taking). For me personally, the core design that made Cohost so valuable was a particular mix of features that enabled: Full-spectrum posting; Cohost felt suited to and supported well everything from <140 character microblogs to long essays to media posting. In particular, it was extremely good at what I'd call "mesoblogging," posts in the 500-800 word range which are a poor fit both for traditional essayistic blogging and microblogging platforms. This is really what I miss the most. Posts on Cohost could have titles, but did not have to; the posting interface essentially scaled gracefully in complexity from "typing some words…