cohost.org was a web site. It was an attempt to engineer a social media website that wasn’t actively hateful to be involved in – no visible engagement numbers, no algorithms, longer and better presented text. the ability to format posts directly using CSS, which led to a lot of funny and creative stuff. userbase skewed “alternative”, geeky and lefty, but wasn’t quite as… young-feeling as most comparable spaces, which was important to me. “tumblr for people who get achewood references”…?
It’s going read-only on October 1st and will be a redirect to archive.org in 2025. This is due to financial issues and burnout, according to the staff.
I liked it a lot. I don’t really enjoy posting on other social media. This just got out of my hair, didn’t prey on me, and let me talk about whatever was on my mind without worrying about inviting a bizarre contextless interaction from a total weirdo. So I’m not happy about this situation.
I’ll list what I consider to be the successes and failures of the web site.
U Postin’ Good
- It was a web site designed for looking at text on the computer, which at this point is radically different from most places. I personally enjoyed the groovy warm theming.
- It proved that the world doesn’t actually collapse when you let people express theirselves using HTML and CSS, the basic language of the internet. In fact, it allowed for a hacker creativity that is rarely seen elsewhere. There was an image of a game boy that deteriorated when one person views it. Within an hour, it turned into blood. There’s probably a few people who took their first steps in web stuff writing shitposts on Cohost. I wrote a bot in a weekend that generated weird inscrutable dark souls messages. The site was great at encouraging this type of thing.
- It was… slow! It had no need to push the gavage-pipe of Content in my mouth whenever I mindlessly flick onto the site. The userbase was in the tens of thousands instead of the hundreds of millions. I could check it for a few minutes and then get on with my tasks. This is another benefit of having a smaller and well-defined community.
- There were a lot of cool features. It was extremely easy to spin up a new page for whatever else you want to do. The “following” view presented a faux-rss/email view of the website, making it easy to keep up with people regardless of who’s currently hogging your timeline. A few days after announcing the sunset, staff pushed a drag-and-drop editor that lets people easily place images etc wherever they want in posts. The “artist alley” user ads page was a great idea, though I feel it needed a bit more work to be something that was fun to look at.
- While it may be gone, a lot of people now know exactly what they want from posting on the internet. They’ll chase after this for a long time. They probably won’t find it, but their footfall might beat a path to something better than what else is on the table currently.
U Postin’ Bad
- Problem in the userbase with racism orientalism harassment etc that was incorrectly handled. Since I neither received nor participated in this, I’m just going to link to a few posts about it. (1) (2) It drove folk like the Indie Tsushin person away, so it’s definitionally a problem. About a month before closure, the staff changed policy on a lot of this stuff in what seemed like a positive direction. It’s too bad we don’t see how that shakes out long-term. For a while it was my belief that you could just establish a good culture and only good people would come – it definitely helps the numbers game, but knowing when to put the foot down is still necessary.
- It was not financially sustainable. From day 1 it was privately funded by a rich friend of the staff, and was later funded further by an anonymous site user, as far as I know. This is, broadly, how every social media site works – they’re all large holes that investors throw money into, none of them are sustainable, all of them are just mindlessly trying to grow into turning the corner. It’s very easy to poke holes1 here and say that they should have been more imaginative/radical in how the place is funded – the userbase are a bunch of C-programmer elder furries, by god the money’s got to be there somewhere – but the unique feel and vision of the place would probably be different under a different financial structure. “Just make it like Cohost” could be a good rallying cry for someone to pick up in the future, at least.
I hate thinking about this kind of crap, but it was the only place I was present for a while. In the future I have to think more about self-promotion. I don’t think choosing to post on a website that doesn’t want me to be angry and despondent all the time consitutes some eggs-in-one-basket irresponsibility, but I’m definitely in my cross-posting era now. Don’t worry about it. I’ll catch up.
But this will be where I post personal stuff for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for trying, staff.
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One hole I particularly don’t like poking is the staff’s salary cost, which a lot of people seem to balk at. American tech workers, particularly programmers and sysadmins capable of delivering this kind of system, don’t really come super-cheap. The original funder said quite directly “this is what it costs!” to this line of questioning. Paying people grossly under what they’re worth is also not sustainable – at best, you’re merely burning them for fuel instead of money, and financially incentivising them to fuck off with their invaluable knowledge of the systems/culture/people etc. Moreover, I’m describing a problem with the financial structure, not the particular balance of a few numbers. ↩