💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 9-10.gmi captured on 2024-09-29 at 00:39:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A few days ago I posted a goodbye to cohost (which I'll fully admit was written a while earlier, but which got bumped forward in my gemlog queue). I'd been done with it for a while, and have always maintained a bit of a love/hate relationship with that site: you can write, not just post! But it's hard to find anything. But you can search via hashtags! But that only works if people use them. The frustrating, weird, wonderful site will go read-only at the start of October, and shut down at the end of the year. cohost is done.
cohost to shut down at end of 2024
Cohost's Financials - A Retrospective
Like a lot of people, I'd had a suspicion this day was coming for a while. The financial situation at cohost has been bad for a while, and was admitted to be especially dire this year, when they lost contact with their funder. At that point, I figured it was time to export all my posts (which I was able to do thanks to a kind stranger's python script), and then back them up to my private git repo, which I've also been doing with my web journal and this gemlog (see? I'm learning!). This is compounded by the fact that I'm not sure how long I can reasonably expect the Wayback Machine to exist, given the current state of litigation against the Internet Archive, though that's a whole other post. Everything I write, I'll come back to it later. The last couple years I've been writing a remarkable amount, relative to when I was younger. I'd always wished I'd written more. I've tried to live that in this second era of journalling.
I backed my stuff up, and I waited, and it turned out, I didn't wait all that long. And I'm sad. Because with cohost going read-only in a few weeks, there's the loss not just of another social media site (which, on its own? who cares), but more importantly, a site that suggested a different relationship with how we spend our time online.
One of the striking things about cohost after you get started is how there aren't really any numbers. There are notifications to say that people have followed you, or liked a post, or rechosted it; you can see who followed you, but it's never reduced to a single number that you can fret over every time you load the page. cohost forced you to slow down. It didn't try to be "sticky", in the awful parlance of corporate America. It was there for you to use. It wasn't trying to use you.
And when you decided to use it, there was choice. cohost was and is a weird hybrid of posting and writing, a place where you can do what chosters call "CSS crimes" (modify all kinds of things within the post). You could shitpost effortlessly, typing dumb thoughts into the post subject for Big Text; or, you know, you actually write, getting a very large subset of markdown to work with. There was a lot of great longform writing on cohost; the problem was, it was hard to find. Because I'm polite and follow back, my feed eventually became a wall of furry art, a real cornucopia of big, veiny, glistening dicks (to say that cohost has a lot of furries would be an understatement). Longform writing was sometimes nicely tagged, but often not - I was reliant on other people boosting it into my feed, in the hope that I might get more of that in the future. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. Such was the problem with the site.
Or, one of them, anyway. The hard-to-find content, the vanishing backer, the burnt out staff. There were other issues, too: the initial invite system; then, you spent the first few days in a kind of posting-jail. It was like they went out of their way to make the site easy to bounce off. But a lot of us (and for a time, myself included) found that with a little effort, it was a place worth hanging around. I missed writing so much. The last few decades, the social media decades, the Posting decades, have turned the web into a wasteland, turned us against each other. We chase engagement and likes and number-go-up.
cohost offered something different, for a few years anyway. For a moment in time. It was a place where you could find interesting people and talk to them, find interesting writing, or art, or nudes, just, whatever you were really looking for, assuming people had thought to tag it.
And now it's ending, and soon it will be gone. It's a shame. It didn't outlast Twitter, the site so many of its users came from. That site still shambles forward, hemorrhaging users, polluting the commons. cohost struggled against the status quo, and failed. So now there's one less site, now we're back to the same five social media sites. I'll still be here, and on my web journal; I've still got my WhatsApp chat with online friends from the 90s. I suspect a lot of chosters will go back to private Discords, cultivate a tightly-knit community. I keep hoping the era of the everyone-social-media will end. I want to talk with friends. I want to meet genuinely interesting people. And I really, really don't want to see anyone I peripherally knew in high school. I don't know if cohost dying is a step towards that, or just the coming and going of a very minor player. A ripple in the pond, so to speak. But I know what I'm hoping. And I guess we'll see.