cohost was cool

[02-10-2024]

Early September, the announcement was made that cohost was set to be put in read-only mode on October 1st, and completely taken down at the end of the year. I guess in a way I always knew it was inevitable, given the rather grim financial statements the staff published, but suddenly seeing it in black and white and set to happen so soon was still a bit of a shock. We are now on day 2 of read-only mode, and given I was (albeit not a very impactful) part of the site's community, I feel like I should recap my thoughts about the platform and the time I spent there.

I first became aware of cohost in spring of 2022, when the site was not yet fully open to the public. You could, however, make an account, set up your profile, follow people, and have yourself be put on a waitlist that staff slowly worked their way through and activated, to have control over scaling up the site. You could even share posts. This meant that other people on the website could get a sense of what kind of person you were and if they wanted to follow you, meaning you could find community before you were even allowed to post. If I recall correctly, it took me 4 months until I got activated and was able to make my own posts. But even during that time, I frequently visited, just to bask in the incredible posting energy I was witnessing on the site. The shitposting game was absolutely top notch, and the site's format allowed for a lot of creativity and freedom in what users were able to post. For once, there was no character limit, just like tumblr, and one of the first things many will point out when it comes to cohost, it allowed users to freely use css inside posts, leading to a trend quickly coined "css crimes", featuring some very outside the box posts, many of which being fully interactable.

When I finally got activated, I was of course delighted. I didn't feel like I had all that much to contribute, but it still felt good to just be there and post the way I usually did on other platforms. The community of the site leaned heavily towards queer 30-somethings that were fed up with the dynamics of corporate mainstream social media, which is something I, despite not quite hitting the 30s yet, identify with. I was extremely active on tumblr in 2014 and 2015, rejoined sometime around 2017 and 2018 to try and recapture the magic, not long before the infamous porn ban that is often cited as the downfall for the platform's popularity (a recent video by tumblr historian Strange Æons dives into this topic in great detail). Witnessing developments on tumblr, twitter, YouTube, twitch, all the platforms I enjoyed spending my free time on, all becoming gradually more irritating to use in favour of corporate bloat, I was pretty much on the same page. I was sick of these corporate mainstream sites, ready to get deeply invested in indie alternatives, and cohost looked like it would perfectly fit the bill. I had tried out Mastodon and pillowfort before for extended periods of time in the past, really trying to make them work for me. In both cases, I never really felt at home though. Cohost though hit in a way felt special. It managed to not only not fall into the same traps of mainstream platforms, but also provide multimedia posts with no character limits, and its own, dedicated community with its own distinct identity. It managed to recapture much of the same magic of unhinged yet genuine posting that I had experienced in my early internet days on tumblr.

The source of the very specific energy of the site's community could clearly be tracked down to staff's unshaken principles of how they envisioned the site. No ads, no algorithms, minimal metrics, minimal discovery tools, full control over what you see on your timeline, and, setting them apart from tumblr, no bans of adult content. While these choices certainly were not to everyone's liking, they spoke to the people that the founders wanted to attract. You couldn't just log on to the site and be fed an endless stream of content. You had to work for your content. But in exchange, what you got was hand selected and genuine. Even though it may seem counterintuitive, many artists on the platform reported great engagement for their work despite a smaller audience in raw numbers, because here, their audience was truly invested in what they were seeing. I'm not an artist nor someone who ever had a large following anywhere, so I can't attest to that first hand. But I had good interactions, people seemed to frequently engage with my posts. It seemed that despite concerns by critics about lack of algorithms and limited discoverability, artists were striving on cohost. Many users dedicated to cohost welcomed the the design approaches taken by staff, which often have been described as a detox from the clout chasing incentivized by the numbers game of other platforms. You had no follower counts, and posts did not display engagement numbers. New notifications were numbered, but were summarised in the iconic phrase "several users liked your post", which led to the common phrase of "doing severals", in reference to a post "doing numbers" on other sites. Cohost functioned mostly on old principles, but in the modern bloated and corporatized social media environment, it felt like such a breath of fresh air to be on a website that felt like it was designed for people and not for brands.

Unfortunately, staff's principles were, it seems in part, to a fault, as their dedication to not run ads put them at a great financial loss. Users could subscribe to a 5$ a month plan of cohost plus!, which granted them mostly neglectable extra features. Still, many, including myself, subscribed to it, because they wanted to support the site they loved and believed in its vision. Many even bought several memberships. Eventually, an artist alley was implemented, where users could buy ad space for their projects, but it was on a separate page that you had to go out of your way to visit, so it seems after the initial excitement for it, the income from it slowed down. Another monetizing feature was planned, one that would allow users to tip each other, which to me sounded similar to bits and subscriptions on twitch, but that had to be scrapped because it wasn't compatible with their payment processor's new content guidelines (the way in which payment processors appear to increasingly make it more and more difficult for adult content to exist on the internet is rabbit hole that I don't feel equipped getting deeper into but I am a queer person on the internet and I'm worried, to say the least). In light of regular, pessimistic financial reports, users basically begged staff to integrate banner ads for inter-community advertising and stronger integration of the artist alley into the main feed, but it would never happen. Cohost users were asking for advertising and not getting it.

Finances aside, not all was well internally either. Early on, discourse about how exactly ToS had been phrased was frequent, and later on, tensions came to the surface about the user base that, despite a strong queer and leftist bent, was still overwhelmingly white, leading to experiences of racism, disillusionment and alienation from many of the more active and outspoken people of colour. This was underlined by the fact that not every moderation decision taken by the very barebones team was always handled well, despite their good intentions. Founder jkap had also often talked about feeling burnt out and their regret of getting into the business of social media. In a way, maybe the dire financial situation was an unlikely saviour here because it gave them a good reason to get out. The cohost staff team seemed like well intentioned, principled people. I'm sad it didn't work out, and I truly wish them the best in the future.

Being a social media site very much explicitly positioned in direct opposition to its competitors in its mission statement, cohost of course invited much outside critique. Cohost never set out to replace other websites, it was, from the beginning, meant to be "the 4th website", one you use in addition to all the biggest platforms, but its intrinsically contrarian attitude towards the rest of the modern internet may have had many think of a conceited snob they'd like to take down a peg. I unfortunately have to say that there definitely were some very elitist attitudes expressed by cohost users towards other platforms and by extension their users. I think in a way that's normal and inevitable if you're a small, alternative community, I experienced the same thing on Mastodon back in the day, and to a degree it's fine if you do it amongst yourselves. What I very much could have done without though is seeing cohost users log on to other websites (bluesky in my case) and act like they have discovered nirvana and are now too pure to be in the presence of the lowly mortals who are corrupted by the allure of the fake. I think cohost did a lot well with regards to how it incentivized user behaviour, so the detox-feeling many described I think is warranted, but please, read the fucking room. Anyways, I digress. Much of the criticisms in its design choices were aimed at deliberate decisions staff made to counteract what they saw as the root causes of many of the harmful social dynamics of social media, so they were easy to dismiss, cause if you miss feature xyz, this was deliberate and you're not the target audience then. That's fine, not every site has to be for everyone and cohost didn't try to be for everyone. There were some legitimate criticisms to be made though from within the framework of what cohost was supposed to be. Which makes sense, given it's a new platform with limited resources and a small staff. Not everything is necessarily gonna be in place and perfectly functional all the time, and many of these things have been greatly improved over the course of the site's lifespan.

Something I want to get into at this point though is my frustration with how people treat indie websites and how they are seemingly held to a higher standard than established corporate sites. We all spend our time on various mainstream websites with ungodly amounts of corporate financial backing. I'm not sure if I ever experienced one of those sites actually being fully satisfactory, and beyond that, most of them are actively getting worse, most notably tumblr and twitter, while youtube and twitch mostly get increasingly bloated and corporate with many questionable decisions along the way. I'm not sure anyone really likes the mainstream platforms they use. I certainly don't. Everyone constantly complains about something being wrong on the websites and services we use. Yet we keep using them out of habit and we just deal with everything that's wrong. All these giant corporations have ungodly amounts of cash and giant operations of staff and still can't make a good website. Every website on the web is terrible, but they're terrible in a way that we're used to. Yet when it comes to indie sites that are run on a shoestring budget by four people, everything had to be perfect. Every little imperfection, every bit of clunky implementation, every design choice that is not perfectly to your liking is an instant dealbreaker. So you come to the conclusion that this site sucks and is unusable, so you go back to twitter, and still fucking hate it there. Frustrates the everloving shit out of me. I truly believe that the internet could be infinitely much better if people just showed the same amount of charitability towards indie platforms that they had towards the corporate slop trainwrecks we all fucking hate.

My relationship to cohost and its community was largely very good and I was frequently willing to recommend the site and defend it against criticism. I missed mid 2010s tumblr, and I genuinely believed in the vision of the site. The people on cohost were largely great, I had very few unpleasant interactions there. That being said, I did admire the community, in a way, but I'm not sure if I ever found community myself. The cliché cohost user was a mid 30s transfem programmer. This obviously isn't the full picture, but it was a strong part of the general vibe, and I often felt like I was positioned outside of a very tight knit community. I enjoyed seeing that sense community from the outside, but I didn't neccesarily feel like I belonged there myself. Might very well be a me-problem though, as I have terminal "stand in the corner at social gatherings"-disease. I just don't integrate into groups easily. The reason I'm saying this anyways is because the feeling of belonging I personally experienced was no better than what I get now on bluesky or used to on twitter. But if you were the right person, you would have struck gold with cohost. Your milage may vary. I made a couple of good acquaintances there, but I'm not confident I can say I ever truly felt at home or had many people I felt a strong personal connection to. At times I found myself get tired of overly elaborate, academic sounding posts (glass houses, I know), and the common topic of discussion being cohost itself. To me, cohost was at its best when it came to shitposting and kinky queer erotica. I enjoy a well thought out essay every once in a while, but ultimately that's not what I go to social media for. This unfortunately leads me to the point now, writing this post in the last couple of days of its active lifespan, that I have to end my time with cohost on a bit of a bitter note. The last couple of days are a time for celebration and heartfelt goodbyes, but I just can't deal with it. I don't do well with goodbyes, and since the announcement in early September, we now have a goodbye that's prolonged over several weeks, and this endless concluding and recapping just exhausts me (once again, I know, glass houses. I still participate in it with this post cause there are thoughts I have that I feel like expressing. I don't have any ill will towards anyone else and if someone feels the same way about my post adding to the noise, fair enough, they are welcome to do so). I've not really enjoyed the site all that much in its last two weeks. I don't blame anyone for this, it's only natural to want to bring your time in a community to a clean conclusion, I just wish I wasn't feeling so bitter about it. In a way, I'm glad this final concluding period is finally over.

To bring this back around to a more positive note though, I can't understate the importance this site had for me in the last two years. Great people, great posts and great times, overall. It led me to a renewed interest in writing and expressing myself, which then resulted in the neocities website you're reading this on right now. I've seen many on the site go through greatly important personal journeys of self-actualization, once again, drawing parallels to tumblr in the early to mid 2010s, which was an incredible avenue for young queer people to explore their identity, just as much as cohost was, for admittedly older queer people, 10 years later. And although I never expressed it much on cohost itself, I do believe the general spirit of genuine self-expression of the site might have sparked something in me that I hope can help me to break out of my shell in the long run. I can only hope.

Cohost was cool. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I think it's gotten closer to any other website in the last 10 years. It gives me hope that spaces made for people and not advertisers are still possible and that there are passionate people that can come together and create such spaces. And that, although cohost didn't survive, maybe one day, another such space will exist.
Enjoy your retirement, eggbug. You deserve it.