Long Live Cohost

I'm going to miss Cohost.

For the uninitiated, the staff behind Cohost, a social media blogging site, announced this month that they will be shutting down by the end of 2024. I felt an intense mixture of emotions when I read the bad news...because that meant losing what is perhaps one of the best possible modern social media sites I’ve ever used.

_{Posting, but better.}

What bothers me about social media nowadays is that it’s fast-paced and always lives in the present, often adding frivolous and unnecessary features. Some social media sites are also so filled with bloated features that it becomes a hostile user experience. I cannot, for the life of me, safely navigate Facebook or Instagram without feeling like something is trying to grab my attention. As for Twitter, I’m feeling the rot like a slow burn, like a sinking cruise liner without knowing when it will sink into the ocean. I’m waiting for an excuse to abandon ship, but I’m still on Twitter because that’s where most of my friends are. That’s where most of my favorite accounts are. I’m in a Stockholm syndrome situation with social media that’s getting worse by the day, and it started intensifying its rot as soon as a terminally online billionaire bought the damn hellsite.

And the metrics! Ohh fucking hell, the visible metrics! I started hating how I’ve tied my self-worth to the amount of likes or retweets I got on Twitter. I hated the disappointment that came with seeing a post fail miserably in engagements and how I tried to think about how I could do better next time, especially as a digital illustrator. Do I post during the day? Do I post on a weekday instead of the weekend? Did I forget to use the right keywords and hashtags? What other invisible algorithmic factors am I forgetting about??

And then I found Cohost. This website had none of the engagement farm bullshit built in, it’s structured to deter witch-hunting, and it focuses on what matters the most: the posts themselves. What caught my interest was the distinct lack of visible metrics: the only numerical metrics that you’ll see are the amount of comments on a post, and the amount of notifications that you haven’t read. That’s it.

_{Cohost's core ideas.}

This meant that a site like Cohost values discussion over engagement, because instead of looking at a post on any other social media site and thinking “man, this post is doing so good ‘cause it got shared around the most,” you can look at at a post on Cohost and think “man! This post is doing so good ‘cause people are talking about it a lot!” And people have made some cool and informative posts on Cohost. From the posts that make the most of CSS scripting to the long & drawn-out short essays, it felt like being on Tumblr before it succumbed to its long series of enshittificated rot.

_{This is how the main feed looked.}

Cohost wasn’t without its problems, though. There is no Direct Messaging feature, there’s no way to post videos directly, and the things you can search are limited. Those problems mainly stem from the staff’s philosophy, who sought to make a social media site that’s meant to detoxify the minds of people who used engagement-driven sites like Facebook and Twitter. But also, social media is notoriously unprofitable, and Cohost’s staff knew this, so they did their best to delay the inevitable shutdown they’d have to face if their funding runs out.

Cohost’s staff also took a while to directly address user abuse, particularly from racists and bigots in general, but if they were given more time, I would have been interested to see how they would have lived up to their promise to eject anyone who kept being reported for bigoted behavior. To be fair, Cohost’s staff is very small, and the fact they addressed user abuse is far better than Twitter (which has done next to NOTHING to stop this kind of abuse). Unfortunately, the damage was already done when Cohost’s staff started taking racism super seriously, at least based on individual accounts of non-white people who left the site because of the staff’s reluctance to act sooner. Bigotry & racism will spread as soon as you lower your tolerance for them, so it would have been better to nip them in the bud before it takes root like a weed.

Those are the only problems I’ve seen with Cohost. It was otherwise a slow, yet chill experience for me. My Cohost feed was just as boring as my neighborhood: you won’t expect crime or violence to happen a lot, but there’s still a non-zero chance that it can happen anyway.

_{My cohost profile!}

Meanwhile, as BlueSky (a Twitter imitator) continues to rise in popularity (mostly over Twitter’s blunders), Cohost never got nearly as much traction. Is it because Cohost is too niche? Maybe. But I feel sad that people do not understand the value of a website trying to set better standards for social media interaction. I don’t want another website that fuels my bad social media habits, I want to break from them. I don’t want another Twitter imitator, I want Cohost. More importantly, I don’t want a website that feels like an engagement farm. I want a website that feels like a community.

I want to stop worrying about the need to post every fleeting thought on a big, public website. I want to stop worrying about numbers that make me want to see go up. I want to share my artwork purely for the sake of sharing it. Yes, part of me wants to achieve popularity to some degree, but I want to be popular because I’m doing something I love and not because I made a funny post that did big numbers. Most social media sites are not made with community or love in mind. The solution is to not tack on a Community tab on the website’s dozen other features, the cure is to give the feeling of community. Joining a community of people can be easy, but feeling like you are in good company is so hard to come by on social media sites.

_{My art posts would often look like this.}

The enshittification of social media feels like gentrification. What once was a nice, relaxing online space has been ravaged by idiotic changes and business-driven ideas. I didn’t come to social media to do business, I came to INTERACT with my friends! I came to share what I love!! Stop treating social media like a business hub! Now I see how it feels to have your favorite home or venue bulldozed for a new land development that is marginaly worse at best.

This is why I joined Cohost. This is why I am now taking up Sheezy.Art in the wake of Cohost’s closure despite it catering to artists instead of the general populace. This is why I value direct communication with online friends through Discord. This is why I built my own website on Neocities from scratch. I want to feel at home in an online community, and Cohost was one of the best possible things I could ask for.

Despite everything going wrong with Cohost, I will sorely miss it. Long live Cohost, and I hope to find another community that’s just as strong and inviting.

_{Thank you, Cohost 💖}

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