I'm not sure I've felt this ambivalent in a long time. Like, about anything.

It's sad that Cohost (the site where I met many new friends, got closer to quite a few long-time acquaintances, and even reconnected with quite a few people I'd drifted away from) is ending this early in its life. It's frustrating watching the widespread glossing over of Cohost's very real problems with a specific brand of self-victimising "left"-flavoured racism, the strategic limitations Anti Software Software Club was saddled with by their primary funding arrangement and the approach they took to their founding values, and people's continued ignoring of ASSC asking people to be a bit less defensive of their efforts — and just as frustrating watching off-site bad actors with much less legitimate grievances trying to muddy the waters around What Happened With Cohost.

It's a serious shame that a lot of people are losing the one place online where they felt safe. I also think it's an insult to the positive legacy that Cohost has had for many to speak about it as if there was no one who was unfairly excluded from the vision that many people on the site; whether those of us who stuck with it to the end, or those who had to leave it before now; wanted to give effect to.

ASSC set out to do something incredible, and we need to learn from the many errors which occurred between them setting out on this project and today. We set out to participate in that project, and we all need to reflect on what we did right, what we did wrong, and what opportunities we might have just outright missed. It's great that so many people, myself included, are participating in projects which seek to carry the torch, for some definition or another of "the torch" — but I'm absolutely concerned that some of these efforts will fail to ever achieve anything better than the site we are leaving.

(I also strongly encourage anyone who hasn't already done so to read Alyaza's post about the history of the racism issues on Cohost and Part Three of Shel's retrospective on Cohost generally.)

But when it comes to how Cohost affected me or changed my life? It was largely just another social media platform, even if it was different in many ways that were profoundly relevant for a lot of its other users.

Some personal context

Many people have given better analyses of what went wrong on Cohost than I ever could (and some have given worse analyses than I ever would, but that's beside the point). However, I don't believe that my mixed feelings on the end of Cohost are just because many people have come out of it with generally negative feelings (if not material outcomes); lord knows, there're more than enough people who have nothing but the most glowing praise of the site based on their own experiences.

Alas, I don't even have the feelings in my heart I'd need to join in with that — even if it weren't for the fact that mourning the site without acknowledging its failures seems to me to be irresponsible, particularly given my role in trying to build something new and better. Because really, for me, it was just another site where I made a fair number of friends, made a few enemies, and mostly just changed. Not really for the better or the worse. Sure, I might've become better to others, but not by a margin vastly outweighing any internal costs of the path I took to get there.

I invite you to read this companion post if you want to know more about why I ended up feeling the way I do, but it's not exactly necessary.

My time on Cohost

In short, and in line with the "it was like a website in here" jokes being made all around, it was hardly unprecedented in the role it played in my life, let alone truly unique. It was, indeed, my Fourth Website, alongside Mastodon, Tumblr, and Twitter (which was then replaced by Bluesky).

Especially after my experiences with Mastodon during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic (and particularly due to what I saw many friends of mine experiencing to a far more severe degree than I ever did), I was extremely wary of having no redundancy in my online presence. Any such space could always just implode. I had known for a long time that I could just get banned or chased out of spaces over arcane social politics, but the specific arrangement of threats on the Fediverse was such that, even despite returning to primarily using Twitter, I felt the need to set up a Tumblr. Twitter was Twitter, of course; hexagon avatars and Twitter Blue and questionable moderation decisions and Elon Musk threatening to buy it and all. Various friends of mine who'd already been through the wringer of those Mastodon issues ended up being driven off even Twitter due to bad actors of a similar flavour.

Like, fuck, Twitter was rough, even then. Even before Musk bought it. And then I found out about Cohost.

For maybe a few weeks, I was very optimistic and excited about it! It seemed like people were not just serious about contributing to a better social media platform, but also on a course to achieve that by actually behaving in a manner matching those aspirations. The Usual Suspects from over on the Fediverse engaging in dishonest attacks about the site? Whatever! Threads of outright FUD being posted by people with real, legitimate conflicts of interest? To be expected!

The mods making one deeply questionable call, and then another, and then another, with middling responses to people's concerns each time? Hm. Various users bouncing off of the site for reasons I absolutely couldn't blame them for? Shit, I hope that isn't going to be a pattern. (It was.) The site generally being equivalent to the Fediverse in terms of not being able to have "meta" conversations in a manner commensurate with its aspirations of being Better Than Legacy Platforms? Cool. I guess it's just as stressful as the other sites now. Of course, that I cared about the project and wanted it to succeed made it worse, in a way, but — it already seemed to be falling short of its aspirations, even before the most widely-remembered Site-Wide Discourses™ happened.

Various major, acrimonious discussions happened. Desperately wanting Cohost to succeed, I chimed in, giving my input on how I thought the site could best earn the confidence of users. Sometimes, I had good ideas; other times, well, it was evident that I was speaking from a place of "fuck I can't let this site crash and burn" panic. On average, I think I ended up having about as (good/bad) of a time on Cohost as I did on any other sites I've used in any major capacity in my adult life, and I think I made regrettable decisions in navigating the social politics on the site about as often as I historically have elsewhere.

But even amidst all of this, I have to say, Cohost was qualitatively like no site I'd ever used before. When its unique features were good, they were great. When its posting culture arrived at beneficial tendencies or fun bits of culture, once again, it hit it out of the park. It's a serious, serious shame that it ended up suffering from many of the same problems as other social media platforms, and ultimately ran aground before it could meaningfully overcome many of those issues.

Ultimately, I engaged with Cohost as someone who got the same kind of Fun Internet Damage from mainstream social media platforms as many of my peers, but as someone who experienced such while younger and while having other issues exacerbating the corrosive effects of, for example, the panopticon-like nature of Twitter, the labyrinthine network of alliances and blood feuds of the Fediverse, or the ambient volatility and cruelty of Tumblr.

How it has ultimately affected me

Well, I think Cohost has been a moderate net positive for me.

Like, I made many new acquaintances and friends! I deepened a lot of connections which started out being pretty superficial! I even reconnected with a decent number of people who I had fallen out of touch with or actively fell out with.

Cohost played a large role in me finally deciding to get into VR, which has also been an unambiguous positive for me so far! Oh my gosh. Once again, that's another space that I don't allow to be too load-bearing, but it's pushed me to learn new skills, and has let me experience things that you just can't in the offline world. Also, having more motivation to do photography or other such… …like, secondary creative pursuits than I've had in a long time has been fun, though I think it would've been even more helpful on that front if it came at a time in my life when I wasn't so generally busy.

As for the fabled Cohost-Mediated Social Media Detox? I never got that. I had long since ceased to be someone who could really put all my eggs in one basket when it comes to social media. It was nice to have Cohost when the meta got insufferable for, like, truly inscrutable, goofy reasons on my other usual platforms — and more importantly, having a site that technically supported and socially encouraged long-form textual content to a degree far beyond Tumblr was fantastic. It got me into writing essays for personal reasons in a way that I hadn't done… …in years, at least. But I just couldn't trust any platform to remain tenable for me to use to a degree that'd let me have one main social media presence ever again, let alone one like Cohost that neither had ungodly amounts of venture capital backing nor a pool of volunteers to draw off of (and, in far too many cases, burn out) vastly larger than it could ever need.

On the downside, well, it wouldn't be a social media platform if I didn't make a few indisputable blunders on it (which I think I've mostly learned from?), or if I didn't get mistreated in Innovative™ ways on it at least once or twice, or if it didn't somehow intensify at least a few hang-ups or problems of an inward-facing nature. I can't claim to have been harmed by the site or members thereof to nearly the same degree as a considerable number of people, but, eh, I'm not going to say it was all good for me.

What does the future hold?

Well, for me, I'm participating in a new effort called the Website League, which aims to build upon what Cohost did right while correcting what it did wrong. (Expect me to set up an account on a node there sometime this evening, I guess.) But I can at least say that I'm keeping my eyes open for critical or even cynical feedback, because I (and I think everyone else involved) understand that we need to earn people's trust.

Otherwise, you can find me on the Fediverse, Bluesky, Tumblr, VRChat, FA, Weasyl, Itaku, and also on Telegram and Discord (at the same username I use on Tumblr).