As mentioned in my main post on the subject, here's some deeper personal context about why I feel the way I do about Cohost shutting down.

If you give a Best Outcome Kid™ DSL and a computer with no parental controls,

I first started interacting with other people online when I was about 5 or 6. Even at that young of an age, I was already lying about being 13 to get into Cool Adult Spaces where Smart People hang out, like "Neopets with looser safety settings" or "industry forums related to my special interests". I got a bit older, and got banned from Wikipedia at least once for my good-faith but just bad edits as a precocious preteen who overestimated my intelligence and competence. I definitely had a brief stint on Furcadia as well, but I don't particularly remember ever having gotten to know anyone through there.

Around this time, I was introduced to Warriors, the novel series. I joined a few Warriors RP forums. I made a few acquaintances and one good friend, and through that friend, I discovered deviantART.

The forum eventually fell apart after somewhat of a jumping-the-shark moment. The status quo had gotten boring, as far as I recall, so it was decided that a natural disaster would be thrown into the mix, along with a re-brand. This was the first time of many that a website where I found a community would wrap up before it really needed to. It wasn't a website that really changed me much, but it was only months after my time on there started to wind down that I searched the phrase "fat dragons" on dA. It can reasonably be inferred based on my fursona that such had no impact upon me as well. (Also, it was directly from dA that I found FA. I figure there is a decent chance I would have ended up there eventually in any event, but me being on dA did accelerate me making that jump.)

I kept posting on various forums into the early 2010s, and just ended up bouncing off of them as I grew up and changed as a person. Most of these didn't have any major effect on me, regardless of how much I discussed the practical aspects of my life and further honed my beliefs and values in those environments—

Because my heart was elsewhere, worn right on my sleeve, as I arrogantly charged into spaces where I might be able to connect more closely with others than forums where I always felt like I was at least somewhat of an annoyance to the comparatively small communities in each forum or subforum I was active in.

they'll run wild,

FA was really the first site in the now recurring pattern of sites that are, or were, important to me having complicated, messy impacts on me. In addition to being the place that completely shattered any illusions I might ever have had of being straight, FA led to making new friends, some of whom I am still friends with today, and FA was also what first led me to IRC and Twitter. However, FA is also where my earnest arrogance as a young autistic teenager got (partly reasonably and partly with needless spite and cruelty) crushed out of me, in favour the then-in-vogue irony poisoning.

IRC is also how I met many long-time friends; however, I was also out of my depth here. I had just discovered that I was more or less gay, and had just discovered the sheer force of the emotions that were unlocked by me growing older — and the sorts of interactions that I invited into my life by having a manner of speaking and a degree of reading comprehension substantially beyond my inner maturity. Anyone who was on the other side of these interactions has, like I have, grown and changed a lot; there's been no bad blood left on my end for years. Regardless, just as I started making serious progress on disassembling the wall of irony with which I tried to protect myself from being a target of ridicule, I started to learn that, no, I just needed to move the walls in deeper instead.

There was also Twitter. When I first started using it, in 2009, I got bored of it quickly. My specific variety of Too Cool To Care didn't lend itself to the sort of mundane sincerity which defined early Twitter. Coming back to it in 2010, now with less irony shielding, I started to make acquaintances quickly, both between my existing friends from FA and IRC and with the help of a nearly ubiquitous dynamic of "Hey, you're a furry too? Let's follow each other!". I could now post my thoughts in a way that was less likely to actively annoy people than trying to chime in in IRC chatrooms. I showed more and more of who I was in a way where, at some points, over a thousand people had front-row seats to… …a lot.

step on a bunch of rakes while ending up immersed in fascinating new Social Dynamics (derogatory),

Being the main place I interacted with many people, and being a place where my thoughts were suddenly hypothetically visible to as many as tens and then hundreds of millions of people, it was somewhat of a pressure cooker in terms of personality development for me, for better and for worse. Getting dogpiled into adopting better, more progressive political positions than my naïve liberalism? It worked on me, at the cost of making me permanently more nervous and quiet. Ending up enmeshed in social circles on there which were basically dictated by some of the most perniciously toxic posters produced by Something Awful? To this day, parts of how I relate with the world and others have been shaped by a need to not be the next target of such people's ire. Watching "apolitical" friends on one side go mask-off during Gamergate, and also having other friends end up backstabbing me or determining that I should be the next target of their own even more subtle abuse? Also might have had some effects on me, maybe. (Surprisingly, the 18+ side of Twitter did by far the least damage to me.)

And let's be serious here, I wasn't at all blameless in the events and patterns which led to Twitter mangling me how it did. There was just as much of me facing the consequences of my own actions as there was me being subjected to others trying to wring catharsis out of me.

Tumblr was the same, really. It was only my "main" platform for probably a year or two, during a time in my life which depression has blasted an unusual number of holes in my memories of — around Occupy Wall Street and up until about 2013-ish, I think. The era that some derided as being one of "SJWs"; long before the porn ban or the development of its current brand of toxicity or whatever. Still, though, it had the same sort of effects on me as Twitter, as far as I recall.

There were also so, so many attempts at "Twitter but better" or other such efforts which I engaged with. Google+ gave me a brief but fascinating period of being more vulnerable than I've ever been outside of proper locked accounts, thanks to the Circles function; App.net seemed pretty cool, particularly in the context of Twitter proposing API changes which would severely limit third-party clients; there were also a bunch of other attempts like Ello, which I mostly only remember for having posted on them once or twice before never posting there again.

And then in late 2016, just as I was starting to get involved in offline activism and as I was in the course of reorienting my educational and thus career trajectory, I discovered Mastodon.

I checked it out for a bit. Set up an account, even. Checked the local timeline column.

Saw two people who had recently harmed me in a manner which, while not uniquely severe, was of a nature that made me give up on attempting to use the Fediverse for the next year and a half. People who just seemed that hazardous to me, given the character of their actions.

and then finally stop to take a breath… … …in the middle of a seemingly interminable cycle.

Cue late summer of 2018, again a time of rapid changes in my life. The vague reorientation I'd started in 2016 had finally crystallised into a single direction: I was going to go to law school. The sky was full of smoke for the second summer in a row. And Twitter had just implemented a "feature" that led to the "(user) liked this post" recommendations attributing likes on bigoted posts to people's mutuals, right in the middle of their timeline. Sensibly, several friends of mine quickly decided that:

fuck that.

And they set up a Mastodon instance, and a bunch of my friends and I all more or less ditched Twitter in favour of using Mastodon, whether on that specific instance or on others. Things were great! Amidst the existing furry cluster on the Fediverse, we quickly went from 0 to 100 in terms of really making the most of a website with CWs, with privacy settings on a per-post basis, and other such features. There was occasionally some tension between this sort of corner of the furry Fediverse and other more established users and spaces, but they were basically just teething pains, to start. To be clear, this vague set of overlapping social circles was not without bad actors, but my recollection is that they were generally better-behaved than the median Cohost user.

And this worked fine, more or less. Until the second half of March 2020 hit.

A full history of the events that led up to snouts.online being shut down is outside the scope of this, but my experience of this all definitely suggested that there was an intensifying degree of resentment of a largely "cringe culture" nature being levied at said instance by various bad-faith actors. This is not the only negativity that was aimed at Snouts, to be clear. I am absolutely not trying to imply that no one had legitimate issues with the instance.

Given people's perennial issues with FA, which has always been… …fraught but also, especially over the past decade or so, almost uniquely stable, there was this brief period where myself and quite a few others tried out this thing called FurryLife Online. (Also, remember that whole Entail thing? Or what happened with Howlr? The "trying to replace FA" market has been pretty grim on a consistent basis, wow.) So I gave that a try for, if I recall correctly, a few weeks. As far as I recall, it was cratered over, like, people arguing over what level of animalistic features should be banned from NSFW art on the site (like, on a scale of "literally just a 0% anthropomorphic normal animal" to "a typical highly anthropomorphic furry with human genitalia"). But this did not inspire a ton of confidence in me in how people would mentally cope with being extremely online not-by-choice for likely years longer — nor did it inspire much confidence in me in any site which even had the slightest pretentions of being anyone's Main Site.

And, unsurprisingly, over the same period, the Fediverse suffered from this same cabin fever. Which, once again, I won't recount in detail, but the end result was yet another community that I was highly involved in basically getting detonated overnight, though the problems had started to get pretty acute about a month earlier.

The point is: I came into the whole Cohost thing absolutely being emotionally prepared for it to fail. I figured it'd just plain old run out of money before any of the problems which eventually became evident actually ended up chipping away at its future prospects in the more pernicious way that they did, but.