Longpost of post-Cohost thoughts.
The post that set off this chain of thought:
"Not being on Twitter anymore really has really changed my life for the positive in a bunch of small ways. For example now when I see someone say or do something wack I just say "that's crazy. You sound like you're 12 years old" and move on with my day" - dante
Saw this repost on the feed and it hit hard - my partner took a twitter break a couple years ago and I found myself half way through explaining Bean Dad before seeing myself in the 3rd person - and I just sighed and stopped. There was no point to either of us knowing about this.
It was a good setup for joining Cohost a year or so later, and leaving Twitter and its vicious neuroses behind. My partner is also off Twitter permanently now but is active on SpaceBattles, the creative writing forum. Occasionally she'll show me some bizarre little argument happening on there and we both have the distance to say "what a weird thing to say/do" and not let it affect our day.
In a very real way, Cohost has improved my life. I haven't done a great job at building/taking part in community on here, but it's been an incredibly comfortable place to spend some time seeing what people care about enough to post. But really, the change Cohost made was in my own perception of online presence, and my habits interacting with it. Infinite scrolls are so uniquely bad for my mental wellbeing - algorithmic feeds have led to me spending literal hours doing nothing, feeling nothing, and the way social media has been built around strong-arming people into using them feels explicitly exploitative.
Cohost is a project and a place that makes me feel genuinely optimistic about the future of the internet - not because I think we're all going to break out and change the world, but because we don't have to. This website broke a lot of bad habits and deprogrammed some awful behaviours and all it took was a site structure that didn't revolve around metrics. Posting here is about expression in whatever form feels appropriate, and damn the response or lack thereof.
A big reason I want to keep in touch with the people here is that I believe the lessons learned here will have value to someone in the future who wants to do a similar thing, build a social platform revolves around its users without commoditising them. I don't want to be out of the loop when that happens. While I'll miss seeing certain names that are going other ways, if I'm brutally honest the FOMO I'm feeling is about a second chance at this thing.
What took this down wasn't a content war, or cyber attacks, or corporations gaming the system until the space was unusable. There was a relatively wealthy benefactor, but not so wealthy that they could keep it going forever - that's frankly not unreasonable. It's frustrating that we lose this place due to what amounts to a rounding error in Twitters annual costs, but look at it this way - they have the literal richest man in the world bankrolling them, and they still have a collapsing website nobody likes. All we needed was a benefactor 1 rung further up the "damn that's a lot of money" ladder and this could have worked. The financial issue Cohost faced is endemic and structural to social media - but unlike Twitter the website itself was good. Did good. Is good.
I'm still not 100% sure what post-Cohost online life looks like for me. I don't know that I want to go and try to "do cohost" somewhere else. I'm pulling together a Neocities page but it's taking a while - I'm an enthusiastic computer toucher but incredibly uncomfortable with web stuff, and have been dealing with migraines this week. I really don't know how much of the heavy lifting I want to hand over to an Organisation but at the very least I know I'm happy to let someone else deal with hosting things. I am extremely open to suggestions for better alternatives, but I've been through a lot of options and the main problem is that I don't know what I want to do with it! Neocities seems to offer the best balance at the moment, and a lot of flexibility to change my mind later. I have never interacted with a CMS and they scare me for some reason.
I won't lengthen this post much more with why the other alternatives don't appeal, but suffice to say for now that I've thought about Discord, fediverse stuff, and Tumblr. I think my future in those places would be a step back. I might hook up something to keep up with individual posters but we'll have to see. I'm learning a lot about RSS this week.
I'm not going to lie, I'm grieving. Over a fucking website. How embarrassing.
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