a different way to be

cohost is nearing its final days before becoming read-only and if there's a prevailing mood, it's melancholy. a lot of people are mourning the premature loss of a website that was, for many, a home free from judgement; a hub for creativity and sharing; a network for organising and mutual aid, and a holdout against the algorithm-driven corporate internet. it's a loss that's personal, material and symbolic. and i'm feeling it too

every forum that i've left in the past was one that i'd slowly drifted away from. and while sad, i felt as though it was time. cohost shutting down is ripping away a community from so many people that need it and could have happily stayed there for years. i think the inevitability of this is something that a lot of people are coming to terms with, but the violent burning out rather than the slow fading away is a very different sensation to one that's normally felt around internet communities

the sudden nature of all this means people have been left scrambling to find new places to reconnect. bluesky and tumblr seem to be the main destinations, but the no-numbers detoxification of cohost has led a lot of people to abandon the social internet entirely and try to find home amongst the ruins of blogs and webrings. and i'm partially one of them! this isn't a website i would have made or a blog i would have started if i still had cohost, after all

i think most people are, however, coming to the conclusion that the very nature of modern social media platforms are antithetical to the cohost vibes. there was a great democratising feeling to cohost, unless i knew of someone's name personally, there were no numbers to tell me how much of an internet big deal (tm) they were. interaction felt free and easy. there were no quantifiable metrics to compare yourself to another human being with. the lack of discoverability on cohost was bemoaned a lot in the early days, but sometimes you don't necessarily want a post to be found. everyone on cohost could migrate to tumblr or bluesky, but it was as much the platform itself that gave cohost its energy as it was the people who used it

it can be easy to feel despaired by this realisation, that october 2024 will bring about an immediate and incalculable loss to the communities on cohost. even in the best of outcomes, those communities will find themselves fragmented and unable to recapture what felt so special about cohost.

that said, in the longer term, i find myself feeling optimistic. the unique place in the internet that cohost carved out for itself will not be forgotten and the dream of a truly open and caring social media platform can still be fought for. it was possible and it will be made possible again. this momentum, once picked up, can't be stopped

to steal a quote that i'm no doubt wildly misinterpreting for this situation: if cohost does not exist, it would be necessary to create it

thanks for reading