a cohost postmortem

a website i used and really liked called cohost recently shut down.

statistically, you already come from there and so you know what the deal is, but for the uninitiated: cohost was a Tumblr-like social media platform that strived to reduce or outright remove a lot of the negative and hostile aspects of the modern social media experience. (it shut down in no small part because a lot of the negative and hostile aspects of the modern social media experience were all the profitable ones.) it still had problems, and the problems it did have were Not Small ones, but for what it's worth, i will say yeah, it really was that good.

there's probably already a lot of scattered post-mortems across the internet wherever people wound up after cohost, be it Pillowfort or Dreamwidth or on personal blogs or what have you. if you want more reading there, i recommend Alyaza Birze's eulogy (which also links to Nicky Flowers' postmortem, who also collated other users' memories) and Shel Raphen's eulogy.

while the site was still up and my page was still editable, i refrained from making any kind of "where will you find me next"-type posts, in part because i wasn't sure myself where i wanted to be. cohost is -- was -- more or less the only social media site i've ever tried, or really even wanted, to maintain a public, participatory presence.

and honestly? it's left me too spoiled to want to use much of anything else. trying out other social media sites mostly just reminded me of the things that were really nice about cohost and that are sorely missing from every other site on the web.

tagging, filtering, and content warning

honestly this was a highlight of the site and there are ideas i want to see adopted everywhere.

tagging worked a bit like tumblr. you had a seperate box for tags, and they were freeform input. you could optionally follow tags, and they would appear in a seperate "followed tags" feed. tagging a post with "#minecraft" meant everyone that followed the "#minecraft" tag could see that post in their tags feed (which lived seperately from the main "followed users" feed).

you also had a third box for content warnings, which hid posts behind a labeled click-through. i could add a content warning for "minecraft" and everyone else would get a "this post has content warnings for: minecraft" click-through before they could see the post. so far so good, yeah?

here's the neat part: you could 'upgrade' any tags into content warnings (for yourself). if you wanted anything tagged "#minecraft" to be behind a content warning as you scrolled, you could do that. (you could also filter out tags entirely, if you wanted minecraft gone from the site forever.)

but that's not all. you could also 'downgrade' any content warnings to show-by-default as well, so if i didn't want to click through people's CW's for "minecraft", i could just have them shown by default.

these obviously were of great use to people browsing, but it also really helped me when i was posting, because i didn't have to worry about alienating whatever """audiences""" i had. if they liked my art, i had a seperate tag for my art that they could follow. if they HATED my art, they could just block that one tag and things worked just fine. people had the option of picking and choosing what they saw or didn't see of me, and that mentally freed me from having to anticipate and micromanage people's expectations and wants for my page.

18+ content

the straightforwardly-lax 18+ policy was a breath of fresh air in a online environment seemingly totally dominated by advertiser-friendly and puritan corporate interests. i didn't have to dance around with innuendo, i didn't have to worry about getting dinged by some algorithm, i didn't have to leave my designated digital Ikea showroom¹ to go to a separate site to post 18+ stuffs, i could just post dick and/or balls as and when i felt like it. i have no intention of futzing around and fighting any other social media sites that don't straightforwardly allow 18+ content, because i don't have any interest in stripping away some of the most interesting parts of my life for the sake of the idea of some company maybe getting a couple more cents from their clicks.

tying in with the tagging and CW'ing system, posts on cohost also had a simple "18+" tickbox you could tick to mark something as 18+, with no extra frills except that anonymous users had to press an "i am 18+" button. (rather than mark an entire page as 18+, you just had a page setting that controlled the default state of this tickbox when you first drafted posts.) this likewise liberated me from having to worry about whether some random hornypost was going to get put in front of someone who didn't want to see it.

longposts

cohost was a delightful place for longposts. an extremely generous ~250,000 character limit, a sizable but not too bit first-paragraph preview, and a non-intrusive "read more" button ensured that it was as easy to read and write long essays or blog posts as it was to make one-sentence shitposts.

Poster's Energy

Poster's Energy is hard to describe. but you know when it's missing.

anybody can write a post in any given online social space, but it takes a certain kind of talent to Post. the kind of Post that not just makes an impact in terms of numbers and virality, but enters into a canon of Posts, for other Posters to expand and iterate upon, to distill down to their core ideas and reformulate them, to build culture out of them.

when a space fosters this phenomenon well, that's Poster's Energy.

some spaces naturally rise and fall, taking their Poster's Energy with them. others are slowly choked out by the passive erosion of corporate interest, vestigial remains of the culture slowly bled for every last penny. sometimes it's a lot faster, deliberately killed off by petty fascist billionares. other spaces are hand-crafted with the specific scientific endeavor of figuring out what happens when there is no Poster's Energy at all (LinkedIn).

i think cohost scratched an itch for a lot of Posters. maybe it's too early to call, and maybe there really wasn't enough time to develop the kind of Poster's Energy to rival a Twitter or a Tumblr from their respective haydays, but i think what was there burned bright.

my prediction is that we'll see screenshots from cohost circulate over the years among the remaining three websites as people share bits and pieces of what made the space so special. but lots more will just be stuck there, too enmeshed with the space; either on a cultural level, as with many of the in-jokes and memes, or a technological one, in the case of CSS crimes.

we will hopefully have archives of all the Posts. but the Posters themselves are gone now, scattered back to the winds from which they came. i will miss them.

so where am i actually at now

yeah... that's a question i'm still trying to answer myself. most of the places i'm experimenting with being on have mostly just reminded me of the things i missed most about cohost. cohost deliberately chose to eschew some of the anti-features of modern web and social media site design, such as infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, and engagement metrics. trying to go "back" to other sites after experiencing a place that deliberately didn't have these very definitively feels like a step down.

a lot of people i followed on cohost made the jump to bluesky, but for me personally? going from a ~250K character limit all the way down to a 300-character limit feels like a bad joke. i didn't have twitter, and it sounds like bluesky is setting itself up to just be twitter 2 (and inheriting all of its issues). there's a ton of furry porn there, sure, but i can't imagine myself seriously participating.

mastodon... exists, but the required reading (instances? federation? frontends?) for maintaining a presence there gets deeply grating. combine that with the cultural problems caused by the core devs' laissez-faire approach to moderating harassment, and it's not looking like a fun place to be. (though in all fairness, cohost also had major racism problems basically from jump).

tumblr's banning of 18+ content (and its CEO currently having an extended mental breakdown) strikes it off the list, though there are a handful of tumblr-likes that have caught my attention (pillowfort comes to mind).

the fledgeling website league created in the wake of cohost's demise has a couple familiar faces, but being based on mastodon, it similarly has a tech hurdle for new users right at the start, amplified by being so new and rough around the edges in places. people are working on a cohost-like interface that in theory can implement some of the design decisions that made cohost so nice to use, but at time of writing it's currently missing major features. as far as i feel right now, the website league as a whole just feels like a smaller, slightly-improved mastodon than anything else. i just don't know if that's what i'm looking for.

goodbye

it just sucks. it stings in that way where every little thing reminds you of what was there, and what could have been there. i copy-paste CSS snippets into my user-style manager to remove like counts from bluesky and sigh.

i'm sad now, but i'm hopeful that people will take the best ideas from cohost and build something else with those pieces. i will eagerly look forward to what comes next.