Post Chost: a Debriefing
September 24th, 2024How do I feel as we approach a Post Chost world?
It's hard to say. It's hard to say how much of cohost was the actual website. I disagreed with a lot of Staff's decisions. Many features of the site are just as vulnerable for abuse and anti-patterns than anywhere else. It's strange.... There is no reason a post on Cohost couldn't have the notification shattering virility of a good tumblr post. It's a cultural difference. Taking away certain numbers isn't necessarily the same benefit to everyone on a personal, user level, but removing a lot of elements seemed to weed out a lot of users and types of blogs. Blogs that are glorified content farms keeping fandom posts in circulation for eternity. Posts are allowed to die here. Regardless of how I felt about individual cohost decisions, as a whole, the design self selected for people who wanted to talk.
I primarily used cohost as an unofficial comment section for my blog. Not that I didn't rechost stuff or pop off about random things occasionally, but cohost definitely fell into a weird "middle space" with me. I felt better blabbing on the blabberer apps like twitter and bluesky, but it was hard to think of an effortful post I'd put here that I wouldn't want on my blog. I felt this was a problem for me, but ultimately, with cohost dying, I realize it wasn't. It was perfect. Cohost was a self selecting audience. I didn't need to moderate or worry about weird drivebys, or complete, rude randos. While I had a few chucklefucks once or twice, my posting experience on cohost was great. People wanted to talk.
More importantly, it encouraged my other friends to write more. While I care about what my friends say on twitter, ultimately it felt like a space where I go to talk. They just have less investment, and honestly... use for that platform? Meanwhile, Cohost is where I heard to see my friends flex. They didn't need thousands of followers to get a response like they did in other places.
This didn't come right away, either. For awhile I joked that cohost was the place you went to hang out and talk about how good cohost is. By the end, it long broke free of that.
Well now what???
Some thoughts on where we go from here...
Maintaining a Personal Website is the most Punk Thing you can do!
Okay no I'm sorry that's firebombing a walmart. Come to think about it, websites aren't very punk in the grand scheme of things. But by INTERNET STANDARDS they're pretty rad! A rejection of the feudal lords of the web, living out in your own cabin out in the woods. That cabin is lonely though. We joke about bringing back webrings and RSS (and some of us are actually serious), but it's still going to be hard to maintain any kind of community in the open seas of the web.
Worse, not everyone is even going to be able to put together even a static neocities page or something. There still needs to be something "social media"ish To fill that space for long form content.
In a weird way, Cohost encouraged me to keep my site updated. To simplify it. To keep my content human readable on the backend. Flat files. Websites became like scrapbooks to me. Even if no one goes to them, they are now objects of pleasure for me, whether they're online, or are local files. Some of the values of this place reminded me of what I was missing.
I'm not going to get excited by anything that isn't federated
Cohost fails, Pillowfort is struggling, social media in general is expensive and profitless. Everything that is good is waiting for a buyout to destroy it and let the founders cash out. But you know what is still alive and healthy? Even growing?
Fucking Mastodon.
No matter how much people whine, no matter how much people invent problems about it "being confusing", that shit lives. No matter how much the stink of free software nerds fills the air, Mastodon fucking LIVES.
Oh it sucked when the instance your friend ran went down due to some drama and everyone had to figure out where to go? Well we had all of our eggbugs in one basket. Our one instance is gone, and no one can run another.
I'm not saying we should all use mastodon(I barely touch mine), but we need to respect its hustle. Mastodon is a poor fit for this kind of content. The idea is key though -- distributing the load. You can't find many people willing to drop donations to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars on staff to run a platform, but you can find hobbyists who will invest in their part of an ecosystem.
I hope for something different but compatible. Kinda like Misskey. Another ActivityPub (or whatever, AT protocol who cares) bit of software that can connect to other services, but is more suited for all this. If we can't make social media profitable, then we need to share the burden... and not by having fundraisers, but letting people actually invest in the infrastructure they care about.
I'm not sure how I'm going to live without native markdown and HTML support in stuff
Dreamwidth is fucking stagnant dogwater but oh god I can just USE HTML to cross post stuff that's amazing! Other stuff won't even take markdown, even if they have styles. Aughghghgh. Like what the fuck is pillowfort doing? The Tweets-and-Skeets give you no formatting, and tumblr is in some boring middle zone. Control of how you display information is a kind of self expression. Part of this is why I want to see friends play around in HTML a bit, run those site generators, make free static sites! Have control of your stuff!!!
Unfortunately now in most places, if you want to express more, it'll be monetized. How did Livejournal figure out, back then, that having multiple different profile pictures you could switch to depending on the mood of your post was awesome? How did we forget that? When did everything have to become so small and clean?
A lack of options protects us from having bad taste. But it also protects us from having good taste. Let people be tacky.
I'm going to miss this place more than I thought I would a year ago
Cohost constantly felt like it was getting better at being cohost. At the same time some part of me always knew it was going to explode. Not through some flaw in staff (whether or not they deserve any criticism is not a topic I'm interested in. We will not speak ill of the dead), but getting screwed by the payment processors felt like the exact sort of thing that was going to happen. No matter what, I thank them for at least reminding people that the internet can be a place for them. We don't have to hang out the mall food court, waiting to get thrown out by security. We can make our own spaces.
Hope to see most of y'all somewhere else.