Cohost is shutting down

Originally Posted 9/10/24. Last Updated: 9/13/24

Fuck man. Where do I even start.

I guess with the farewell post I made on Cohost upon hearing the news:

Fuck guys. I loved this website so much. I loved seeing everything people posted, the community, how it was different. I really enjoyed Cohost, it's easily my favorite social media site I've ever been on. Because of Cohost, I was able to learn about Neocities and able to create my own website. Seeing what CSS crimes was up to made me curious enough to learn about CSS (though, I still know very little). I learned more about RSS Feeds and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. I know Cohost's future was never stable but... I don't know. I guess I hoped we had just a little bit longer.

And let's also post the announcements themselves, if nothing else to just save them historically. This post was made yesterday:

I'm... almost at a loss of words. What do I say now?... I guess we start at the beginning.

What is Cohost?

If you've seen some of my other articles, this isn't the first time I mentioned cohost. I originally mentioned it to talk about why I thouhgt you should use it, and then again to talk about how it was in need of saving. Unfortunately, its time has come.

Cohost is a special place. It was a place that was extremely accepting of people, and pretty protective of it. The owners of the site would simply ban people who were acting poorly or spreading hateful speech. Because of this a lot of people felt welcomed and safe on Cohost, which they didn't feel elsewhere online.

The closest thing to compare Cohost to, unfortunately, is Tumblr. Cohost looked somewhat similar to Tumblr. You could make text posts as well as embed pictures (and later Audio) to your posts. You could make a simple text post or *really* go all out because Cohost supported mardown, html, and css! The other term I've heard a lot for Cohost is microblogging, because that's often what posts were. Of course you had memes and in jokes and such, but there were also a fair amount of people just talking about an idea, or problem, or issue that was important to them.

What made Cohost so special?

One of the first things was how accepting they were. I came in contact with so many people I just wouldn't have run into on other social media platforms, because most of those people usually woudldn't feel comfortable elsewhere. On top of that though, I want to talk about a few things that I think made Cohost unique compared to other sites I've been on:

• Tags: This was something I've run into before on other sites, but not nearly to the degree that Cohost used them. On Cohost, the *only* way to find content was to search for Tags that would be related to your interest. And you'd have to hope people who were posting about your interest was tagging them correctly. From there you could follow people to have whatever they posted or shared show up on your main feed. This was already weird for most people. Nowadays content is often just served to you, so having to go out of your way to find it honestly turned some people away from the site. There were a lot of people making new user guides to Cohost and talking about tags and the need to curate your own content. This was a common thing people felt needed to be mentioned to new people, as it was so foreign to how most things work now. This reminded a lot of people of the "old internet" though - when that's how you had to find anything. This article here I think I've mentioned before talks about how curation used to be a thing on the internet. On the topic of being served content,
• No Algorithm:Man was this a breath of fresh air compared to every other social media platform. One of Cohosts goals was to make the place welcoming without making you feel like you *had* to be on it constantly. One way they accomplished this was by making your feed chronological, rather than algorithmic. You could simply catch up on posts that were shared since the last time you were on, and be done. If you wanted more content, you could browse the tags you followed. Now, of course, if you followed a lot of people you could still end up having a giant home feed. But they even tried to solve this by implementing a way to view your home feed that would group everything shared by someone together. It would look sort of like an email thread, where each "email" was a persons posts and shares. So if you had someone you follow who makes 100 posts a day, and another person who only posted once a week, you could still see the person who posted once a week because you could just click on their "email" to see everything.
• No Numbers:One thing that was also a breath of fresh air was there were no numbers for how well a post was doing. You could not see how well a post was doing at all. You would get notifications every time someone shared or liked your post, but there was not a number on the post itself how many times it had been liked or shared. You could see how many comments a post had though. This made a big difference for how a lot of people approached the site. For me numbers was never something that bothered me much on other sites, but for some people this really helped them have a better relationship with social media. I did enjoy it and it did make me realize how useless I think metrics really are on social media. Really what seems to be the most important reason to have numbers is for advertisers - so you could say "see how many people my posts are reaching!?". Speaking of...
• No ads:Cohost did not sell advertising. This is something they were against from the beginning since so much of the internet is just filled with ads. They did not want to be like that. Of course, this presents a problem: how do they make enough money to stay afloat then? I mentioned it in my previous Cohost posts I think, but they were largely funded through an annonymous private donor. They also had plans on how to make money outside of traditional advertising. They launched what they called "Artist Alley" where users could pay to have their artwork showed to everyone else on the website, as well as a message or link to their store or whatever. This was different than traditional advertising since people only saw these things if they went to a specific spot on the website. They eventually also allowed you to share these posts to your page, if you saw something you really liked. The user base also at one point mentioned they'd be okay with untargeted advertising, if it meant Cohost could stay around. The people who made Cohost had talked before how they believe social media to be inherently unprofitable, so were doubtful even if they had ads that they could make enough to stay afloat. Another plan they had to make money was something they were calling eggbux, which would've been a way for you to be able to support/ tip your favorite creators on cohost. However, Stripe changed something on their end and this became impossible (I'm not entirely sure the story behind this). They also sold some merch, including a limited edition Eggbug plushies (which I have a 1 in 3 chance of having the 666th one ordered). The other way they made money was with subscriptions - for $50 a year you could support Cohost and you received some perks.
• Quirky Perks: One of the things that just made the website really cool to me is that with the subscription you didn't really get much that I felt was game changing. What you did get though was access to was Swatch Internet Time which is what the site used timestamp posts. I had never heard of this before but to me was just a sort of fun, sort of quirky thing to give people. I don't know, to me it just seemed funny and I wanted to support the site anyways, so to get some weird perks with it just made it more fun.
• RSS Feeds:One thing I also really loved about Cohost was that they had RSS feed functionality built in. Everyone's profile was also an RSS feed, and so you could just follow people in an RSS feed reader of your choice. This again made it so you did not have to be on the site itself to get content from people. I wish there were more social media sites like this out there, but of course that takes away from advertising revenue.
• CSS Crimes:I'm not sure if this originated with Cohost, but since Cohost allowed inline CSS, people would make all sorts of really interesting posts that you just didn't see elsewhere. They'd change your mouse cursor to fun images, or you could interact with the posts (click something to have something else happen). My main blogs page, the backgrounds being different images is straight from a post I saw on Cohost. This post in particular actually.

The Mark Cohost left on others

The rest of this post is going to be screenshots of posts that resonated with me that people have made about Cohost shutting down. I hope they'll allow you to get a good sense of how special this site was. I'm truly sad to see it go. I don't think I've been this upset by another website closing before. This was a great place to be, and I'm glad I was able to witness it.

This section is going to have more emtotional sort of posts

This section is going to be for more meme sort of posts

You guys may remember that photo from my last Cohost post. The artist made this follow up:

Someone made a whole TF2 based comic about the remaining time on cohost. I've put it behind this dropdown so you can choose if you want to read through the 11 images or not.

In case you're unfamiliar, these images are edits from the video Expiration Date from the Team Fortress team