eggbug is kil
i saw a post that said something like: “no matter how you feel about the site itself, don’t wish for twitter to die. people have relationships/connections with people there, some even have jobs that depend on the site. losing twitter would mean losing their friends, having the rebuilt connections again.” this is how i feel about Cohost.
most of us here are fortunate that our experience is that positive, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows for everyone. i’ve heard about racist trolls harassing people; and remember the whole Alyaza thing? (do you know AriaSalvatrice literally came back to shit on Cohost one last time? i don’t like her but you can’t deny how funny that post was.) for some of these cases, i felt like it was their fault, that they’re the kind of people who cannot have a civil discussion, the kind i would block/mute for the sake of my mental health. now that cohost is ending, i feel like it’s a shame that their experience were that negative.
people have a lot of things to say about how staff ran the site. personally, my criticism comes down to them sticking too close to their ideals. they really should have allowed community contributions, maybe community moderators, etc. i genuinely thought that, at the very least, they would open source the site and transfer it to the community, but unfortunately the mysterious benefactor owns the source code.
maybe i’m not leftist enough to see ASSC’s vision. i’ve internalised that it’s impossible to be sustainable without being evil. i believed the only way to Have Nice Things is to work on some open source software in your free time, relying on some giant company for a living. cohost’s shutdown isn’t helping me be more optimistic.
even taking all of that into account, it’ll be disingenuous to say Cohost is a failure. there is a minority of Cohost critics like that and it annoys me. Cohost succeeded at being a social media far more peaceful and healthier than most. it’s disingenuous to only focus on Cohost’s failure as a business and ignore its accomplishments.
you know who else talked about Cohost that way? ASSC’s very own Colin. in contrast to us who knew ASSC for Cohost, from his perspective, Cohost is a project from ASSC, build on two bad decisions that ultimately doomed them, along with ASSC’s ambitious plans. if it wasn’t for those mistakes, we wouldn’t be here, but maybe ASSC could have been sustainable.
being active on Cohost made me take everything for granted. Shel’s eulogy and retrospective did a really good job at summarizing why Cohost was so great, far better job than I ever could. If there’s a Cohost dickriding competition i would definitely participate, but i would have no chance of winning.
when i first discovered cohost, there was a honeymoon phase where it felt like the best place ever. at the time, i was a twitter addict, where i kept coming back to a site that’s guaranteed to made me feel uncomfortable. on the other hand, Cohost was completely drama free for the first few months. there was also a few months when I got much less active, but I got back to Cohost after making it a PWA on my phone.
going back in time even more, before all of that, I wasted my teenage years being an r/pewdiepiesubmissions kid. I’ve always been a lurker, like how my parents use Facebook. I took everything at face value. I absorbed opinions like a sponge. I upvoted things without knowing the consequences. I thought Ben Shapiro was cool. I had the audacity to make fun of Instagram normies. I joked about PewDiePie killing memes without knowing it was about me. I was the closest thing to an NPC, and i’ve been trying to fix that ever since.
Cohost coincided with my diploma years, a period of time where I was growing up and trying to feel like a real person. and it did become the first social media where i felt like a proper user. i dunno, forming an opinion entirely on your own? do you know saying the wrong things will piss off people, and they can even block you? most surprisingly, people actually give a shit about me. I was surprised that there were people reaching out on discord. thanks, i guess.
it’s not like Cohost changed my life or anything. my life would have been the same without Cohost, albeit much lonelier. I’ll associate Cohost with that period of life. I wish it did change my life though. I wish I interacted with people more. I wish I was more friends than mutuals to someone. Maybe it’s not too late to start now.
speaking of the future - over the past few weeks, i realised you can’t just Replicate Cohost. you can’t recreate the exact same feed on some other social since everyone uses different socials, while some people just aren’t on anywhere else (how did these people even discover Cohost?) (Bluesky seems to be the most popular place to migrate to). don’t get me started on the lack of long form posting on most places, companies being weird about adult creators, etc. and how are you supposed to get in touch with people with discord DMs?? All this talk is making me feel sad.
at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. most social media relationships are fleeting anyway. i was following everyone at any platform possible as an attempt to preserve something, then fall out of love on my own, organically. but i’ve already partially failed at this. i can’t really keep up with every single platform. BUT i’ve preserved a few things. better than nothing, i guess.
lastly, pls listen to this Porter Robinson song. it’s really good and thematically fitting here i promise.
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