So, last week, Cohost announced they were shutting down.

And we're still processing that.

It felt somewhat inevitable with months of transparent financial updates indicating just how far they were in the red, propped up by a single angel investor - but no one outside of the involved staff could have predicted when.

And there is a profound sadness in a way that there wasn't necessarily when we (mostly) left Twitter.

Cohost encouraged a lot of people to be better, in a way. A lot of people took their first tentative steps into editing Markdown, HTML and CSS as a result of it; to make their posts truly their own at a time most social media encourages similarity and stagnation [1].

The combination of using CSS for talksprites, as well as the ability to have separate pages with their own timelines, made the site the most plural friendly we've seen.

Things displaying exactly as intended led to a culture of bringing back Geocities style 88x31 buttons; displayed at native resolution when every other site would stretch them. Some people had forum style signatures attached to every post. Sometimes you'd scroll over and see a surprise custom cursor.

And a lot of people are now running scared with no home to post their longform work; some are going to Dreamwidth, some are going to Bluesky some are going back to Tumblr, some have made personal websites, some are going to stick to Discord [2]. RSS can help keep track of a lot of these (and indeed is something we're going to have to rely on as people spread out again)... but all of them have tradeoffs for creativity vs. convenience in a way Cohost mostly didn't.

A personal website offers ultimate creative potential, but at the cost of either having to maintain static site generation or an actual CMS - and makes it more difficult to know if someone has liked or linked what you wrote - particularly, if like us, you'd rather die than add any form of analytics. It can be possible to bring in comments from Fediverse instances or use the Webmentions API or the like, but it isn't as simple.

Us

This site exists in response to Cohost, specifically that it's difficult to give VRChat tutorials when limited to the default 4 photos [3]. It exists because Cohost once again gave me the urge to play with CSS again, to relearn what we'd forgotten.

And it existed in concert with Cohost as well. This site isn't exactly depersonalized, but it is at least generally pseudonymous; our primary fursonas and forms aren't featured, leaving at least a little digging required to link it back to us, leaving personal posts and projects almost entirely for Cohost.

And we need to figure how we want to handle that going forwards, particularly with wanting to switch to this as our primary email domain at some point rather than the .space we're currently using - which means potential employers also taking a look. A lot of friends seem to have done alright with having everything out there, but I'm just... anxious. The other avenue might be a separate blog over on other website where it might be more appropriate, but that might mean more hassle in other ways.

And a lot of the things we do are reactive. (Including this post). We can go on for ages but a lot of the more tutorial or philosophical notes are because something someone else wrote sparked something. And even with following RSS feeds and maintaining contact with friends via Discord, that's less likely to happen, just as it became a little less likely to happen after mostly leaving Twitter.

N. Tropy

Entropy is, ironically, the one constant. Everything on the Internet will go away eventually, whether naturally like this, or because a big company has decided to cut a line item on their budget in the name of pushing people to their streaming service .

I cannot even remotely pretend everything was perfect with Cohost. A very small staff means an even smaller moderation team, and that combined with the focus on privacy and timeline curation unfortunately allowed for some incredibly vile shit to happen that the rest of the site basically couldn't see until the frustrated yells of the people being harassed finally got enough traction to break into other filter bubbles - if the people being harassed didn't just give up and leave the site. It fucking sucks, and it is not our place to say what measures could have been put in place to avoid it.

But for many others, it provided a glimpse of what social media could look like with more user control, more collaboration (whether from the Artist Alley classified ads, or the constant sharing of CSS tips and resources), impossible to traditionally monetize.

And right now, I don't see how that gets replicated on today's Internet at this kind of (small) scale, rather than a return to isolated personal islands. But I suppose we'll see.

For now...

A hastily edited screenshot of the scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) where the dolphins leave Earth, with eggbugs pasted over the dolphins
So long, and thanks for all the chosts.

Footnotes

  1. Writing this a couple of days after Bluesky delivered video in an update... but also cropped all vertical art. ↩︎

  2. I'd advise against this one if you make any sort of informative content that would benefit a wider audience than just your server. ↩︎

  3. There were ways around this - either by submitting a post as a draft or by hotlinking to another site - but I felt like both of these would be kind of fragile for maintaining links. ↩︎