the end of cohost

20240930

i.

i didn’t expect to feel this bad on the day. i hadn’t written anything about cohost’s disappearance because like, while it made me sad, it’s just a website, yknow? i stayed up last night until the site went read only at 6AM PST. it wasn’t entirely because of cohost, i’ve been having trouble sleeping in general, but it was partly because of cohost. i kind of wanted my final post to be something special, but i couldn’t decide on anything. at the last moment, i posted “who the fuck is scraeming ‘LOG OFF’ at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off.” i scrolled the timeline and saw the most recent reblog of blackle’s final css crime. i hit the button. i went to sleep. in the morning, i thought of a good post in the shower and realized i’d never be able to make it. writing this i feel like crying but i’m in a room full of other people and i don’t want them to know i’m crying over a damn website.

ii.

social media, as we knew it, is over. cohost and bluesky and mastodon have shown me that people simply do not want it anymore. cohost was the best possible version of social media, and it was still a total mess than immiserated the people who ran it. when they announced the site’s closure for financial reasons, i was sort of grateful because i had been worried since the site launched that it would eventually implode for more embarrassing reasons. cohost did a lot to avoid the “so you hate waffles?” problem, by restricting the spread of decontexualized posts, but it’s inherent to the format of social media. all of my friends heartfelt cohost eulogy posts got comments from overly aggressive weirdos mad that the post did not encompass their specific life experiences. at the end of the day, people have flocked to instagram, tiktok, and youtube because it lets them just relax and be an audience again. posting on twitter, or indeed cohost, was to live in constant fear that something you said would be taken out of context and made the focus of a harassament campaign. most people just don’t want attention badly enough to put up with that.

iii.

the thing that we lose with the end of social media is the fine art of Posting. there is a specific act of context-free joke making that is possible on social media that is impossible in a group chat, or on a forum or blog. i didn’t realize just how much i would miss it until i spent all day thinking of good jokes and realizing i had nowhere to post them. when i think about social media, i oftne think about the “likes” mechanic in death stranding. in a lesser game, this would be a banksy-esque tedious commentary on how instead of food kids these days eat likes. instead, it is astonishingly earnest, a mechanical commentary on how social media has made it possible to quietly reward someone for doing something you liked. i don’t think it’s sad or that my brain is fried because i liked it when i posted a stupid image edit and woke up to a notification that over a hundred people thought that it was funny.

iv.

in the waning hours of cohost, i saw so many panicked people trying to figure out a way to save the place they loved. i don’t personally think there’s any real negative consequences to releasing the source code of cohost, but also it doesn’t matter. cohost was a frontend to a database and some S3 storage. without each and every one of us, what mattered is gone.

v.

i really cannot stress this enough: if your concept of cohost is that it failed because of some moronic error the staff made and you think they fumbled a free $200k/yr or something, fuck you. you have literally no idea what you are talking about. if you think staff paying themselves a living wage to build the site is somehow bourgeois, fuck you. fuck every single person cheerleading cohost’s death, fuck every single person who mocked and chronicled the site’s “drama”, fuck every single person who decided to go around telling people that the everyone on cohost was a racist transmisogynist pedophile based on your misinterpretation of hearsay.

vi.

when i saw the read only message pop up at 6AM PST, lying in my bed with the sun coming up, the first thing i thought of was the porter robinson song everything goes on. it’s so embarrassing to think of a song that is about the actual death of a person when your favorite website shuts down, and doubly embarrassing when that song is a promotional tie-in for league of legends. but it’s how i thought of it.

And when I’m better, we’ll do everything / I gotta stop making promises I can’t keep