A delightful creature
Today’s the last day we can post to the site. We only know it’s going read only on the 1st of October “at some time in the morning UTC-4 (US Eastern Time)” so I’m going to assume that’s 2024-10-01 00:00 UTC (so 1 AM my time) for myself for the sake of actually putting in the final post, so I best do it. When they get a site export going I’ll probably yoink the posts I like that I made and cross post them here on my personal site, like I did with the Tumblr posts. Thankfully 2 years is a lot less stuff to sieve through unlike Tumblr so I will honestly have the time and energy to preserve more.
Cohost was a unique experience in today’s bland corporate washed internet. The fediverse spinning up with the ActivityPub protocol and various Mastodon instances (some literally with only the webmaster running it to act as their own personal island!) started to recapture a bit of what the internet was like before social media became very heavily corporate and clean. Of course this was also part of Cohost’s downfall, in the modern internet while running a social network and the sheer storage and bandwidth costs for that type of venture is genuinely not really something that is even remotely sustainable without capital I Investors to inject regular cash, there was no way Cohost+ or the Artist Ally ads would ever cover the full costs without massively downscaling what the site was and I think most people knew that, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. I certainly realised that when the site effectively ran a roulette where it felt like I only had a 1 in 10 chance of being able to load the site let alone post but the final announcement still fucking sucked. (Amusingly, the staff’s “end of posting” post is completely inaccessible for me so this post may never even show up on my Cohost)
The site’s freedom for “CSS Crimes” as they got tagged, for unfettered nonsense like Tumblr used to be, while also keeping the more modern CW system in place like Mastodoon and similar sites was fantastic. It really recaptured that late 00s feel when I posted on Tumblr, when we’d just post our silly little posts on our silly little mini-blogs (Tumblr’s not really “micro” like Twitter was so I’ll use “mini”) and generally not really care about self censoring to stop The Algorithm or Shadow Bans. Should people have taken care over sensitive topics? Yeah absolutely, that’s what I used fucking “read more”s for when it wasn’t just a long ass post.
In some ways this did make the site daunting because I couldn’t do funny CSS things, but I just went “yeah but that isn’t why I used Tumblr” and used it how I liked. Perhaps a little too much in the early days as it would distract me a lot. But it also meant I had a good place to see the funny creatures I like in my computer screen without worrying that some stupid fucking keyword algorithm has decided “no actually, they’re bad for saying ‘KILL’ once”. Mastodon and Bluesky are also currently not algorithm’d like this either, despite the misconceptions people have about Bluesky because they dared to call user feeds (as in feeds users can create) “algorithms”.
The site I took part of, as you needed to build up your own experience in the end (whoa, imagine that! Like social media used to be), allowed me to actually follow people I care about or found interesting again! But in a longer format than you get on Mastodon, it was great seeing people being able to interject posts with images within the text instead of at the bottom or deliberately threading it.
But sadly, all good things come to an end, as saddening as it is, this would be the… 6th? time I’ve had to deal with this now. The contingency was that I just made a post containing all my links, but since 2018, well, this site exists so I just link my own links page. Plus hell, I’ve been DarkOverord for almost 20 years so so long as you literally copy my username, or remember there’s no L if typing manually, you get me.
Via private browsing, so theoretically should be pretty accurate for me.
So I’ll be around, and now I am working on an actual “links to other people” type page like we used to. But for now, I at least made fun web buttons. I’ll talk more about it in a later, long site update post but for now. (One update you may have noticed is that I have, perhaps foolishly, allowed comments now)
So long Cohost, thanks for the fun
I also made some little buttons that I’ll talk about more in the other site update post I’m doing. They’re simple and not what I’m gonna talk about mostly. A small gif and a static ver ‘cus we’re all collecting them now like pins.
