goodbye, cohost
here are a collection of thoughts that have been swirling around my brain for the last week. I am glad cohost existed, it had a positive impact on my life which is rare for interactions I have online
given the online cultural moment that cohost emerged into, I had a feeling deep down cohost would not last very long. I wish it could have, of course, but the shutdown had an ominous feeling of when, not if. coming out of twitter, which had reigned for so long as a public town square (derogatory) of the internet and the game industry specifically, it felt like a breath of fresh air. a true next generation of social media site, designed with the knowledge of how everything was built before it. I think it says a lot that all the flash-in-the-pan attempts like hive, peach, and others that came and went in the span of a week felt both too similar and slightly too different to feel meaningful.
naturally the ongoing collapse of twitter has given motivation to try new things like cohost or go somewhere 99% identical like bluesky. cohost is special to me because the design of the site and the architecture of interaction was actually thought through, and that staff made it happen. that, to me, is a success! regardless of the when not if feeling, it happened and it was a million times a better place to be than any other large scale social media site.
i have infinitely better things to do than armchair analyze the cohost haters, but I think people perhaps caught onto that feeling that it would go away and decided to get mad at it and the people who contributed themselves anyway. why put time and effort into something that will inevitably disappear? as the digital and internet age we're in gets older, we're seeing more and more how impermanent everything really is, but cohost is not a failure because it ended. I don't think permanence is an inherent virtue.
my personal life had some extreme ups and downs during cohost tenure. now that i'm here at the end of cohost, I feel sad but not heartbroken. everything ends sooner or later. it feels foolish to isolate yourself from something that will end to avoid the pain of having to move on. adapting yourself to a new situation in life is painful, but doing it and helping others to do it is one of the most rewarding things one can do. so I will move on