Behemous

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What if a mouse was like 14ft tall


staff
@staff

hi everyone, we wanted to provide some details on read-only mode, data exports, and how to keep track of what’s going on with us.

read-only mode

cohost will enter read-only mode tomorrow, October 1, at some time in the morning UTC-4 (US Eastern Time). it will be october 1 everywhere in the world when this occurs, so don’t stress too much about the timing; if your clock reads September 30 then you can still post.

in read-only mode, cohost will look and function about the same as it does now. the dashboard, profiles, tag feeds, bookmarked tag feed, search, comments, and pretty much everything else will still function. you will not be able to make new posts, edit or delete existing posts, like posts, follow, unfollow, block, or silence users, edit your profile, or do any other action that would involve changing cohost. due to a bug, account deletions may not be available until after we have processed all data exports.

read-only mode is not a different website; it uses the read-only permission we’ve had in place since the beginning as a moderation tool. it’s still the same cohost, you just can’t post on it.


data exports

we will begin processing data exports after the site goes read-only. all users will receive a data export. you do not need to request one. we expect the process to take a few days, potentially longer if issues arise. if there are any serious delays, we will post on this account (more details on that below).

you will receive an e-mail once your export is available to download. exports will be available for download through the end of the year.

unfortunately, the generator to make a browsable/rehostable version of your data will not be ready in time for read-only mode, and we do not want to delay data exports for it to be ready. we will be open sourcing the tool we use to make this export this week; this includes the open source post renderer. we assume other users will also create tools that are able to act on your export.

to be completely clear: the data export you receive will not include a browsable version of your posts, but will include all the data you’d need to make one.

the find your friends page will be in your data export, although it is admittedly pretty barebones (just an unstyled html file and a data file that you can do whatever with). it includes a list of all pages you followed along with their main URL and any additional information they included in their contact card. we recommend that all users make sure this information is up to date today. if you do not want this information to be in any public archives, make sure you set your contact card links to “logged-in users only”; the exports will include these links but any public archive will not.

open sourcing cohost

we have not yet made any decisions regarding if we will or will not be open sourcing cohost after the site shuts down. we intend to open source individual components (such as the post renderer, as mentioned above). we will post any changes to our plans here.

keeping track of updates

we will not make @staff read-only so that we have a centralized place to post any updates through shutdown. we recommend you add @staff to your RSS reader if you have one (you should be able to just add https://cohost.org/staff to any reader made in the last 20-odd years). we will also crosspost updates to the fediverse at @cohost@mastodon.social and bluesky at @staff.cohost.org. we will not be using these pages for anything else.

thank you for having used cohost

the outpouring of support over the last few weeks is beyond anything we could have expected. we’ve had more than a few ugly cries over some of the tributes we’ve seen.

when we launched cohost, we never could have expected the sort of impact it would have on so many people. 227k users (the final count) is small compared to most social media, but still a huge group.

thank you for being here. thank you for having used cohost.

be well, and safe travels. we’ll see you around. :eggbug:


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in reply to @staff's post:

Sending you love today. It is so hard to do fucking anything in this world, let alone try to do something good and new. Day after day, you built something that brought a lot of people a great deal of joy. Hard to do better than that.

as much as I'm sad to lose cohost, I'm grateful y'all don't have to keep running it, I'm sure it's been a hard few years. thanks again for everything, I'll be keeping a beats clock on my computers as a memorial lmao

Thank you for making Cohost. @staff

This site has been an amazing experience and I have met some great people along the way who I will still stay in contact even after we lose this site. I hope y'all are able to find work again sometime soon and can continue y'alls interests.

Here's to y'all and whatever next best thing hits the net~ ☕:eggbug:

Thank you, Cohost crew, for making such a special place in all of our hearts.
And I look forward to the open sourcing of the elements you’ve mentioned. This site has rekindled both my interest in both the internet as a place of self-expression and websites as a form of creative design. I hope I can at least take something away from all of this and use the parts of this site available to the public to make something of my own.

Wish I could’ve done more to support you guys. Take care.

Thank you for everything, thank you for crafting a little slice of piece and quiet. Wish all staff good luck in the coming months, enjoy this winter and have a lovely new year when it comes.

Thank you, @staff, for making Cohost.
This place I think has reminded us that we can do and want better for ourselves, that we are the place we make, and with this knowledge out in the open, now it can't go back inside the box.
Cohost was a success.
Thank you again for all your hard work, I wish you luck going forward.
Eggbug forever.
:eggbug:💜

y'all made something truly special and i hope you recognize that. carry that kindness in your heart for the rest of your days, and i hope that we all may be blessed by cohost's vision in the future. the internet does not have to be a miserable, hateful place if we don't want it to be. :eggbug-heart-sob:

thank you so much for all the work you did to make this site exist. y’all were deal a bad rigged hand at the end but the beauty of cohost has shone through this last month.

thank you from the bottom of my heart. :eggbug-heart-sob::eggbug-heart-sob:

i think here is where i learned that the internet, wide and lonely as it was... it didn't have to be. i found both joy and heartache through this site and the people on it, and i'll always bring that with me.

thank you for making a place where that could happen.

we were here
roaming on the endless prairie
writing an endless story
building a walden of our own
we were here
grieving the saddened faces
conquering the darkest places
time to rest now and to finish the show
and become the music, one with alpenglow

Thank you all for creating and maintaining and being a part of this space. It's come to mean a lot to me in a surprisingly short time. Like anything, it was imperfect and temporary. But I feel that it did a lot of good in the online world, and I hope we all get to see and take part in the ripple effect of that good propagating to other spaces in the coming years.

Thank you for making cohost, it has been a wonderful site and I wish more of my friends had come here as well. Love the unique features you all came up with. Wishing all the best to the team in the future!

Thank you so much Cohost staff for everything you did! I wish I had been able to experience more of this site while it was up, but even from the little time I got to spend here, checking in occasionally, it already had a very different feeling to anything else out there. Like taking the best of old internet and merging it with all the conveniences of current internet, and adding so much more to it all. Thank you!

Cohost has meant the world to me 😌

I had a twitter for a long while, even after the Musk takeover, and the general sentiment there was like people wishing for a meteor to hit the Earth because it deserved it. That place felt nihilistic in the sense that for the users to stay in touch with their friends, and the creators to have large enough audiences to succeed, they needed to remain there and become progressively more miserable. Damned by widespread adoption of the platform when it wasn't so bad, which then slowly, and later rapidly, sunk into the fetid morass it's now known to be.

Here I'm scrolling through the comments on this post, and the thoughtful eulogies on my timeline, and there is no such sentiment. No "Long-Time Nuclear Waste Warning Message" memes. Cohost was a success. It was a success that was not allowed to continue being, in no small part because of how things are weighted to keep failures operating forever, and successes limping along at best.

Cohost had its flaws, some sizable and glaring, but attempts were made to remedy them. Meanwhile, forever failsites have dismantled moderation and handed as much of it over to mindless, nuanceless automated systems as possible. Attempts made there to encourage those same problems.

Cohost was a success. You can see it in so many users posting about not wanting to go back to anywhere else. Thank you all 🙇‍♀️ Please be proud of your success.