I mean it's still the best word to use here, right?
Like, there's:
- Cohost (website/structure/UI)
- Cohost (Staff of the organization running said website and people with an immediate influence on them)
- Cohost (userbase)
- Cohost (for lack of a better term social space we are all participating in, at the current moment)
And given that there have been a lot of posts discussing all four across days, but what people like me were reacting to was the generalizations about the latter two that were irritating a lot of us, there's this constant obliteration of framing repeating itself again and again.
Whoever mentioned the parable of the elephants and the blind men had it on the money. I had this whole post typed out about power dynamics and the ways that all these contexts are interacting with each other, that they push and pull and none of them really exist in a vacuum, but it was way too long and a waste of time. Different people keep raising different issues or trying to talk about trends and we end up with reactionary feedback loops whenever a post leaves a certain group or vagueposting gets boosted from misunderstanding. Thinking that anything I had to say was going to get heard in the noise, much less heard as intended was naïve of me. "Cohost" is much more than any of those specifics, yet people keep getting tunnel vision on specific ones. The parable of the eggbug and the take-posters. Maybe it's just me but this seems like a textbook case for the term.