also the August 2024 financial update, but I’m trying not to bury the lede.

Hi everyone,

We have come to the decision to cease operations of cohost and anti software software club due to lack of funding and burnout. As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor¹; all of our money in the bank, and any money coming in from people who buy our merch or don’t cancel cohost plus, is going towards servers and operations — paying the bills so we can turn the lights off with as little disruption as possible.

cohost will become read-only on Tuesday, October 1st. At this time, we will make best-effort attempts to keep the servers online through the end of 2024.

Development focus has immediately shifted to data export. We have offered minimal data export for GDPR compliance for a while now, but this is a barebones system that doesn’t meet our quality standards. We will be improving this system over the next few weeks and will issue full data exports for all users when the site goes read-only. We will continue to offer downloads of your data export through the end of the read-only period.

When the read-only period concludes, we will delete all of your data from our servers without a backup. Even now we want to reiterate that we think “data brokerage” and other common practices of the software industry are inimical to who we are as people, and we would never consider selling your data to others or asserting any rights to stuff you posted under any circumstance.

Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

1. on that note, we’re looking for new jobs. we’ll each be posting about that bit individually.

Info

I'm not affiliated/partnered with cohost itself or its devs, but as you might know from this post alone, it's coming to a conclusion.

I know that the main purpose of me joining Cohost was because of the Twitter backlash, which I've been contemplating about ever since—and I haven't been that active on here since my fall college semester started. Nevertheless, it was a good run while it lasted.

Where to Find Me

I'm mostly using Bluesky over Cohost now that someone invited me to it, but you can find me on any of my socials provided on my website: https://focalflare.carrd.co

One Last Leave

It's sad to see Cohost shut down, but all good things come to an end, and that's an inevitable concept. Hopefully, Cohost may come back better than what it once was, but until then, this will officially be my last post.

Goodbye.

Focal Flare
Owner of FCL ART & FCL AUDIO. Creator of RCIT, NIFT, and The PIX.

Please read.

The Natural Intelligence Experience

After making the fan-made Wireframe logo for Paper Skies's "Wireframe" LP out now on Pilot--which I haven't exported yet, I decided to make one in a similar style for my W3_4R3_HUM4N image set.

TAPE_4

What Was

Thanks @kilobytekiwami for suggesting alt text. Never thought about adding as it didn't click in time.

1. In order to find out who you were, you must figure out and memorize who you weren't.
2. What used to be part of the general reality is now in your own reality and done from the general reality. Only you can see these things as nobody else has access to them.
3. Within reality, you get from A to B, but you don't get from A to be in legitimate ways.
   You use undiscovered and odd occurrences and events to pierce through the entire fabric of reality and into odd and eerie areas of geometry called "liminal spaces".
   These areas could lead to new passages within the general reality every being has yet to see for themselves.

Losing Focus

What Was has became part of my collaboration with Grego. See the rest of the collection here:

Yes I made 4 covers for one remix lmfao

Fun fact: 3 and 4 both use the Anonymous Downlink render.