invertigo hayfever on cohost

I decided to share this one among the various cohost retrospectives I've seen because it was the first one that mirrored my own thoughts on the website. There have been a few others since, but this was the first (it's taken me a while to work on this post). It's maybe a bit more forceful in its language than I might have chosen but I broadly agree with the sentiment -- and my thoughts on writing would support leading with a provocative statement to get everyone's attention, and then explain out the nuance in the rest of the post anyway.

(minor edit: if you saw this post earlier you might have seen a bit about the typical Atlantic contributor that someone pointed out to me was worded ambiguously. note the footnote.)

And the fact that this is the dissenting, less-common opinion on the site, and I broadly agree with it drives my desire to post: because my perspective doesn't seem aligned with most of the site, I feel obligated to share it.

Plus, I think trying to be too nice about the sites in its last days would be counter-productive. Even at the times when the site's financial future was known to be tenuous at best, I've never felt too compelled to post my own appeals for people to join Cohost Plus; there's something about trying to advertise a site to its own users that feels a little scummy to me even if the site isn't burdened by the worst excesses of capitalism.

I similarly don't want to make a retrospective of this site sound like hagiography; ignoring ways that this site didn't measure up to its ideals is probably going to stunt the growth of the next community that tries an experiment like this.

This is not meant to be a gloating "I told you all so!" post. I'm as frustrated as anyone about this, not only because I've invested a fair bit of time in posting on here, but also because it means the site's culture won't have that opportunity for growth! I would have much rather seen this site find a way to become better. I was also subscribed to Cohost+, though I rarely spent my time advertising it on here, partly because it seems gauche to advertise a service to the people who are already using it, and even more because a lot of my timeline was people seeking financial assistance. Shilling the site to what seems like an audience of people barely making ends meet, or failing, felt less like it would be a noble defense of a shared home than a massive, catastrophic failure to read the room.

I mean, there's also not that much to "I told you so" about anyway. This site has been extremely transparent about its finances and especially since the main plan for monetization fell through has been pretty obviously not sustainable. I've been posting for a while with the expectation that this site wouldn't be able to last long-term, which is a shame. That the site will still be usable for two weeks, given that its operation has been running on fumes for a while, is more shocking for how long it'll last. I've been prepared for the site to finally close for a while. That said, with how dire the financials are and the other factors (major illness, existentially-threatening politics) that have affected the staff during this site's tenure, I'm not terribly keen to actually reflect the human cost of managing this shutdown; I'm sure I'd find it horrifying, and I see no value in being smug about someone else's sacrifices, especially when it has meant something to so many people.

No, what I do want to do is compare Cohost to a few other internet communities I've been part of in the past, and while will probably do a lot to help explain why I've been less rosy about this site than a lot of the other people whose accounts you've read on the website, and I think that I should probably lead with the one that felt to me most like how people here have described cohost.

It was a Facebook group. Yes, really.

Well, I should be clear -- it didn't start as a Facebook group. This was actually a blog comment section. Specifically, for the Atlantic. I will give you a moment to collectively roll your eyes before I explain.

Like, this was not The Atlantic at large, but specifically the general comment section of Ta-Nehisi Coates's writing, where his voice as a Black man during the Obama presidency was vital and meant that at least some of the site was readable. I had stumbled upon TNC's posts by way of the now-defunct scienceblogs blog hub. I had a small selection of bloggers I followed regularly, doing stuff like medical crankery debunking, explaining new papers, and talking about things like gender and racial equity in science and academia. I recall the blogger DrugMonkey being one whose words stuck with me, and while I think one of the specific blogs I read that stuck with me -- one about understanding that a (sub)community that's made up primarily or exclusively white people isn't a natural phenomenon but one that's been socially constructed by someone (not necessarily someone in that community, mind you) -- probably has been lost to time, you can get a feeling for the kinds of articles, like this one and this one that are reflective of how I examine these issues, and a major catalyst for my interest in sociology. This was as I was leaving high school to enter college to study physics, so actually paying attention to the human element of scientific research was relevant to me. It was pretty easy to slot TNC into my blogroll as the stuff he wrote about -- Black justice, the history of racial inequality in America, and the inescapable affects of slavery on America -- was definitely relevant to this, and became all the more so on the cusp of the Obama presidency.

TNC obviously didn't fit the profile of the average writer at The Atlantic, the kind of guy that you were probably thinking about as I invited you to roll your eyes: you know, middle aged, white guy, libertarian-leaning, deeply invested in framing their own transphobia as a serious concern¹. David Brooks, Conor Friersdorf, Andrew Sullivan (whose probably greatest contribution to the cultural discourse at large is actually giving Coates that gig at the Atlantic), fuckin Jesse Singal (whose name brings me to a particularly nasty groan these days). This meant that the kinds of readers he brought to the site wound up being a broader, less blindspotted community than the wider Atlantic, and this of course included the comment section on posts. Blogs at the time regularly would just have posts to foster free discussion among their comment sections, and I think out of all the ones I participated in or observed, the one for TNC tended to be the most insightful (tied, I am sure, to the more diverse audience) and most varied in its interests.

Of course, Coates didn't blog for the Atlantic forever, spending more time on long-form writing, and disqus, the service that enabled the blog comment sections was notoriously inconsistent, so at some point the more prominent members of the commentary section set up a facebook group. It facilitated wider discussion of relevant issues, other blogs, and both long and short-form writing and fostering a major community.

During the later years of the Obama presidency as racial violence became more pronounced and more open it was a deeply vital resource to making sense of the . It was also a community that was good at providing advice for more practical and immediate issues -- questions like "is this still safe to eat" (usually 'the dates on packaging are inherently conservative -- does it look or smell weird?') or "why is this part of my house making this noise?" A community that did a lot to help make sense of all parts of the world. I consider myself deeply privileged to have been part of it, and the connections I made there also helped make it easier for me to find and connect with minority perspectives on other parts of social media like so-called Black Twitter.

There are a number of ways that I think this community was set up to be ideal. Beingclosed, it meant that there was basically no threat of drive-by harrassment. Members were vetted by the moderation team, recruiting people who'd already been part of the more public comment section; if you couldn't behave yourself in public you weren't going to be part of the group. Being a Facebook group meant that everything everyone posted would be visible, so nobody was doing stuff getting buried in obscurity; participation was never obligated but just about every post got some attention. This group was also closed and private, which meant that external harrassment wasn't an issue -- the community could be trusted. It was also right around 150 members, which is a soft maximum on how many people a community can have without anybody being strangers. Indeed, this was my experience: everybody knew everybody, everybody was invested in the health of the group, and thus everybody wanted everyone else in the group to flourish as much as possible. It was quite possibly the largest, continually active, and socially supportive group I've been a part of on the internet.

And also, I want to be clear, that compared to most of the internet spaces I've been on that it was pretty Black. This shouldn't be surprising given who TNC is, but there were a lot more active Black participants there that I saw compared to almost any other internet community, at least as a proportion to the size of the community. Thus, this was a community with a lot of knowledge to share that was often outside of my active knowledge or experience. Being in a community like this is engaging and refreshing, though I suspect that I don't need to elaborate on this much, as it's close to how I've seen a lot of other people describe their relationship to cohost.

Though if I compare this to cohost, I feel like the attention issue really does come up and hurt its impact in how I related to it: here, it seems like getting over 20 people to actually see a post would be a miracle, even if I can't say with confidence. A lot of the site's design has been to limit discoverability and obscure this information. While that means I can't make any guarantees, I would struggle to believe my long-form posts (yes, sigh, including this one) are getting that many views. There's no evidence to support such a statement (at least for anything I've posted here longer than a paragraph), and plenty of reasons to believe otherwise.

That's fine; I'm certainly not entitled to an audience, but it's another reason why my long-form posting here hasn't been very consistent. My general suspicion has been that the juice of having content for people to read hasn't been worth the squeeze of putting my ideas down in a form where they can be parsed by other people. I don't do this for myself, exactly; I already know I feel about things. I write stuff for it to be read. Without that guarantee my desire to participate is massively reduced. While, obviously, people did read my posts, it's hard to believe my own voice has been particularly vital or necessary on here.

But this also ties to my specific background not really meshing with that of the wider community here. I'm a cishet white guy. I'm not a furry (and, echoing a post I read from @shel several months ago, don't think I could ever see myself calling myself one -- I'd link it here but I don't expect to be able to find it, as I rarely bookmark specific posts, and it would be ponderous to try to find amidst my likes or reposts, if I even reposted it). I've largely written off the possibility of making a career out of my creative work -- there's simply no money in music any more. Cohost was a place that I could post my music and write about it, but so was the now-defunct 8bitcollective and its immediate successor ucollective (microcollective) -- and has convinced me that there's no point in trying to get supplemental income from it. The audience is small, and everyone in it has money better spent elsewhere.

Like, if you were here to make/share/appreciate furry porn then this is probably the only half-decent general purpose social network site to do that. If that's what you got out of it then I can see why something that seems much harder to replace has been lost. But for me it was just...there.

I'd also like to compare cohost to a few other communities I've been a part of, in hopes of gaining more insight into the nature of this site as a platform.

I joined Mastodon very close to when it started. October of 2016 was a major mental health upswing for me compared to most of that year as it's when I was able to move from academia into a new job and so had a much less unstable financial future. The election of Trump was awful, as it was not portentious to my then-fiancee, who was still living in Mexico, being able to expediently come here to get married, but I could take a clean break to the parts of my life that had become most toxic. As a result I had new opportunities to join new communities -- and there it was, an alternative to Twitter with an approach to moderation that was obviously massively better. I joined on, and indeed made friends with a lot of cool people on there, and connected with at least a few of the people who would become ASSC; if they weren't people I'd had prior relationships with I probably wouldn't have paid attention to the launch of this site, and thus I probably wouldn't have joined. My experience there was valuable, though the site had obvious cultural problems.

Mastodon, as a series of independent social network servers that are able to interconnect to facilitate group discussions, strikes me as a suburbanization of social media. These communities may have some valid reasons to flee toxicity of mainstream, larger social media, but the communities being smaller and more insular means that it's much easier to shut off discussions of justice the moment they become inconvenient or uncomfortable for its participants. Lest I be misconstrued, I don't think Mastodon exists or was designed to facilitate/perpetuate racism, but that its communities definitely appeal to people who would prefer to avoid the issues rather than address them, and thus its infrastructure does perpetuate racism.

I fell away from it, not necessarily as a result of any specific moderation issue, but first because the service was, having been built on gnu social, been identified as torrent traffic by workplace IT, cutting into my ability to participate with any of the communities. Conflicts tied to inter-instance moderation sapped my will to continue to participate, and while I've been off-and-on there from time to time (my last posts on there are about a year old!) I wasn't as active as I was for the first year or so.

Knowing that this site's origins were at least partly tied to Mastodon and knowing how Mastodon struggled to address issues of racial iniquity among its participants I came in here with an expectation that these problems could, and if not actively pushed against, likely would manifest on here. I'm not terribly happy coming away from this site having seen that play out, but I'll try to take some comfort in thinking that, however little a part I've played in doing so, I've helped form community focused on pushing back against that. And, yes, looking internet social media as a whole, cohost is better at this than a lot of other communities, but that's not a great comfort for people who had to bear the brunt of racial harassment on this site, nor could it absolve anyone of the responsibility to do better.

If you would like to continue that dynamic, it is much easier than you think. I suspect that many people here won't feel comfortable setting up a private Facebook group, not only because of Facebook's association with mainstreaming odious political discourse, but also because of the restrictions on identity representation that Facebook has, but it's not the only option. There are plenty of free and commercial off-the-shelf forum options out there. Among free options, the one I've seen used the most is Discourse, while most sites that used to use software like vbulletin or phpforum have moved onto Xenforo, which has cloud hosting for $60 a month at their most basic plan or can be self-hosted for $200 a year (so if you know 5 other people who paid for Cohost Plus, you might be able to instead shift that money over to running your own forum). With decent privacy management, you too can have a webforum that fosters community discussions over analytics maximization.

That's the thing -- this whole time I've been participating in closed internet communities! The forums of yesteryear aren't all dead, and they haven't been. The old talking time forums as founded by (but now independent from) video game historian Jeremy Parish are still up! I used to do a lot of longer-form posting there because the forum was well-suited to my interest in long-form posting about Sonic stages. It's closed down now and probably isn't as suitable a home for that sort of posting, but I still hang out there, and it still definitely has a tight community and, since it's a forum, is built for participatory discussion. Nobody cares about numbers, because that's not why people are there. Yes, it's small and insular (you probably won't get much from signing up for it), but that's also the kind of culture that this site was designed around, trying to be an insular blogging platform.

What cohost gave to me was neither unique in the moment nor unprecedented in my history of using the internet. I will move on, and almost certainly find other communities that are like it, and possibly better -- and ones that I'll have joined due to people I've connected with on here. I've already joined a forum or two and some discord groups from people I've met or reconnected with here. Another stepping stone on a journey to...somewhere, eventually; the grave, at least.

I am glad to find that people found this site a balm in an otherwise hostile world, but I certainly didn't. Hearing people I followed on here talk about having panic attacks due to targeted harassment and a lack of moderator action makes this...like most of the internet, in my experience. In some ways worse because the walled gardens of this website made it harder for people to connect based on their shared experiences and act in solidarity against that harassment! And I think the problem of this harassment easily getting buried in the wider culture of the site is borne out because from what I've seen right now, almost nobody is talking about it! I think that sucks, and it worries me that, per what I was saying above, that the people most positioned to try to follow up from this site's experimentation with social dynamics are going to have some massive blind spots about it, and make many of the same mistakes, possibly worse.

Making communities small and hard to find doesn't end virality -- things will be more popular than others based on the shared culture of active users. Making communities small and hard to find doesn't end harassment -- even if the site doesn't collate posts that chuds will take offense at, they can still compile them into documents or posts somewhere else; they can still organize to target people elsehwere. Making communities small and hard to find can make this easier for a moderation team to take action against, but that requires a proactive approach that a site with this specific scale was very ill-equipped to deal with.

And to be clear, I certainly don't begrudge the team at ASSC given their struggles. I would have no desire to manage a platform or its struggles knowing full well it would not last the coming months, and if I were in charge I probably wouldn't be keeping this site open until October. A big site with a small team working full-time (for what I'm sure wasn't enough money by the end of it; posts kvetching that the team were overpaid were wrong, period) is always going to be a struggle. When the main plans fell through, months ago, I think this site's fate was sealed. I see the funding issue as tied pretty closely to those moderation struggles as a result; a team of only four people had to build, maintain, and moderate the site with dwindling cash reserves and no good long-term plan. Being proactive in those circumstances is basically impossible. Right now I'm just relieved that it looks like everyone's getting out alive.

Ultimately, "Platforms aren't your friends" and "Hm, maybe I'll start using this platform my friends built" aren't ideas in contention.

Certainly I don't hate the site, but I simply don't think many of its distinctive features have been borne out to be as revolutionary as they have been sold as by some of this site's members. Still, I am, ultimately, glad that many people that I would hope to call 'friends' in some respect found value, community, and some kinds of intellectual and emotional peace here. I wish I could have shared in it the way you all did.

Those of you familiar with the career trajectory of former Atlantic contributor Jesse Singal will have probably understood what I meant by this, but the original version of this essay said "deeply invested in framing transphobia as a serious concern" here; I've rewritten this to better express what I mean -- transphobia as a cultural force is something to be concerned about, but a lot of the people who have written for the Atlantic in recent memory are transphobic concern trolls. The respectable institution equivalent of "but I'm just deeply invested in the safety of women" despite the fact that they also are pretty misogynist.

Lariria

@Ligana5

in reply to @the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi's post: