What made cohost for us wasn't the site, it was the folks we met here.
The site itself was slow and buggy, and lacked a lot of quality-of-life features, and had a lot of intentional design choices that really ruined what the experience could've been. I know there's only so much they could do with a few people, but the degree at which they were unwilling (or unable? I can't recall) to accept any volunteer work definitely hurt them. I know, they made a website and we didn't, but at the same time, I've found time to both design and implement over a dozen custom ux/ui features for said website over the past 8 months while cycling between full-time work and school, while cohost's vanilla featureset has remained...largely the same.
It's so unfortunate that cohost ended up having such a culture of being hostile to newcomers and outsiders because it cropped up at such an opportune moment where both twitter and tumblr were constantly seeing a mass outflux of users. Even jae admitted that a lot of the site's problems came from outside users not fitting in with cohost's culture; and that's a TERRIBLE thing on COHOST's part. Ironically, between moderation shortcomings, and having established a core userbase during the closed beta that had a very strong idea of what kind of social media it was and who should be able to use it, cohost became the very thing it sought to avoid: the perfect site for large-scale harassment.
Sure, no website is perfect, but at its worst, cohost felt worse than even tumblr when it came to racism and transmisogyny. It's a miracle we even ended up staying here after February of this year. So many trans women moving to cohost because of tumblr transmisogyny were immediately faced with the exact same hate when arriving here, and even though that seemed to mostly disappear after a few weeks, it's always left a sour taste in our mouth. Even aside from the obvious bad actors, there was a very clear sense of "you don't belong here" coming from long-time users, and that same unspoken feeling always reared its ugly head whenever some marginalised group of users found themselves in the crosshairs of the site's Global Discourse Feed™. Even the missing step policy, regardless of what it was intended for, felt a little dubious to us as someone who has time and time again seen trans people and people of colour kicked out of social spaces on grounds of "being an asshole" for daring to raise their voices against waves of hate speech.
Part of the reason stuff like the website league is just so...utterly unappealing to us (aside from being inaccessible from a design basis) is because it wants to be cohost. But cohost was just tumblr with an HTML post editor, antisocial design, and a lack of quality of life features. You don't want cohost, you want a niche online club to hang out with users that share your same tastes and make long-form posts. You just want a forum. Additionally, speaking as someone who does have the privilege of knowing how to code; social media sites catered only to people who know how to code are fucking insufferable.
The fifth website, whatever it shall be, shouldn't be another cohost. We've seen a lot of back and forth on whether cohost failed financially or not (the answer there is pretty obvious), but ultimately, we think it failed as a social experience. That isn't to say nobody had fun. Even we had fun here! But it wasn't because of the site's design, it was in spite of it. When thinking over it, the highs of our experiences here weren't the site's ingrained culture, or the in-jokes, or even the css crimes. It was because of the folks that were outsiders here, and still managed to make it a home despite all that.
We personally aren't shedding any tears over cohost, but we fully understand friends being sad over having to leave. Leaving tumblr was a sad moment for us, even if it was during the most stressful period of our life and tumblr had wronged us in so many ways. Writing a goodbye on tumblr was something we did out of sadness, anger and frustration. On cohost...it's just a feeling of disappointment for what this place could have been if it had fostered a better culture or encouraged more social interaction. There are so many folks from elsewhere that I never knew were on cohost until we scraped the entire site and just happened to catch their username amidst a list of tens of thousands. We'll always be grateful for the connections we did make, and the folks we already knew that we grew closer to here.
We aren't closing our account before the site goes read-only- it would be hypocritical of us, considering we've already scraped the public side of the site ourselves. But this is still goodbye from us.
Regards,
Lyra Lunarii, on behalf of April, Cassiopeia, Raven, Zinnia, CB, and September Lunarii
I got really lucky that my experience with cohost was completely positive, I'll say this.
I've heard stories from many people who had terrible experiences that drove them away from here. And it makes me really think of that being the biggest failure of the site.
I wish more people could have been comfortable here, I wish so many people didn't feel that "unwelcoming" feeling, because to me, the site was great, and I wish it could have been great for those people who left. It's genuinely upsetting to hear of some of the actions that led to them leaving. Especially the racism and transmisogyny, some people really REALLY failed to make this place accommodating.