One last little thought I want to rush out the door. Don't mistake this for me saying "Cohost was always doomed to fail", what I mean is that part of the site's appeal was that no matter how many people you followed, you would eventually run out of new posts. I followed a ton of people, very active people who made their own posts and who reposted other people's posts frequently, and I don't think it ever took me much longer than 20 minutes to catch up on a full day's feed activity. After I'd done that, I'd have to... go do other things. I'd have to either go to a different website or get up out of bed and start my day.
I think remembering this is going to be useful, going forward. Cohost, for me, was a destination, an institution, somewhere I loved coming filled with people and things I enjoyed, but it was never where I LIVED, y'know? And I think a lot of different spaces have the potential to become that for a lot of different people.
Put a different way, I think it's imperative for us to recognize the distinction between "websites as tools that can be used to share and communicate" and "websites as load-bearing pillars of our identities and happiness". That doesn't mean "don't enjoy or invest in anything because it might go away some day" - that mindset was what kept a lot of people from enjoying Cohost to its fullest potential, after all. It means that things are always changing, all the time. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. I know those sound like platitudes but the fucked-up thing about platitudes is sometimes they're correct.
I really can't bring myself to be a doomer about The Dire State Of The Web when a tiny site like this one produced so much beauty and joy in so little a time. To me, that speaks to a vast wellspring of human expression, creativity, inventiveness, and community that Cohost only tapped a few driblets of. Cohost managed to be a better place than a lot of the web through a lot of hard work and some smart design choices, but slick web design and a robust codebase aren't what made the site fun to be on. If the web weren't full of smart, interesting, funny people, Cohost wouldn't have collected so many of them. There's no reason there can't be another place, or places, that are as good or better than Cohost. Things are always changing.
