mandatory soundtrack for this post. you better be playing this while you read.
when @uber (love ya, hun - i'll see you soon <3) first told me about cohost in our matrix dms, around the time of the mass twitter exodus, i was pretty on the fence about it. back then, i had never really engaged with social media - discord and matrix were the only places i was really active, and "instant messaging" and "social media" seem like two distinct categories of things - in my mind, at least. i used instagram and snapchat very lightly during high school, since it's where my friends were, and i used to lurk reddit a bit, but that's all. i was never on facebook (and never will be - even if i try to make an account there it seems to just get instantly terminated for some reason), my twitter account was always an empty stub, and i never really cared for tumblr. social media was always something i thought was more trouble than it was worth, and so i never bothered to really engage with it myself.
on a whim, i decided to give cohost a spin though. the idea seemed interesting - the lack of an algorithmic timeline and post metrics seemed interesting. that might be a good way to prevent the place from becoming a constant popularity pissing contest. i've got no idea if i have anything worthwhile to post, but like... what the hell. i'll try posting, why not. if anything, maybe i'll find some interesting people here. i hear you can just straight up put html and css in your posts, too? i'm a career webdev - i'll surely have some fun with that. and so, i joined the registration queue.
fuck me, i'm so glad i did that.
the past ~2 years have been... honestly? transformative. cohost has been a peek into a type of social media, a type of online community, that i had never seen before. one that i didn't even think was possible. i'm a bit younger than the average cohost user, born sometime between Shrek (2001) and 9/11. never really got to experience forums, irc, blogs - by the time i was hitting the information superhighway, the world was well into the facebook/twitter/instagram era. and i honestly thought that was all social media ever was. all it ever could be. that was the only reference point i had. but then i saw cohost, got to experience it first hand. and over those ~2 years, i learnt about a whole new type of social media. one that's not all about popularity over everything. one that's not all about being the loudest in the room. one where you can actually make meaningful social connections.
my posting here tends to take a shitposty form. that's just the kinda person i am, really. always been a little irreverent - not to the point of being mean, but just trying not to take things too seriously, letting myself have a little fun with everything. so that's what i did here. just shitposting into the void a little. maybe someone will find my jokes funny. my dry, sarcastic sense of humour isn't for everyone, but it is for some people. i never did count the pages in the followers section but... damn, that's a lot more people than i thought would enjoy my posting than i ever thought there'd be. and that goes the other way, too - i've followed a lot more people than i ever expected i'd follow. yall are great! i was hoping i could keep my follower list manageable enough to be able to reasonably backscroll my home feed in the mornings (timezones do mean there's a lot of activity around the same time i go to bed), but that quickly became infeasible as i found more and more people that were posting stuff i liked.
all this to say - i had a great time here! i've enjoyed so many of the collective bits we've come up with. i've read so many insightful posts on topics i never even thought about. i've met so many amazing and beautiful people, many of whom i'll 100% be making plans to meet up with in the future if i haven't done so already. i plan to keep in touch with plenty of people i met here - there's a lot of you in my rss reader, and i don't intend to be a stranger in your emails if i ever think of something to say. i know i haven't shared a blog or rss feed of my own yet (i'll touch on why shortly), but there'll definitely be something on https://srxl.me one day. watch that space.
unfortunately, it's time to pack it all up now. the staff are tired, and assc is running out of cash. it's been in the back of my head for at least a year now, the thought that cohost probably doesn't have that long left. i did hope we'd have at least a little longer, but i guess it was just not meant to be. in a few hours, the last post on this website will be made, and then everything will go into the time capsule. and many of us are left wondering where to go next. some of us aren't going anywhere. some of us are going back to the trenches of platforms like x (twitter doesn't exist anymore, sorry) and bluesky, with hopes that maybe we can make them at least tolerable again. some of us are taking matters into our own hands, and building our own personal places to post, syndicating them out across each other's websites.
across all of this, i've been sensing a feeling of finality across the userbase. the sense that this is the end of cohost, that this era of posting is coming to a close. that cohost was a once-in-a-lifetime website, and that cohost was never to be long for this world. and to that sentiment, there is one thing i would like to make very clear:
no. it's not over.
if you'll allow me to get a little roman catholic for a moment (yeah, yeah, i know - can't change the environment i was raised in), there's a little deviation from the standard format of the mass that our local priest liked to use. at the end of the mass, the priest is supposed to give the parishioners a dismissal, that's usually in the vein of "go forth, the mass has ended" or something like that. i don't remember what it's supposed to be, because it's not how our priest would end masses. instead, he would say this:
The mass never ends; it must be lived. So let us go forth to love and serve the Lord. Thanks be to God. Hallelujah.
the exact wording is etched into my memory - a decade plus of weekly repetition will do that to you, i guess. but it's that line in particular that always stuck with me. "the mass never ends; it must be lived". there's a mindset, a mantra of sorts, that i developed a few years back. i don't remember exactly where it came from - my memory of times before i finished high school is quite spotty - but i'm pretty sure this was a part of it. "there's always a light". no matter what the situation is, there is always a way out of dark times. it's never that there's no way out - only that i haven't found the way out yet. it's there, it always is. i just have to find it. again, the final years of school are quite blocked out in my memories, but i'm pretty sure this mantra is - to put it bluntly - the reason i'm not currently swimming with the bikes in the yarra.
cohost never ends. cohost must be lived. the only way cohost will ever be over, will ever truly end, is if we all take nothing away from it, and forget it ever happened. what we had here does not have to end on the 1st of october. we may lose this place, specifically - but we can bring the idea, the notion, the spirit of cohost along with us, wherever we go. it's on us now, to take cohost and bring it to the places we all end up. the internet doesn't have to be like the type of social media i used to think was the only one that could exist. we've seen it work, first-hand. we know this is a thing that can exist. we've been here. and it can continue to exist, if we make the effort to keep bringing it forward with us.
this was not a perfect place. there were certainly issues, ranging from small annoyances with parts of the site ui/ux, to an overarching, pervasive whiteness within the community that was likely baked into it from the very beginning, intentional or not. i had a great time on cohost - as did many of us - but there's also many people who didn't have a great time, for who cohost wasn't the beautiful, life-changing experience it was for people like myself. while i look back on cohost with fondness and joy and love, there's some who look at it and see the same failings, the same mistakes that so many websites before us fell into. i wish we could have done better for them. i wish we didn't replicate the same dynamics that pushed them away from everywhere else.
but again - cohost only ends if we let it end. we can learn from the mistakes that were made here. we can build new communities, with the hindsight of what went wrong here, and we can avoid falling into the same pitfalls. it's not just that this isn't the end of cohost - it's the beginning of an even better cohost, a cohost that learns from the failures of the past, a cohost that isn't overwhelmingly white, a cohost that we can be even prouder to be a part of than this one.
a couple weeks ago, a post from @atomicthumbs came across my home feed, describing an idea for a new social media place. i really liked that idea - i felt like it could be viable as a "next home after cohost" for myself, and maybe even other people here too. i felt like this could be our path forward, like i might have found that light that's always there. so i planted a flag in the hopes that people would gather around it, and we could build a group that could maybe, just maybe, make this idea work.
fast forward to today and the Website League has a solid core of 29 people dedicated to making this idea a reality, with even more people pitching in additional work where they can, and still more watching hopefully from the sidelines (remember when i mentioned i don't have a blog to share yet? it's because this is where my focus is right now). to be clear, i'm not talking about this to brag about how "i started this" or whatever - i'm talking about it because to me, the Website League is proof of all the things i've been talking about in this whole post - taking cohost with us to try and build new, better places is possible, and this is just one of the forms it can take.
if there's anything i want you to take away from all of this, it's that this is not over. this might be the point where cohost shuts down, where we all split off down our own paths, but this is not the end. cohost walked so that one day, we might be able to run. our time here is coming to a close, but the time in our next places is just beginning. we just have to make it happen. and i'd like to believe that between all of us who experienced this amazing little corner of the internet, there's enough of us committed to it that we can make it happen.
i'm going to miss this place. i have so many fond memories here. i hope i was able to be a positive part of some of your memories, too. and don't forget - i don't have to stay in your memories either. my contact info is in my sidebar, and you should get a copy of it in your data export if you follow me, too. don't be scared to reach out to me at anytime about anything - i might be a fox, but i don't bite, promise. (well... okay, i do bite, but only with consent.) just like cohost, our time together doesn't have to end if we don't want it to.
this is not over. the light, showing us the path forward, is out there. the only way this ends is if we all let it end.
and i refuse to let this be where it ends. i hope you will, too.
-- ruby iris jurič
