Anyway, this is all just furthering my feeling that the era of social media as we knew it is over.
With Twitter still dying (active users down 30% in the last year!), I've seen more and more discussion of where everyone's going - but what I'm seeing is that most users aren't. The numbers don't line up; more people are quitting twitter than are joining Bluesky or Mastodon or anything else. Which is what makes me think the era of participatory social media is ending.
This isn't just because of twitter dying. I remember reading in Garbage Day a year or two back that Twitter was seeing active posting go down in the early days of the pandemic. People kept using group DMs, but stopped posting. And as much as Adam Mosseri's "people aren't posting, they're just sharing links in group chats" comment has to do with the site culture he built, it's the same phenomenon - many normal people pulled back from posting like they would have before. Meanwhile, the fastest growing things were TikTok and Youtube, which have a highly stratified audience/creator relationship that's more like traditional media, and Discord and Telegram, which are non-public facing social media.
There are people like us who post, who need to post to survive. But it seems like for a lot of people they're simply losing interest, or are happy to settle into a more passive relationship where they "consume content" but don't post.
I was thinking earlier about how the value of Cohost, in part, was that it's a space where I didn't feel pressured to post. Like, it's a user culture and UX where 'your silence speaks volumes' was always a joke and only a joke. I always felt comfortable not commenting on the discourse or news of the day if I didn't think I had something to add.
This in contrast to the microblogging platforms where people absolutely will constantly quote-tweet some piece of news or some chunk of discourse just to add "this sucks!" or whatever. Cohost allowed for silence which just turned the signal to noise way up; if someone was posting it was typically for a good reason.
I also note the phenomenon of people who posted a lot on other platforms, came here, and became lurkers on Cohost. I think some people don't actually need to post, or don't need to post so much, and once the pressure is removed (either through platform design or just a 'break' that makes them quit the old platforms), they stop.
If cohost is to be the last breath of social media as we know it, let the best thing about it be the lesson for any future websites.
You always had control over your notifications
You always had control over what you see in your feed
You always had control over whether to react or not (because you weren't constantly incentivized by numbers going up)
Yes, the site culture that emerged was natural, but it's extremely important to remember that a new user signing on cohost finds their notifications off by default, no default accounts until they go looking for tags or people or friends to follow, and no numbers beyond X comments on each post; and it is small and not prominent, fulfilling its purpose of information instead of being a score counter.
The culture we built here was guided by the system. Cohost is built with the intention to be respectful of your choices
Was it perfect in every way? No, but there's something to be said about intent in design. This more than anything is what the modern internet abuses the most. All major social media platforms exploit and abuse engagement, creating people who simply Can't Stop Posting and forming parasocial relationships and addictions.
Those are the people who quote tweet, those are the reply guys, those are the people who just can't stop talking; and that's the sort of people that says insane bullshit like "Your silence speaks volumes." Refusing to engage is anathema when you're an addict; so naturally, how can anything happen in good faith? How can you post anything BUT engagement bait, BUT the angriest takes, BUT the shit that polarizes people the most, in pursuit of the almighty engagement?
Have I ever felt addicted to cohost? Yes, but it was natural and entirely my own fault. I got addicted to checking this webbed site out because it is good-old-fashioned good and because I liked it that much, and I suspect this is also the case for many if not most users.
It wasn't built to clamp down on my lizard brain; only to put a little eggbug in my mind, and so it did.
