cohost. A website. And herein dwell all manner of creatures. Many are friendly. Many are hungry. Some are dangerous. Some few may, I have it on good authority, be milked.
This guide assembles what is known of these various beasts, so that all may learn from the chosts and rebugs of those who have come before. And of course, as further scholarship is performed, this index of chosting creatures (or "chokédex," if you will) can be revised and expanded.
So, without further ado:
It took considerably more work than I expected, but I have completed my off-site reconstruction of De Historia choscium, my original doing-severals effortpost from an era when I was only just settling in and was following enough people to piece things together for myself.
Folks have reached out about my plans for this post, and I've given a lot of thought (too much, surely) to the right balance to strike for its long-term archival form. I know some folks will want to link back to this from off-site, while others will want merely to know, in some vague way, that it's somewhere. At the same time, as part of the effort to ensure that the document no longer has any dependencies on assets that will stop being available, I've redirected links to user handles as much as possible to the public "find me here" locations that folks have made available. I want to make clear that I don't mind redacting any such information upon request. I would like this archival page to be a place a person can go to remind themselves of the times they had, and not something that would be a liability to anyone.
Looking back on cohost as an experiment, I have been reflecting a lot on the differing functions of jokes vs. in-jokes. As I note in my new preface, I originally drafted my bestiary because new users were asking to be let in on the joke, and existing users often could not find the posts that acted as the joke's inciting incident. A lot of the site's lore was, in effect, a whisper network of rumors. If the site was to grow, I thought, if its community was going to have some kind of coherent site culture, then word of mouth was not going to cut it. People needed to be able to find answers.
The most important feature of the bestiary, in my opinion, was that it was a non-reply post full of tags, on a site whose design ensured, for better and for worse, that interactions between users were buried almost as fast as they occurred. So much of the best stuff that happened here arose from the site's yes-and culture of reply-posting, but tags at the time kept everything happening in those reposts in the dark. For example, this post is the oldest post surfaced by Search when someone tries to find out what #post hog is all about, and since publishing it, I've seen no further confusion about who Post Hog is.
If this bestiary helped you when you were new here, I would love (selfishly, I'll admit) to hear about it. But more than that, I encourage folks to think about what shared knowledge looks like as we all go on with our lives beyond this place. Think about the in-jokes you recognize in my humble document, and then think also about the reflections you've probably seen over the last week in which people say saying "Wow, I never even knew that happened" about some joke, or some thread, or some scandal.
The history of a place is not an archive, it's not an accounting ledger. It's a story that it takes work to write. When that history is complicated and has high stakes, it also takes work to read. I hope this silly little history was helpful, and can still serve some small role. I hope other histories, other retrospectives, also survive the site's eventual sunsetting. I share this to celebrate the good times, but above all I do not want to forget. For my part, I will continue to try to do better than, "You had to have been there."
