We have made it to the final stage of cohost.
Lots of smug people on other social media--the people I left those sites to get away from--have been gloating about how cohost was a failure because it couldn't keep itself financially sustainable. It is true that cohost was unsuccessful in this important aspect. It's also telling that they, as people who chose not to be customers, are thinking of cohost primarily as a business--about what it was to its founders, not what it was to its users. This is an astounding perspective from people who have built personal brands and amassed thousands of followers on being anticapitalists. Just look at those MAUs. Look at those growth metrics, those engagement numbers. No no no, you have no idea what you're doing, that's no way to run a hot new web startup. You'll never go IPO that way, you'll never be the next Twitter, the next Tumblr.
Cohost, as a business and as a sustainable project, is indeed a failure. But cohost, as an idea and the embodiment of a manifesto, is not a failure at all. It has been, in fact, a resounding success.
The central thesis of cohost, the design and engineering philosophy that has emerged from ASSC's manifesto, is that the love of virality is the root of all evil. Social media professionals balked at the hiding of follower counts and like counts, at the deliberate omission of a global feed, at the reliance of user-selected tags for discoverability, because growth and clout are central to how they think of social media, as a game where the goal is to score as high on the metrics as possible and convert that attention into profit, fame, or political power. You can't use cohost effectively as a marketing tool. You can't use it to get the word out, wage wars of ideas, slander or exonerate people, amass power and influence in any meaningful way. (You can't really use it effectively to sell things in general, which I guess was its Achilles heel.) It is not for the people who exploit social media for a living one way or another, its userbase forever an untapped market. It defies being used that way, by design, on purpose.
Cohost has been the first and only social media site in decades to be exclusively for its users, a site where the user experience was the single greatest priority, and where posters and readers were the customers, not the product. You go on cohost to write things--they could be a few lines long, they could be fifteen pages--and to read them. There is no algorithm constantly pushing you to engage more, to produce more content, to drive those metrics up. There are no grand delusions of empire building or mass propaganda or microcelebrity, of replacing journalism or connecting people or fundamentally changing how people interact with each other. It's just a collection of things someone cared enough about to show the world, at their own pace, consumed by people who went looking for it, at their own pace. If someone pisses you off on cohost--and this has happened to me plenty of times--it's usually because you went out of your way to find them, and can just as easily cut them off, complex social dynamics be damned. The site's sole purpose is the real reason we're all consuming text on the internet, which everyone these days now takes for granted: we want interesting things to read.
Cohost has been very good for this. All the little experiments in taking the other stuff away, the absence of metrics, the deliberately finite scroll, the chronological feed, the aggressive privacy toolset, the flexible content moderation policy--they succeeded at the goal of making the user experience less stressful. It has been genuinely enjoyable to read and write on cohost in a way that other sites are not, because cohost has avoided making compromises to people within its ecosystem who are not its users. I don't have to scroll through three pages of ads, influencer reels, suggested users, and stolen viral content farms I don't follow to find out what my favorite VN reviewer thinks of the new Tokimeki Memorial game, like I do on Facebook. I don't have to cut down a lot of complicated thoughts on politics or culture into 240 characters, like I do on Twitter or Mastodon, or even less, on Instagram, only to have some ragebaiting rando pop into my comments smugly pointing out some small detail I didn't have space to comment on or respond to. I am not pressured to conserve time writing because people here are not pressured to conserve time reading, and I don't care (and often don't even know) if five people have read my post or five hundred. Three paragraphs feels far too long to read on Facebook but ten pages go by in a breeze here, and I can step away for a week and feel like I missed nothing.
There are tradeoffs. Cohost is not a place to find community; I have not developed any sort of personal relationship whatsoever with mutuals who I did not know previously. The userbase is, as critics have rightfully pointed out, homogenous to the point of stereotype. The site is not a good place to promote anything, or find work, or fight a revolution. It is not well suited, for all its CSS-crimes flexibility, for sharing anything but text. If you do write something that goes cohost's equivalent of viral, in which your notification bell is stuck at 99+ for weeks--something that's happened to me a few times--there really isn't any way to make it benefit you.
And yet. Those aspects have always been the upsell, not the draw. Nowhere since the golden age of blogging have I taken so much pleasure, or had so much thought provoked, by the miracle of seeing the thoughts of strangers through a computer. Everything social media has done since the early naughts has diluted that. But each post I read on cohost, no matter how stupid or silly or upsetting, has had the purity of listening to a drunken stranger ramble over a drink at a bar. I have learned about so many little things through my follows--ballpoint pens, electronics repair, work culture in foreign countries, personal quests for nonbinary gender identity--that matter less to me than learning how somebody out there feels about those things, about what they mean to them, in a way that I'd never get from the engagement bait of an influencer video or the flippant brevity of a meme image or tweet. People communicate their own humanity here, at a depth I only ever see anymore in face to face conversation. We took that for granted for so long, on this internet. I missed that.
Reddit is a lynch mob. TikTok aspires to be an infinite quick-dopamine machine. Facebook is an ailing advertising marketplace, the dead mall where all your friends used to hang out. Tumblr is a high school cafeteria over where cliques of adolescent adults project their anxieties about the real world onto other people. Twitter, once a toy, is now a weapon--not repurposed as one, not useful as one, but a weapon as its primary purpose; I quit soon after I saw people I thought I respected screenshotting on Facebook that viral tweet about how Elon was robbing non-billionaires of the means by which they could speak truth to power. (Let's strip away that Marxist framing, putting aside whether or not billionaires deserve it or whether most of the people who get bullied by randos on Twitter are billionaires, and be honest about what it really implies: everyone on that site now broadly takes for granted that the whole point of Twitter is to hurt other people, an entire profession has arisen around doing it for any political ideology that will pay them, and that one user and tens of thousands of retweeters have been emboldened by the dynamics of propaganda on that site to the point where they feel entitled to that means of political violence without repercussion. It's why when somebody tries to sell me on Threads or Bluesky or even late Mastodon as a place where posters can be free to be Twitter without Elon, I just stare at them blankly and tell them I wish they hadn't told me that, because now I respect them just a little less as a person.)
Cohost is, on purpose, not any of those things. Cohost hasn't lost the plot by being obsessed with dreaming bigger. Cohost has become optimized for sharing not content, but thoughts--long ones, short ones, in depth ones, shallow ones, stupid ones, smart ones. The experiment in improving control over the quality of shared thoughts in your feed by eliminating features from the platform that increase the reach of shared thoughts produced the intended result. In the end, if you joined this site a year or more ago and are still here now, you're probably not here because it's just where your friends went, or because it's the battleground for a culture war, or because you're so mad about drama on other social media that you'd be emotionally attached to any alternative. You're here because you read some damn good posts. And if you're like me, you're sad that you won't be able to read posts like them anymore, because nowhere else on the internet really facilitates that.
Cohost won. It didn't fail because of its allergy to the engine of virality at the core of every other social media site's business model, it survived for this long with such an active and enthusiastic userbase because of it. The site quit when it was ahead, beloved by its niche audience, near the peak of its popularity, as functional as it will ever be. It never suffered the slow, humiliating rot of LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook, with ever more burdensome advertising features gradually driving away all its users. It never succumbed to enshittification. It was never cannibalized by vulture capitalists, or purchased by a state-owned company primarily interested in surveillance or propaganda, or absorbed into a huge tech corporation as part of its empire-building project and slowly atrophied to nothing, or acquired by a billionaire primarily interested in controlling the conversation around himself. It was true to its values to the end, its active, loyal, and mostly satisfied userbase well prepared for shutdown and bidding fond farewells with cartoon eggbugs and Love Honk and CSS crimes. It is meeting a far better fate than all the old websites it once made us nostalgic for, which seldom gave us as much as an end date, or the closure of a real goodbye. If we consider that all things on the internet are ephemeral, cohost had a really good run.
I'll be frank with you: while it was part of the initial draw of cohost for me, unlike other users writing epitaphs, I do not give a rat's ass about the Old Internet anymore. For all the time I spent there I remember how toxic LiveJournal could be, how vicious and cruel MySpace often was, how delusionally groupthinky and insular Wordpress blogs and their comment sections could become. They were the product of a much smaller, less inclusive, more elitist internet culture that is never coming back--and seeing the monsters it has produced, all the new media hipsters and the 4chan edgelords and the movement grifters, the Kiwifarms harassers and the Macedonian troll farms and the cult of the mass shooter, good fucking riddance. I've said goodbye to those sites and those people long ago and it's no skin off my back having to do it again. What I am going to miss is being invited to peek into the head of someone I'll never meet and never know, as a complex human being and not a brand or a demographic, with the frankness of someone who has too little at stake to be dishonest. There just isn't anywhere else, right now.
So where can you find me, instead? What's the alternative?
Maybe you won't. Maybe there isn't one. How used to the status quo are we, that we expect someone owes the internet a personal public presence, exposed to abuse? From promoting my work on social media I've received death threats in person, I've had people impersonate me on Twitter, I have on multiple occasions been confronted IRL at conventions by idiots expecting to find that I'm someone other than I really am. I've seen people cook up crazy Pepe Silvia conspiracy theories about me based on half a dozen Google hits. I've had one person demand on one social media site that I unblock him on another so he can argue with me, as is, apparently, his Zuckerberg-given right as a social media user. Why would I put up with this? Why does anybody?
The question cohost and only cohost has never bothered to ask me, by design, is who the fuck are you? I'm at a stage in my life and career where I understand I no longer owe the internet an answer. And neither do you.
If we're friends, you already know where to find me. My cohost migration strategy is touching grass. I've resolved to spend less time on social media and more time talking to people in person, and I'm really looking forward to better understanding where people are coming from, at a level of depth nearly impossible online. I have already been making new friends close enough to have a drink with, and new enemies who can only taunt me within melee range. If we're not friends, maybe we'll see each other again the next time some brave idealist tries to tear down everything awful about social media and start over. Maybe you won't know it's me. And maybe it's better that way.
