in light of much discussion about the ways the internet has changed: be mindful of reactionary inclinations blooming within you. things might have gotten worse, but that doesnt mean the way things used to be was all that great either.

listen. club penguin had microtransactions for children in 2005. geocities stuck a stupid ass watermark on everyones sites and then blew itself up. if you think startups raising a bajillion dollars before earning even a cent of profit and then tanking is a recent affliction, i hate to burst your dotcom bubble, but um, look up the dotcom bubble? lol

i have been the 1 millionth visitor all my life. the internet has always been a bit shit. its ok. we can make a better internet without returning to the past.

and I feel like I'm so alone on this fifteen hour drive...

And all the while I tell myself to just believe
'Cuz nobody can give so much
And never get anything...
(Never! Get! Any! Thing!)

Everyone I used to know says they don't know what I've become,
But I'm still the same, not much has changed, I still know where I came fro-o-om...

I fell asleep with the lights o-on,
And I can see that you're the first one in a long time, that had some faith in me-eh-ee,
(Have! Faith! In! Me!)

Tell my friends we won't be long
The Flor'da sun begs me to come back home
And it feels like I'm ready for anything
If you can wait for me

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.

(This full version is replicated below since there's a lot of linkbacks to folks here: I tried my best to capture their new homes, if any.)

I've really loved my time on cohost.

I was never too attached to Tumblr or Twitter, but I love cohost very much. Lots of people here seem to share similar ideas around online degrowth. Degrowth as it pertains to economics is a critique on capitalism. Simply put, focus on economic growth causes ecological damage and is unnecessary to human wellness.

Online degrowth, whether that's through personal sites, smallweb, indieweb, the Fediverse—seems to be picking up similar criticisms of the sheer amount of capitalist garbage that gets in between us.

Some of us are artists, tired of the constant pressure to have an audience or produce content that drives us to be miserable while hanging desperately on to tips, monthly subscribers and GoFundMe campaigns to cover basic expenses.

Some of us are alternative folks online who are tired of being so reachable in this online age we want to disconnect—but doing so means we'll be socially alone, because we're the only person we know in our town who is queer/trans/furry/kinky/poly/etc.

Screw the numbers, fuck the algorithm, I want to actually connect.

And connect I have. In fact, here's some connections I made on cohost that made a difference in my—and other people's lives. (in no particular order)

• Thanks to @ldx, I learned about bitsy. I made a paper template for people to hand-draw their own sprites and and co-built a bitsy game with the 35+ participants of our GGJ Tokyo site.
• I also made a bitsy game for my best friend's birthday to tell them how much I love them.
• Also thanks to @ldx, @Internet-Janitor, the creator of Decker, and @liananana, the creator of Narrat, I learned about indie engines and did a showcase of bitsy, Narrat and Decker. I built a little tarot-reading Decker prototype that's still unpublished. You can see the showcase on YouTube.
• Thanks to @highimpactsex's review, I played and cried my eyes out playing 1000x RESIST. It sparked some very tearful and heartfelt conversations between @mabbees and I on the Hong Kong riots, our own families and personal generational trauma.
• Thanks to @melinoe, they connected me with some other queer indie game cooperatives and got their advice for starting Studio Terranova.
• Thanks to @renkotsuban, I was introduced to so many great games from Japanese devs—and got in trouble with our rabbits when I started clapping along to their Nice Gear Games livestream.
• Thanks to @whatnames and Game Dev Galaxy, I not only found out about an all transmasc dating sim, I learned about the Neo-Twiny Jam and made a little game about glassblowing.
• When I made the Interface Drama Master List I only knew what had been inside my own head. It was thanks to @morayati and @ianmichael I got some more long-term perspectives on interactive fiction and how it has played in this space for longer than I realized. Anytime someone sent me an ask about interface dramas, it inspires me to keep working on the list.
• Thanks to @wavebeem, @MeItsMe and everyone who sent me asks on my birthday. Over my birthday I was negotiating a very contentious client contract, and thinking about literally anything else helped me relax.
• Thanks to @geometric who let me play their Playdate at an event, @mabbees bought me one for my birthday. I fucking love this console. I take it everywhere. And I'm planning on building something in Pulp soon.

To everyone above, and many others, thank you. You inspired me, gave me different ways of looking at the world, and enriched my life. I hope I could do the same for you.

Not everyone has had the same life-enriching experiences. Thinking about this has got me thinking about what the next version of cohost might be...and how we can prevent it from becoming the echo chamber we escaped from.

In @alyaza's post Cohost So White: A Comprehensive Record of the Matters of Race on Cohost.org, they catalogue cohost users dismissing racial discourse like this:

“well it's not technically accurate so it's not really a problem (so stop talking about it)”

We're not done with conversations about race—in fact, I don't think we've even properly touched it as a community.

To bring it back to degrowth, degrowth is coupled with anti-colonialist and feminist movements. Many institutions have dismissed the idea of shifting from valuing individual wealth and comfort to community care and collective action as a personal attack or attack on progress. "We've industrialized and cured so many illnesses," the argument goes, "why would you criticize something that brought so much goodness to others?"

From “The Future is Degrowth,”

"Any criticism of the present is equated to the dismissal of the advances we have made. 'If you don't like it, go live somewhere else.' This argument is the last resort of those who aim to preserve the status quo."

I believe we can reflect on the great parts of cohost and not shy away from the fact this site that preserved a white and ableist status quo that caused many people of color to shy away or leave the community. Avoiding these conversations has no place in the online future I wish to be a part of.

I hope it is a bright one. One that makes space for community AND collective action. One that allows for discussion and conflict, and nuance and love.

Thanks again to everyone who I've had the pleasure of meeting on cohost, even if you're going offline to live off the grid with your witch boifriend and never come back online. For those of you who are online, link me your websites/blogs, and your itch.io pages.

Shine on you crazy diamonds.

Yours truly,
CJ

Incidentally, if you're on a platform where you can reasonably install cohost.py and you can responsibly vet an internet rando's python3 script before running it on your machine, you can use this to dump the text of all posts from a specific Cohost page of yours to individual files in the current working directory, named in the pattern postID_whenposted.md

I have made Choices in order to preserve some out-of-band information: post headline, CWs, and tags. I make no attempt to retrieve anything except text; archiving posted images is outside my use case.

#!/usr/bin/python3

from pathlib import Path
from cohost.models.user import User
from cohost.models.post import Post
from sys import exit


cookie = '' # copy-paste from web browser devtools as per https://github.com/valknight/Cohost.py#retrieving-your-cookie 
projectName = 'caffeinatedOtter' # or whatever your @pagename is

try:
	user = User.loginWithCookie(cookie)
	project = user.getProject(projectName)
except:
	exit('Cohost login failed!')

here = Path.cwd()
page = 0
while True:
	postlist = project.getPosts(page)
	if len(postlist) > 0:
		page = page + 1
		for post in postlist:
			md = post.plainTextBody
			if len(post.contentWarnings) > 0:
				cwList = '\n'.join(post.contentWarnings)
				md = f"<!-- CWs:\n{cwList}\n-->\n{md}"
			if len(post.tags) > 0:
				tagList = '\n'.join(post.tags)
				md = f"<!-- tags:\n{tagList}\n-->\n{md}"
			if len(post.headline) > 0:
				md = f"# {post.headline} <!-- Cohost headline -->\n\n{md}"
			if len(md) > 0:
				filename = here / f"{post.postId}_{post.publishedAt}.md"
				filename.write_text(md)
	else:
		print('Done.')
		exit(0)

I've been interested in exporting my cohost data, because, to be frank, I'm not sure how much longer it's going to be around.

The above script works pretty well, but not flawlessly on my Windows machine. In particular, the files couldn't be created (because they included ":", a valid character for eg Linux but not Windows), and there were exceptions around certain characters, so I updated the file to be UTF-8 and these went away.

After following the instructions around inserting the cookie and specifying the username, I was able to get all my posts and tuck them away in my cloud storage.

Back up your posts. Your future self will thank yourself.

#!/usr/bin/python3

from pathlib import Path
from cohost.models.user import User
from cohost.models.post import Post
from sys import exit

# This script was tweaked by me, but originally by caffeinatedOtter.
# See:
# https://cohost.org/caffeinatedOtter/post/5064344-incidentally-if-you

cookie = 'INSERTYOURCOOKIEHERE' # copy-paste from web browser devtools as per https://github.com/valknight/Cohost.py#retrieving-your-cookie 
projectName = 'YOURUSERNAMEHERE' # or whatever your @pagename is

try:
	user = User.loginWithCookie(cookie)
	project = user.getProject(projectName)
except:
	exit('Cohost login failed!')

here = Path.cwd()
page = 0
while True:
	postlist = project.getPosts(page)
	if len(postlist) > 0:
		page = page + 1
		for post in postlist:
			md = post.plainTextBody
			if len(post.contentWarnings) > 0:
				cwList = '\n'.join(post.contentWarnings)
				md = f"<!-- CWs:\n{cwList}\n-->\n{md}"
			if len(post.tags) > 0:
				tagList = '\n'.join(post.tags)
				md = f"<!-- tags:\n{tagList}\n-->\n{md}"
			if len(post.headline) > 0:
				md = f"# {post.headline} <!-- Cohost headline -->\n\n{md}"
			if len(md) > 0:
				# jcd's modifications below:
				filename = f"{post.postId}_{post.publishedAt}.md"
				filename = filename.replace(':', '')

				with open(filename, "w", encoding="utf8") as f:
					f.write(md)

	else:
		print('Done.')
		exit(0)

When I was a kid we had 5.25" floppies and when I was a teenager 3.5" disks were common, and then there was the mass exodus to zip drives, CD-Rs, USB keys, etc. The problem back then was that storage was expensive, and disks would fail, or you'd lose them, and then years later you'd look back and see that so much of what you did, almost everything, actually, was just gone.

I'm not as prolific as some people, but I make a lot of stuff. I've been writing since I was a teenager, coding since I was 14, and I kept a journal online back when you had to do all the updates by hand in the HTML. I wrote a lot of bad poems, a lot of angsty journal entries (as one does at seventeen).

I wish I had all of it, but the truth is I have far less than I'd like. In the early 00s I ended up deleting all my HTML journal entries for reasons I won't get into here, but just to say which spooked me, and which I consider pretty serious. The only reason I have most of them today is because the Wayback machine crawled my sites and saved snapshots of most of the files. I don't have everything (there are missing months, and, tantalizingly, my second roguelike), but I have most of it, and I'm thankful that I do. I'm grateful that the Wayback machine has archives of it. It's a snapshot of an era of my life and being able to go back to it, to see what I was thinking about, worrying about, overreacting about, is incredibly valuable. My younger self was immature, anxious, full of himself. He'd been hurt so bad. At one point, he was barely hanging on. I love him so much, and I wish I had written more, saved more than the incomplete set of files I have.

After the thing that spooked me I wrote more and more in my LiveJournal, in friends-only or private. I saved all this a few years ago too. But that's it: all the other forums, all the stuff I wrote as a teenager, my earlier, broken attempts at roguelikes in Pascal and then C - it's all gone, probably sitting fragmented under a pile of garbage in a landfill in southern Saskatchewan.

We live in an era of cheap and easy online storage. Make a private repo at GitHub. Copy your files to Google Drive, to Dropbox, to One Drive, wherever. But copy them. Because having gone through this myself, over and over and over, I'm here to tell you it never seems important, but if you want to ever come back to it later, you have to save it now.

In the last couple years, going back over my stuff, I got reminded of how one of the horn players in the SSO gave my name to the Okanagan Symphony when they were looking for horn players (!). There was the fall I was moony over C. and V. offered to call her up, email her, anything, just give her some contact info, she'd do it for me (<3). A guestbook message out of the ether from someone in my past who'd hurt me, to say sorry, and which I'd saved in a private LJ entry. And so many other examples, most of which I'd never remember if I hadn't written them down and saved them elsewhere.

As you get older, things recede further and further into the rearview, and it gets harder and harder to remember. It's funny how that works. I used to think I had a good memory, that I had a quick recall. And maybe I did, at one point. We're all cleverest when we're in our late teens, early twenties. Mm, but the truth is, when you're young, everything's happened to you recently. And once it hasn't, it's amazing how quickly things slip.

This is a long post, and I think it may be one of my last cohost posts, though I don't know for sure. cohost's existence always felt pretty tenuous, and the March update didn't help things any. I'm glad Artist's Alley is helping? But it feels like holding a bake sale to try to stop the sale of the local professional sports team. Given that, given the tiny staff and the site's sort of intentionally stunted appeal, it doesn't feel like cohost'll be here much longer. But I've still been here, I guess, for a year and a half. I came here with maybe four or five other writers I knew from Twitter, and I was the only one who stuck.

A year and a half is a long time. It doesn't feel like much, doesn't feel like I've posted that much, or too often, but reviewing my posts, well, it's not just jokey shitposts all the way down. One thing cohost did right was to give people choice as to how they use the site, whether it's closer to LiveJournal or tumblr. I chose the former, hoped more people would too. Didn't happen. Oh well. But as I possibly slip out the back door, before the bar shuts down for good, at least I'll have a record of my time here. And when the lights go off, I hope that holds true for you as well. You're important and what happens to you matters. Write it down. Save it. Your future self will thank you.