so cool to meet all y'all :) this is what i recorded at the meetup, i hope y'all like!
transcript below the fold
love honk sultry keys start playing
"hi, i'm august kline. i was @kline on cohost. it's september 29th, 2024, and today i was
at the boston area cohost meetup! this is a little microcassette audio collage of me going
around to people and asking what cohost meant to them. it was really special meeting people in person who i only knew as like online profiles, so thank you to everyone who gave your voice to this little project. i just want to say—"
HONK
tape recorder pops on
"what does cohost mean to you?"
"I think I probably have the most complicated relationship with cohost of anyone that you're
going to ask. It is simultaneously some of the best and worst two and a half years of my life. It is an extremely hard and extremely rewarding job, and something that really ended up being greater than the sum of its parts. I sort of have always said that the only important part of a social media platform is the people who use it, and I think cohost proved that more than anything could."
"What cohost really meant to me was just, in an increasingly commercialized internet, it felt really good to have a place where being a customer wasn't a part of the equation at all. It was just a place to hang out."
"It was nice to have a place where it was okay to be silly, and people took that seriously. cohost was a really distinctive website that was, first of all, my first social media experience, but I can tell already just from being on other sites that it had a very distinctive kind of intimacy to it, where it was safe to be a lot of people, and I met so many people that I would not otherwise have met."
"What did cohost mean to me? cohost was a place on the internet that was not meant for profit and for upward growth forever. It was meant for the users that were on it."
"It was a really good social media website. It was a good place to put longer-form writing where people would actually read it and engage with it, not just scroll on by it."
"cohost was honestly my favorite bar. It was my favorite place to hang out with friends, at least online friends. It was a place where I could just like, my art was put in front of people no matter what. I knew that if I was going, if I put something out there, someone was going to see it, and whether or not they interact with that, that's on whether it's good. But yeah, I made a lot of good friends there, and it closing down does feel like my favorite bar going out of business, which is sad, but there will be another."
"cohost was a place that you could assume good faith in a way that's not usually possible on social media. It was somewhere where it was a lot safer to have disagreements or to post something that was more vulnerable and understand that people would respond, if not positively, at least supportively. It was basically a troll-free environment, and that makes it so much safer to post on."
"cohost was really fascinating to me because I definitely started being more active on social media at a time when it really was kind of about numbers. And even when I didn't think I was trying to get numbers, I was trying to get numbers. Like, the lowest social media point of my life is before I got banned off TikTok, when I turned into the worst version of myself. And so cohost, I mean, you know, that was kind of my fault, but also cohost did the opposite of that. It actually put me in a really positive head space. I was actually reaching out to people in ways that I wouldn't have before. I was, like, engaging with communities that I wouldn't have before. And I still didn't really do enough of it. So if slash when something like cohost comes back around, I'm definitely going to be engaging in it way more actively, and I have cohost to thank for that."
"Yeah, cohost got me to do a lot more writing than I'd done in a while. It was a fun place to just hang out and be a sicko, you know?"
"cohost has been this special place. It's not like anywhere that I was before, and it's really allowed me to come to know myself better by coming to know so many awesome people that allowed me to, like, look within and without and reflect and figure out things. And I think that's really cool and definitely a part of its legacy for me."
"A place where all the cool queer porno artists went."
"To me, cohost was a very strange and small place that was very unique in how you could make posts so people could be really creative. You could have multiple audio posts that recreate a song. You could have little mini games inside of a post. It was weird and small, and it's really sad that it will be gone."
"Well, there were sites before it, and there will be more sites after it, but I loved it, and on this one I'll remember."
"cohost was home in a web that feels less and less like it can be home."
"cohost meant a space where I was actually happy to be socializing with people and not subject to, like, any paranoia or bad faith readings in the way I'd gotten used to. And it also was a big part of why I decided to start converting to Judaism, and it helped me deprogram a lot of just bad behavior around, like, being addicted to social media."
"It was a chill place where I couldn't post, but I could follow everyone I used to follow on other websites that are so much worse, except on cohost they were real people."
i recorded this on a pearlcorder L200 if anyone's curious!
