when i joined cohost in the summer of 2023, i immediately had the sense that it was a beautiful dream that would last about a year and a half. i don't say that to establish myself as the smartest person in the room, or above it all, i say it to set up the next sentence: what really gut punched me was how fast that year and a half went, and how much fun i had for that time.
i do think that, towards the end of its lifespan, cohost had some problems. i feel as if, ironically for the site with a reputation for being elitist and only celebrating longform effortposts, longer posts or posts about anything that required more than a second to consume (game design, music, for instance) were being buried more and more. my theory is that, as other websites collapsed or got worse, more people were using cohost as their primary social media, meaning feeds got busier, meaning more people felt more pressure to keep up, meaning they spent less time on individual posts? anyway. i also think softer, less explicit transmisogyny that is harder to moderate was slipping through the cracks more often as well, maybe especially as more people flocked here from tumblr.
but even so, cohost checked a few extremely important boxes for me that no other social media site is, and maybe ever will.
the right to self determination
maybe most importantly to me, cohost is the only digital space i've been on since the iPhone caught on and normies started stapling their government name to everything they did, where someone can say "this is who i am" and have that taken at face value.
when a furry, otherkin, therian, post-furry, or just someone who likes to be abstract and semi-anonymous tells you who they are, the core of what they're saying, imo, is "you will understand me better if you think of me as this, rather than imagining a human flesh bag at a computer." cohost is the only community in the modern internet where the response to that wasn't "lmao, no i won't," or at best, "i'll pretend to humor you on this"
i don't need to explain to you why this concept is particularly crucial to trans people.
everywhere else in the world, there is immense pressure to present yourself as a human occupying a known social role in society. more sickeningly, it is pressure to present yourself as a hireable human. failure to do so will result in being perceived as "a delusional failure to be a hireable human" in less progressive spaces, and "a hireable human who is having a bit of fun pretending to be someone they're not on the internet, and i will humor them while simultaneously imagining the real human" in more progressive spaces.
neither of those things are me... and i'm not being hyperbolic when i say that if you can't understand the gist of what i'm saying to you when i say "i am a raccoon jackalope, and here's how i'm character-designed: " then we can't have a sincere connection, and an insincere connection is worth less than nothing to me. i am, at my absolute core, simply not hireable, and the second you imagine the flesh prison i pilot you will inevitably bring cultural baggage into your perception of me that i'd just rather you didn't!
on transmisogyny
relatedly, cohost was the only community i've ever seen where there were tangible consequences for transmisogyny. and to be honest, i don't think that's ever going to happen again until there's another website staffed 75% by transfems.
on cringe culture, tinkering, and small communities
cohost is also the only community i can remember being a part of since... i don't know, pre-facebook forums? where cringe culture was actually dead like people love to talk about so much. i think one of the major engines that powers cringe culture is the way people react to anything less than absolute mastery of art.
probably because of the lack of numbers here, there was just so much more freedom to be a learning artist. people were actually getting engagement on WIPs, on tiny learning projects, just building things in the way real people do, without having to select for only the most instagrammable version of their experience.
people were so much more willing to follow new artists, and to explore. i had been running a twitter account for hoptix for several months before i joined cohost, that never got any real traction (and... not to brag, but hoptix really isn't that hard to promote. it's bright, colorful, fast, and speaks for itself in a very short amount of time compared to other genres of games, or god forbid, to mediums like music or longform writing. not to mention, that is one hella marketable bnnuy.). on cohost day one, i shared what i was making, and multiple real actual people for real reached out to say they thought it was cool, and were interested. that kind of reception, without any established Network at all, simply isn't possible anywhere else.
what's more, is that these things snowball. a lot of what fuels cringe culture isn't just the bullies themselves: it's people who feel unsafe looking to protect themselves. whether that's being afraid to share or promote amateur artists, or putting other people below them and playing the respectability game, people who would otherwise be capable of coexisting in a peaceful and mutually supportive way start to act out in hostile environments. which, begets more hostile environments.
moping in conclusion
prior to joining cohost, i had been completely off social media for 5-6 years. i felt then, as i feel now, that a social environment that doesn't check these boxes is worse than nothing. i'm relatively good at being mostly on my own. i've got a bit of a bog witch vibe going on.
but.
i'm really going to miss having a community. the Self exists, partially, as a relationship to the Other, and i'm about to have so much less Other. i will be okay, and i hope you will be too. but the part of me that exists as a community member will cease to exist, for i don't know how long. i loved it here. i'll just have to remember what that felt like, and carry it with me.
