grimbo

📷: Pentax KM
🎞️: Kodak Portra 400
🌏: Melbourne
🗓️: Spring/Summer 2022

it’s cohost’s birthday! we first launched in private friends-and-family alpha one year ago today, February 3, 2022. before that, we’d been hinting at what we were working on (mostly via the codename “fourth website”), but had been cagey about details and only revealed the name to a few of our closest friends. we didn’t tell anyone in advance that this was our planned launch date, we surprise released on our locked twitter accounts and some friends-only discord servers.

we picked the february 3 date at our member meeting on january 4. we looked at the remaining work items, cut about half of it for the private release, and decided we could probably knock it out in a month. and we did! and we only had to work 12 hour days for two weeks leading up to it! and yes it was broken as hell but it didn’t matter because We Did It, our friends were using it, they seemed to like it, and we knew we could improve it.

on that note, here’s a short list of things that weren’t available until later in the private alpha:

• notifications of any kind
  • we had a like button though. you could click it, it would store that you liked the post, but OP would never know.
  • we accidentally weren’t saving timestamps for these at first, so when notifications shipped we set them all to epoch + like ID as seconds, making your existing notifications all show as January 1, 1970 ± 24 hours, depending on your time zone.
• a post editor that wasn’t largely broken
• a dashboard that took under 30 seconds to load
• pagination on the dashboard, user profiles, or tag pages
• eggbug
  • eggbug’s birthday is tomorrow, february 4
    • not gonna lie, i (aidan) kind of knocked this one out of the park. what a funny little guy. -aidan
• private pages that weren’t horribly bugged
• changing your password, email address, and username yourself
• custom icon shapes
  • the capsule icon shape, which is only available to alpha users, is a reference to a display bug that was present for the first few weeks
• access to drafts
  • you could save posts as drafts but you could never find them again. while the idea of a Post Hole was deeply funny, we decided you should probably be able to find your drafts.
    • in editing, i (jae) was informed that we never shipped pagination for drafts, so draft 21+ are still sent to the Post Hole. i do not intend to fix this, because it’s funny.
      • (editor’s (colin) note: we do actually intend to fix it. it’s just saying that we’re not going to is funnier.)
        • jae note: buzzkill
• image lightboxes
• tag autocompletion when Posting
• a way to actually earn money (this one is pretty important)
  • (editor’s (kara) note: you too can activate .beat timestamps)
• and much much more!

when we say the first release came in hot, we mean it. it’s wild now to read through the early patch notes and see just how much was missing and/or broken.

we didn’t expect at all to be where we are now within just the first year. we got 10k users on public launch day. we thought that was a ton and, given some of our performance issues at the time, we were right! and then four months later, twitter suddenly and unexpectedly imploded and we got 75k new users in under a week. still weird!

we love that you’re all here, we love that you like our website, we love that you love eggbug. we hope you’ll stick with us through the next year as we make cohost even better.

thanks for using cohost!

~ jae, colin, aidan, & kara

january 4, 2023

one of my favorite parts about living in a small town is that not every single surface has been power-washed clean of any trace elements of humanity. Most mid-size American cities, especially out West, feel as though they're in the middle of a bleach-wash cycle, systemically rooting out anything that doesn't look like a pre-planned element, eradicating art for the sake of tranquil sterility (and advertising space).

Reno, in the year I lived there, knocked down dozens of small motels to make space for more gray slab 5-over-1s and strip malls, simultaneously eliminating the only affordable places to live in the city and displacing hundreds while also destroying some of the only buildings that made Reno feel like... Reno. Murals in Reno are 50-foot affairs approved by a city planning board that must be as vibrant as possible without actually satisfying anyone or making any kind of statement beyond "respect everyone", and any actual street art is painted-over and the artist arrested with haste. Every fucking city feels like an Instagram-ready backdrop on a movie set, and not a place people live.

On the other hand, small towns where life has remained, feel more human. Lived-in. Yes, that does mean they look messier and sometimes depressing, because life in America is depressing, but it also leads to moments of joy. For example, why bother painting the mountains on a $60-a-night motel? Because we're people and we like to make pretty things, and it's pretty. It's as though the concept of embarrassment at art for the sake of art hasn't quite made it all the way out here yet.