not “haha!” funny of course, but strange in its own way. the absolute ancients of this place have been here for, what, twoish years? most of us less than that, some of us much less. and yet so many of us have grown so very emotionally attached to this place and its trappings: the amount of eggbug fanart attests to that quite visibly as you scroll your feed in these final days.
it just happened so fast, didn’t it? like a whirlwind romance that fell apart as quickly as it began and with that same set of vibes. we had our rose-tinted lenses crack here and there but mostly we kept trying, we had our sudden acrimonies and our reconciliations and our compromises. we talked about Cohost to our friends (and sometimes they even joined). we all kissed eggbug*.
and now that most is said and done, now that most of the people who ever see this chost will see it at an emotional and temporal distance we call “read-only”, we are all left to stew on what this place meant to us. how it changed us, how it revealed us to ourselves, how it helped so many of us to detox from the poison of social media driven by engagement-farming. it did change many of us and i believe that it was for the better. can we bring these new attitudes forward? can Cohost maintain a deep impression on our spirits?
now as we scatter our to the four winds of the Net, rushing to weave a new fabric for our collective online lives, i’m left wondering as so many others surely are: could it be done again? will there ever be another Cohost? will anyone else take the risk now that they’ve seen that risk not pan out into success? was this our one last real chance at this type of community flourishing? would a future platform created as a spiritual descendant of Cohost overcome its unresolved struggles—of minority representation and respect and more broadly its limited demographic diversity, of staff burnout, of financial sustainability without compromising core values?
i don’t have answers to any of these questions. i know that i will miss this place, this silly, supporting, irreverent, glorious third space that i have called home. there are of course the liferafts and messaging platforms and email and the like, and that’s all well and good, but it won’t be the same. maybe there’s even a silver lining there, that we have now been given practice at being Less Online just in time for losing our space to Be Online, that we are now better-equipped to handle the loss than we could have been before.
i will miss this place all the same. i look forward to the future and what it will bring, but i will always, always look back fondly on this place and its eggéd bug and remember what it meant to me. what it means to me. what it represents in my heart.
i will miss you all so, so much.