hailee

thank you for saying this.

Excellent post. My hope is that if a team tries to make a Cohost-esque site again, they learn from this site's mistakes and are a bit more proactive wrt addressing racist harrassment and dogpiling.

you're right. all i wished for the POC i met on here was for their experience to be as pleasant as mine has been. nobody should have had to go through that shit.

yeah... I've said it elsewhere but despite being on the cohost love train myself, this blemish was very real and if there's one thing that really bugs me about the timing of all this it's that we didn't get to see if the new policies would matter, if trust could be rebuilt, if at least some of those people who left might have come back and felt better about it. now it's permanently too little too late.

You're right. That's why if a successor comes out, it will be its duty and responsibility to be better about this. We cannot have Cohost 2 be So White, to paraphrase Alyaza, and we can't have another Renkotsuban leave.

A part of me has to wonder if cohost's reputation as a cozy lefty queer friendly space made the racism all the worse.

It really is so much more disappointing when it's from those who should know better, huh? :c

it sure as hell ain't pretty, but this conversation was sorely needed. future successors to cohost will have a wealth of hindsight to draw from here.

(Disclaimer: I'm white as a sheet)

I forgot about cohost for a while (ADHD yay), so I somehow feel like a worse person for not knowing that racism was happening here than I would if I had actively participated in it.

Yeah. I like the format, I liked a lot of the things the site was trying to do, I met a whole bunch of cool people here, but also saw some of those cool people get abused and run off for clearly racist reasons.

Same fuckin' hat 😞

Yeah... I wasn't here as much to see the latest round, but saw the effects on a friend. This place had its good sides, but it also had bad ones.

(And the reason I wasn't around as much? Too many instances of disability/accessibility discourse, and seeing a friend pushed off the platform for accessibility advocacy. I think you're right, it hurts more when it isn't a hellhole like Twitter; seeing progressive people I followed and admired get angry about people being vocal about accessibility was so much more upsetting than the casual eugenics of a rando on Twitter.)

i liked this post a lot. ive been thinking a lot about how so many of these events played out in extremely painful ways, kind of explicitly because cohost asks one to let down their guard both socially and at the platform level (at least imo). it helps to see this stuff articulated.

(aside, but maga eggbug is so brutally powerful, i was briefly stunned by that image)

A part of me has to wonder if cohost's reputation as a cozy lefty queer friendly space made the racism all the worse. Getting attacked by racism makes sense on twitter. It's not good or acceptable, but you expect it at least. You know what to expect from the nazi nest. You dont expect that from a group of folks you would otherwise consider to be progressive. I know the left isnt a monolith, but there are some bare minimum competencies you would expect at least.

I have seen a lot of comments on this site over its lifetime with a lot of "but we don't HAVE Nazis/racists/etc. here so this site is different" and I just kept thinking the fuck do you mean, there's nothing special about this site that makes it impossible for racists to sign up, and starting from the assumption that the site simply doesn't have that kind of thing is so dangerous.

this is definitely something that has been on my mind since the announcement. as great as this site has been in a lot of ways, the racism that led a lot of minority users to get harassed to the point of leaving for their own well being... it was awful to watch and makes me hesitant to gush too much. because that nastiness did exist and it did a lot of damage.

thank you for this. i hope in the future it won't have to be said.

very important to remember because yeah not everyone stuck around. i don't want people to gloss over the very real problems that have existed here. i still liked cohost well enough, but it felt bad that i couldn't guarantee my POC friends would have a good time here.

i did not see much racism aside from the cases i was shown by actual POC persons, however, i say this not as means to say that there wasnt so cause there clearly was, i do not need evidence in front of my face to believe what they say, but to showcase another problem.

that i actively had trouble finding POC people posting here, at least the ones i dindt actively searched for.
i think more than anything this showcases the racism problem was very much real, so much so that POC were actively not posting or even being reposted and shared around, and that is... bad. if cohost was the place where people could be comfortable posting and being around then something clearly bad was happening that certain minorities dindt wanna do so.
i came here to see people, and perspectives i havent seen before, cant exactly do that when an entire subset of people are seemingly just pushed under the carpet now can i?

wonder how it would've affected things if discoverability in this place was any better, I didn't really get exposed to the wider cohost population and it's many issues until really recently

this whole place just feels like a missed opportunity, I hope any future attempts can learn from it instead of just making the same mistakes again and again