alright cohost, it's the site's final 9/11, time drop your spiciest memes

i think the loss of this site is gonna be tough but we’re better for it existing. i say that seeing all the wonderfully articulate effort posts talking about how their relationship with socmed has changed because of eggbug and cohost and i can only find myself agreeing.

i nonsense posted and shitchosted a ton but to be honest this was the first time since the early days of twitter and tumblr that i’ve felt so unrestrained in my posting. there was no magic number to hit to “feel good” there was putting your post out there and seeing if it got severals.

and as i look at my tweets and skeets (bsky tweets, need to workshop that one a bit…) over the last 2.5 years they’ve become more like my posting on here.

when i started posting i labelled myself as a recovering tweeter. and i was. i’ve been using that site since 2007 and the main mobile interface was sms. and it was poisoning. i’ve had an account in the teen thousands and the engagement i got here with a fraction of that size absolutely blew that out of the water because it wasn’t an audience but a community.

this is the only place i felt comfortable posting my writing knowing that it WOULD be seen and it would be seen by people i felt safe knowing it was seen by. i posted my cats knowing that i would see the pfps that interacted with the various tags regularly even if they didn’t follow. and to the folks who regularly engaged with my chosts, i see you and it made me smile every time i saw your pfps pop up. when i’d see a hours old post liked and know… that post was searched out by them, they checked my page for updates. and i hope seeing my pfp pop up brought others similar feelings

these last two years have been incredibly wonderful and healing. i can talk about how frustrated i am at the continued misinformation about cohost or the reactions of the naysayers, or hell the fuck nuggets at ncose who are responsible for tipping failing to materialize. but and this is incredible—for me at least—i find myself, without effort, focusing on the fonder memories. before cohost i would’ve been following up those small negative comments with an essay of anger that devolved halfway into rant.

instead i think fondly on all the silliness and community—looking at you my it/its folks—i found here. from the catgirls to mecha/pilot boom, from to electric arc worship to sodium vapor worship, from love honk to hit em, and of course all the variations of the extended eggbug universe.

if you would, please leave a comment mentioning one of the cohost memes you remember, i would love to remember them with you

ps i am SO tempted to make a #Cohost Global Mourning Feed just to cause some chaos at the end

Okay I just had a HUGE idea but I do not know enough about RSS to implement it - I am so willing to learn but a couple weeks isn't enough time!! So if there's anyone who has the time and skills, please consider this proposal!

Here's my vision: coGhost, a system built on RSS the same way pesterchum is built on IRC.

coGhost feeds would have additional data besides the standard RSS data: images to use as profile icons, formatting data for shared posts, that kind of thing

coGhost clients (the original client would be FOSS to make it easier for people to make their own) would display posts based on the formatting data (with the original client being styled like the cohost website), automatically update the user's own outgoing feed with both original and shared posts, and of course give the option to share posts from another feed (with or without additional commentary) while correctly attributing the source and giving you the ability to click to follow those source feeds.

There would obviously be no tags, search, notifications, or comments section. I think that's actually in the spirit of cohost anyway! For discovery, people could set up directories on their personal websites. No numbers, only connection!

Nothing would be stopping someone from using a regular RSS reader for coGhost feeds or a coGhost client for regular RSS feeds other than the formatting looking a bit weird.

Please please let me know if you'd be interested in rushing to work on something like this - it wouldn't have to be perfect when cohost goes read only, just functional enough to use!

Also please let me know if there's more tags I should add for visibility!