As someone who "Lurked" on the site for the past few months, it's been a blast. But I can't help but feel bad that I never properly used the site up until now. So I have some things to say about that.

I can't really come up with any clever Farewell Message as a sendoff for the site, I'm not super great at emotions and plenty of other people have said their piece better than I ever could, but I will at least say what I can about it.

It really was a cozy little corner of the internet that I would enjoy poking my head into every once in a while, and it really did feel like the Best Social Media of it's time, and for that I have nothing but praise for the Team and Users who made that possible.
However, I do feel bad that I never contributed to that in any meaningful way. I had always wanted to, had grand ideas of making a name for myself here with art and jokes and whatnot, but life doesn't wait for plans, and unfortunately I never acted on those ideas before the news broke of the Site's Sunsetting.

For that, I have a new goal. During my time here I had collected (by pasting urls into a text document) various posts from here that I liked, some silly, some neat, and anything else in between. So to give back to everyone that made Cohost what it is, I will be sharing all those posts through the coming days. In both a way to give back to the wonderful people who helped shape Cohost into this fun corner of the internet it became, and to some degree make up for what could have been on my part.
And to that end; Hi, I'm Mack! You can consider this the Intro Post that never was.

All in all, I'm going to miss this. This website and all it was.
To all of the Artists, the Shitposters, the Protesters, the Creatures, the Conversationalists...
To Everyone who made this site what it was, and the Team who kept the lights on for this long.
~ Thank You for Everything, it was Fun while it Lasted ~

RuSShdown

What is RuSShdown?

RuSShdown is a free, open-source, entirely browser-based RSS feed generator for non-coders. RuSShdown takes the Posting experience like you'd find on Cohost, where you type your gay little jokes and hit the button, and translates that into an RSS feed you can slap on your personal site. The whole site runs entirely client-side, so literally nothing ever leaves your browser to some server somewhere, it all runs on your computer, and it has zero tracking cookies or anything of the sort.

How do I use RuSShdown?

It's pretty simple. You go to RuSShdown's deployment page at https://chaiaeran.github.io/RuSShdown and simply fill out the form. If you're making an RSS feed for the first time, you use the Create New RSS Feed tab. If you already have one and want to Post to it, you use the Add Post tab. Either way, when you're done, you'll receive an RSS file that you can then put wherever you like, such as a Neocities page.

It's really that easy?

Well, yeah! RSS-posting isn't super technically difficult to begin with, and the purpose of RuSShdown is to simplify it even further so you don't have to touch a single line of XML or HTML code. The site does all that for you.

Can I use Markdown?

That's what the "down" in RuSShdown stands for! Standard Markdown is supported using Showdownjs. You can even input raw HTML if you wanna do CSS Crimes™! There's a live preview right beside your input box, so you can see what your Post will look like.

Why did you make this?

Because fuck social media, that's why. With Cohost shutting down, it feels like the last big space made for actual human connection is going away, and I have no desire to go back to the Tweet Zone, be it Twitter itself, Bluesky, or even the Fediverse. RSS feeds are really powerful, useful tech that lets you keep Posting the way we do here (minus likes and comments, admittedly), and I found there really wasn't a good tool to make them easier, so I did it myself.

Can I see the code?

Yep! Here it is! https://github.com/ChaiaEran/RuSShdown
It's honestly not very complicated, either.

OK but is there Eggbug

I hope you all enjoy using RuSShdown.

Happy Posting!

Damn, it sucks that cohost is shutting down. I know I didn't use it that much, but I was hoping maybe I could casually enjoy the website and have some fun interactions, using a site pseudonymously. It's sad that this place never got the chance to really take off because I feel like it had a lot to offer and really dialed back a lot of the things that made centralized social media terrible.

For better and for worse it's hard to discover people on this site. I never got to really develop a reason to stay here... I probably would have used the site more regularly. When a social media website is poorly adopted, I think it creates a slippery slope effect where more people refuse to adopt the site. I wonder if people will somehow come back to twitter, or more likely, go back to tumblr. Structurally, this website is a lot like tumblr, but the userbase is actually quite different. Even now, tumblr is an insanely hostile hell hole. It hasn't changed, so everyone here who is now deeply alienated by that tumblr culture might be hesitant.

I'm just sitting here reflecting on how to meet and grow closer to people online while still having a safe and mostly private presence. It feels like the older you get the harder it is to make friends and grow closer to others. I am a very ill person and developmentally handicapped so I live most of my life online.