Yeah I think that the best cohost that could exist Isn't For Everyone, because it's specifically a website about like, not being addicted to constantly being online, slowing down, only checking it a little bit every so often, not thinking about numbers, etc. etc. like that's a very specific thing to want in a website. Not everyone wants that. A lot of people want to use social media specifically for the rapid-pace excitement, the PvP, and most of all the ability to self-promote a business, product, or ideology to as many people as possible.
But like, it's not only white people that could find such a vibe appealing? There's no reason that the website about slowing down and taking your time needs to be soooooo white. There are absolutely plenty of people of color who like the idea of reading a longer book or article instead of ten thousand tiny ones.
I think a part of this is like, a seeding issue. The seed membership of cohost was 100 close friends of the white devs, and due to the racial segregation of the US white people tend to know more white people. Not all of those first 100 users were white but the supermajority were. And then the snowball method of gathering users where people give invite codes to people who they know... means that the population of users continued to skew white. Anything invite-only to start will start off more homogenous as people will invite people who are more like themselves. I'm one of those first 100 users, and I'm not gonna lie and say that I was doing some sort of conscious effort to only invite people of color to offset the probable white majority. It was mostly just determined by who asked me for one first.
Once you end up with a space that's predominantly white, then even when it's not invite-only anymore, it will majorly lose appeal to anyone else. Because of... how white spaces are, but also because people generally want to not feel like the only person in a space who is like them. Breaking that is difficult and not something I've ever seen someone solve. Nobody wants to be invited into a space for the express purpose of making it more diverse. Every attempt I've seen in other offline and online spaces to deal with this issue always ends up being very tokenizing and alienating and thus, failing horribly.
The only thing I've seen that does work is just... when a fuck ton of new people enter a space all at the same time in a big new user rush. Usually because of lots of paid marketing and backing by a major corporation (i.e. tiktok) and/or because of twitter collapsing and a new place being identified as The New Twitter and people just moving over there all at once and bringing their entire social networks with them (bluesky, mastodon). Cohost said "we're something different" and only advertised by word of mouth.
Snowballing is generally considered a poor way to recruit subjects for a scientific or anthropological sample population because it tends to give you lots of subjects who are very similar to each other. But websites can't like... recruit new users by random sampling. So i really don't know the solution. But what I do know is that I really like Cohost and I don't want it to be something only white people can enjoy and get something out of. Everything is better when a greater diversity of people get to enjoy it.
And also, I want to respect the free will and agency of people who decide they don't want to join. If they don't want to, then they don't want to. If they want to be less active, I won't guilt-trip them for it. It's their choice. I'm not going to aggressively hound them to join/stay for the sake of diversity, like people in ahem previous experiments in new social media had done.
