cohost proved that if you build a website like this, people will enjoy using it a lot, and also that it cannot survive in a hostile economic environment, while treating its workers well, even with a massive advantage (secret funder). cohost 2 will happen once we achieve the socialist mode of production

if it had VC funding and dozens of employees like bluesky it would be fine, but it wouldn't be cohost

y'all have likely heard the news by now, cohost is gonna shutdown so to find out where to find me i'd suggest looking at my website

i'm working on a large update for it so keep a close eye on it, otherwise i'll probably advertise the update on tumblr

you should pirate shit

you should download files. it's fun, free, and better for the world than streaming services. "but it's hard" this is a guide. i promise you don't need to be a computerhead. i believe in you.

why should i pirate shit?

• streaming services suck. in every industry, they make their money by financially ruining the people who make the art they profit off of. their algorithms, instead of helping you "discover new art", funnel you into what they want you to watch/listen/play. they're janky & inconsistent & are all missing things. fuck em.
• having your collection of files rules. remember how dads would get excited about their cd or dvd collections? they were right. that shit rules. trust me: knowing your collection represents your tastes, and you're in control of what's in it feels sick as hell.
• it's free! spend your 10 bucks a month buying music from a broke artist on bandcamp instead. easy.
• using media library server software, you can stream your own files to your tv/phone/etc, like streaming services.
• pirate streaming sites also exist but tbh they also suck and I'm not trying to sit through "try not to cum" ads to watch a show in questionable quality with no subtitle options.

read on to Learn....

Reblogging this to refer back to forever

also the August 2024 financial update, but I’m trying not to bury the lede.

Hi everyone,

We have come to the decision to cease operations of cohost and anti software software club due to lack of funding and burnout. As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor¹; all of our money in the bank, and any money coming in from people who buy our merch or don’t cancel cohost plus, is going towards servers and operations — paying the bills so we can turn the lights off with as little disruption as possible.

cohost will become read-only on Tuesday, October 1st. At this time, we will make best-effort attempts to keep the servers online through the end of 2024.

Development focus has immediately shifted to data export. We have offered minimal data export for GDPR compliance for a while now, but this is a barebones system that doesn’t meet our quality standards. We will be improving this system over the next few weeks and will issue full data exports for all users when the site goes read-only. We will continue to offer downloads of your data export through the end of the read-only period.

When the read-only period concludes, we will delete all of your data from our servers without a backup. Even now we want to reiterate that we think “data brokerage” and other common practices of the software industry are inimical to who we are as people, and we would never consider selling your data to others or asserting any rights to stuff you posted under any circumstance.

Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

1. on that note, we’re looking for new jobs. we’ll each be posting about that bit individually.