MOVED TO @VURRSYS

i have to be honest w/ you i think you are taking this / social media generally too seriously. not to say it doesnt suck and isnt sad / stressful that things are up in the air for cohosts future atm! youre welcome to leave if you dont like unpredictability of that degree. otherwise (and this is true of anyone treating the meta like this) i dont think engaging with this in this way seems good for anyone doing it

I don't think it's fair to say users are blinded to the truth. We know things aren't looking good. We are choosing to have hope and push for the chance of keeping this place going because we like it here. We know it still might not work.

The most recent update makes me more hopeful, but overall I do have significant doubts and concerns - there are unpleasant structural problems here that are unlikely to go away. Like - to quote the March 11th update:

fear of failure, preventing us from having the sort of difficult conversations needed to fully right the ship

And the other factors that led to eggbux launch delays. And whatever factors led the initial funder to be unresponsive to communication.

Yeah, the outlook doesn't look good & I don't really see how CH will be able to close the window with most of the proposals. The marginal +10% ideas are probably not going to be able to close that gap as significantly as hoped, and I think staff are going to have to compromise on their ideology to even stand a chance of making it past this present period of crisis.

On the other hand, I really like it here, respect the staff for that ideology and think remaining on cohost to still be worthwhile even if the site is due to die at some point. Keeping myself invested here is no worse from how fedi works where instances can go under, or other places where trans women's accounts just go missing overnight.

I'm keeping CH+ though this, not because it's a sound investment, but cause I like the idea of supporting the endeavour, doomed to failure or not.

I feel like switching focus to recovery tools would just be just declaring defeat outright, which puts a much closer end date to the employment of staff, will probably kill what income the site has and basically take the site from "plane without engines" to "burning fireball" levels of crash-worthiness.
Sure this possibly saves money overall, but it doesn't really offer greater utility to staff or users, merely foreshortening the site's lifespan.

Maybe it's different for others, but I also just don't think there's anything so important here that I'd need to run an export operation either, nor was there on Tumblr which I had since 2013.

I dunno, my feelings on this are like... cut losses and go where? Every other social media site I'm aware of is incredibly toxic, because no one is doing the active moderation of their spaces that Cohost is. And I think the open sexuality is a big part of that, too, so if payment processors are really cutting down on that, then there's not going to be any other place to get the kind of atmosphere created by that, either.

I am not going anywhere after Cohost (except maybe to post my books), because there isn't any place other than Cohost worth being. In that sense, it makes more sense to me to keep trying to do whatever we can to make Cohost work instead of just giving up on it, regardless of the prospects involved.