life after cohost: on its community, its impact, and my own journey

it seems appropriate to make this the first post on my new blog, given how it was born from the gap that would be left in my ability to post long‐form articles online without cohost. initially i wanted my first blog post to be a retrospective on cohost from a pure design standpoint, but inspiration for a proper farewell of sorts struck me as the site’s closure drew nearer.

it would also seem appropriate to make this the last post on my cohost, even though it honestly never occurred to me to wonder what my last post would be until i saw others talking about the idea this week and posting their own eulogies. i’m not gonna stop posting on cohost after putting this up, to be clear, but maybe i’ll re‐share this post to close things off in the final hours.

my eulogy won’t be as sad as the others i’ve seen. it seems cohost has become such a pillar in some other people’s lives that they’ll feel very lost without it, but my journey has always been one that’s just passing through. i’ve definitely enjoyed my time on cohost and made some good connections, and i’ve enjoyed the attention on my silly posts, but the path ahead of me personally is still clear, even if eggbug won’t be in my party anymore.

i’ve seen that more than a few people i follow have said they’re just gonna give up on social media entirely now, or even having an online presence at all, and i don’t seem to be alone in having made this observation. this certainly seems to add a nihilistic note to the current atmosphere, but i’m maintaining a more positive outlook regardless. it could be said that all communities are transient, but i find it’s incredibly rare for all the bonds comprising a community to sever simultaneously. rather, i think it’s more true to say that communities simply evolve. sometimes evolutions are natural and internal due to growth and changes in their members, and sometimes they’re forced in response to events that interrupt their paradigm. cohost’s closure is a pronounced case of the latter, perhaps, but it’s important to remember that the community of cohost isn’t disappearing, just changing — because a strong enough community can’t be destroyed by any single catalyst. the impact of any turbulence will be far outclassed by the impact the community itself has left on the social landscape.

cohost is obviously one place, but the shape of its userbase has never been one large amorphous blob. it’s easily large enough to separate into many smaller, self‐sufficient communities, which will naturally tend to mimic the layout of the existing cohost followgraph. that’s not to say that the end of this chapter will exclusively destroy connections; i myself have been following and followed by a lot of ex‐cohosters on Mastodon that i previously only saw in passing on the site, or maybe even not at all. and i know other “cohost successor” projects have brought some users closer together than they used to be, under a new common goal. the net result might be more fractures in the web of connections around where cohost used to act as a mesh, but there are plenty of consequences outside of loss here.

of course, as has been hashed out at length in the last couple weeks, the greatest challenge any community faces is maintaining sound leadership — which goes doubly so for online communities, as the information age has thrown the scaling of communication and moderation way out of wack indefinitely. even as cohost was, there were plenty of users who had issues with how it was run from a moderation perspective. but there were also a lot of people who felt uniquely safe on cohost, so evidently the site’s showrunners brought real, tangible value to their space. in my case, i have enough privilege as a cis white guy to survive in almost any setting, so i won’t truly be able to relate on this front. but the situations the staff were confronted with and how they handled them are lessons that this community will retain for a long time, even as cohost’s users move into new spaces — including ones of their own making.

i’ve been making a particular effort to try and keep up with the musicians i’d followed on cohost. (this is yet another point in favour of Mastodon for me btw — it’s got audio uploads, while Bluesky does not!) cohost managed to foster some unique little groups of musicians and sound designers after adding audio uploads, and being around them rekindled some of my passion for music composition and production. you can just make silly little tunes! nobody can stop you! there are also plenty of inspiring indie game devs on cohost that i want to see more from in the future. (shoutout to Kyle’s excellent IndieGamesOfCohost page for bringing them more deserved attention!) i’m still not at a spot where i can properly focus on my creative output of music and games yet, but i have more resolve to get there, and more drive to just Create Things for the sake of creation.

cohost was also pretty good for the other types of things i use social media for. obviously cohost’s rich formatting and audio posts lent themselves to specific types of jokes and genres of humour that almost certainly wouldn’t be made on any other website. it was also a good source of relevant news for me, and there were a lot of people using cohost for informative and educational stuff, which the rich formatting and functional lack of character limit facilitated really well. i still have dozens of bookmarked articles on cohost that i want to get to reading while they’re still up.

but on that note, this was something of a weakness in cohost’s design for me: the seamless mix of microblogging and long‐form posts meant sometimes your feed was easy to idly catch up on through the day, and sometimes had 10+ minute reads randomly mixed in. i want to dive more into this in the blog post i’m planning that offers a retrospective on cohost from a design standpoint, but suffice to say that, going forward, i’m going to appreciate having my Mastodon profile and feed, and my Mataroa blog and RSS reader, as separate posting and reading locations respectively. i’m hoping this clearer delineation for my different types of writing will make my future posting more purposeful than it was on cohost.

cohost being practically antithetical to TikTok has more to do with a lack of “content hoses” than a lack of “numbers”, i think, at least from a reader’s perspective. some posters manually manufactured hoses of varying intensity through “global feed” tags and others, but without the site itself making any hoses part of the standard reader’s experience, cohost defaulted to a more intimate, direct mode of interaction. most newcomers accustomed to the hoses on other sites seemed confused when they joined and had nothing plated before them to consume (though some certainly came to appreciate it later), but i settled right in; i followed the few people i knew on Twitter and Mastodon who were making pages, and branched out from there, with my following and follower lists growing largely organically. i enjoyed the occasional methodical perusing of pages that showed up in my feed and notifications and following the ones i found interesting, and having interesting conversations with people in comments sections.

message boards and Discord servers aren’t really my thing, as i’ve never been able to settle down within a larger community like that. i’ll dip my toes into some groups, usually just watching from the sidelines or occasionally participating in small ways that don’t involve much interaction with others, but diving in is too intimidating for me given that usually i can barely tread water when in crowded seas. i’m much too meticulous in how i interact with people to be able to move with the flow of a larger social stream, so individual connections have much more value to me as such, and i think some of the ones i’ve made on cohost are ones i’ll end up holding onto for quite some time.

all this to say: much of the community formed on cohost will continue to persist long after the site’s closure, and while i probably won’t be directly following the movement of any sizable masses of users myself, i’m certain i’ll never be fully severed from the circles formed in its wake, always keeping some connections i’ve made to them. my journey will doubtlessly continue to cross paths with the new forms cohost’s community takes — just at later times, in different places. i’ll see you around, friends of eggbug! :eggbug: