A better World Wide Web can exist
What comes after Cohost
Date published: 2024.10.01
It is finally the 1st of October, and Cohost.org no longer allows new posts to be created. At the end of this year, it will be deleted in its entirety, ending its short (2 years old) life. You might be curious why I chose to publish this essay today, and not yesterday or the day earlier, before the website was locked; after all, I could have shared it there, and people could have rechosted it, and—
Yeah, that’s why. Breathe out. It is done now. It is final. Cohost is gone. Now is the time for a proper goodbye by its grave.
I’m not a fan of prolonged goodbyes, of the nervous anticipation, of knowing something is unavoidable and mourning it before it even has a chance to happen. Every website will one day die, including the one I’m publishing this on; maybe not tomorrow and maybe not this year, but someday, the lights will go off. People will head somewhere else, as always. The Earth will keep turning.
But of course, Cohost was not just a social media website. Cohost was first and foremost an idea and the community that had made its home here. Both of those were something truly unique, even if imperfect.
I will miss Cohost. I wasn’t one of the people who joined it at its very start, I only spent a bit over half a year there; nonetheless, it certainly made an impact on me, and for the first time in my life I can say that a social media’s impact on me was overwhelmingly positive. I moved to Cohost after ditching Tumblr – finally, after a decade of having been a Tumblr user, I’ve had enough of the toxic culture surrounding it. Cohost’s lack of numbers was immediately refreshing; so was the community.
Now, I’m not saying Cohost’s community was perfect. The website was made up of overwhelmingly white Americans, and while it was a very friendly environment for transgender people or therians, the community was also happily ignorant in regards to other matters. Some users were racist, ableist, xenophobic. Honestly, there always was some racist shit going on – here is a big compilation of racist issues Cohost had that a person of color had written just a month before staff announced the website was going to be shut down – and there always were white people ready to make their ignorance other people’s problem. I don’t want that side of Cohost to be forgotten with time. A part of the userbase was capital ‘B’ Bad.
But… for us, it was still better than anywhere else. It was a place open and accepting of other people’s identities, with no patience for discourse about queer microlabels or system origins. People went there to be freely themselves and to find a community of like-minded individuals without being harassed for daring to be who they were (with… exceptions, as I said). After Tumblr, that was genuinely cleansing.
When we joined Cohost we already knew we were plural, but we were still very afraid about the social consequences of it. Not being a system that would qualify as endogenic didn’t change the fact that the extremely divided community everywhere else made us extremely uncomfortable with the idea of being open about our own plurality; we were tired, and we were scared, and the last thing we wanted was to exist in a space with strangers constantly asking us invasive questions to judge our system’s validity, even if they would qualify us as the valid ones! That is still an extremely distressing situation to be in! A community should not be a minefield, and wherever we wouldn’t look, the plural community was a terrible, terrible minefield… but not on Cohost.
One of us checked the #introduction tag and saw many people using “we” instead of “I”, and then, brave as he was, also wrote our post using plural pronouns. The world did not end that day. A bunch of people liked our introduction post, some followed us. Some of those people were other plurals.
During those months we spent on Cohost we finally realized how it felt to have a community, and at no point were we attacked or discriminated against. That was an extremely important experience for our personal growth as a relatively freshly discovered system: the experience of connecting with others, be it other plurals or singlets who legitimately did not give a shit, while being free to unmask and be ourselves as much as we wanted. That was, and I mean it genuinely, a life-changing experience. So life-changing, in fact, that there is one thing that I know for sure:
We will never again go back to any social media website that makes us feel like a cornered animal that has to hide who they are or suffer constantly being harassed.
I don’t believe going back to Tumblr or moving to Bluesky or, god forbid, Twitter, and being proudly plural and inclusive of all other plurals would be brave of us. I think it would be foolish and a form of self-harm (if activism is someone’s calling, there are better places to do it at than on websites with userbases fixated on constant, endless discourse, where nobody will want to listen anyways, but they’ll harass you relentlessly). On the other hand, willingly staying in an environment that forces you to pretend to be someone you’re not to avoid being attacked is also a form of self-harm. (To be clear, I’m talking about Internet spaces here; I know that it’s way safer to not be Out And Proud as plural in actual real life society, under your legal name. The thing is that nobody is choosing to live in offline society; we’re part of it whether we like it or not and can’t simply quit or pick a different one.)
The very moment we heard the news of Cohost shutting down, we knew: wherever we go next, we’ll do so as a community, not as a fake singlet-like persona. Our standards have risen, and we will not allow them to be lowered again.
So, is Internet worse without Cohost in it?
No. Despite all of that, no.
Cohost existed, and it influenced the people who needed a push to create something brand new – and hopefully, even better. There is future being built right before our eyes: in the last few weeks so many Cohost users have started working on projects that they hope might make the Internet a better place. Some of those projects will fail, but some of them will blossom into something, something that I genuinely can’t wait to see. The new projects like this forum for example, or the Website League – I’m curious how they’ll turn out, if they’ll be better than Cohost used to be. They might.
We need more good web. We’re losing one social media site, but gaining multiple brand new, equally as idealistic projects. That’s a good thing! I’m excited! I want to see what future brings! A better World Wide Web can exist, it already has existed in the form of Cohost, and it already does exist right now in the form of every personal website or blog of an Internet queer person, and it will exist in many many forms that we can’t even imagine yet.
Do not let nostalgia and sadness cloud your judgement. Acknowledge all the good that Cohost gave you, and move on with your life. But by god, you do not have to go back to Twitter. There are alternatives out there. If you don’t want to go back, simply don’t.
As for us, our current Internet presence is going to be tied primarily to our own website and Dreamwidth. Both of those are not something we would have tried without Cohost’s demise, and yet I can already tell that they’re something we genuinely needed. No more microblogging – I want to properly blog now.
For our socializing needs, as of now we are members of the aforementioned forum (under the nickname ‘wisp’), and on fediverse at @wisp@chitter.xyz. We also have a Pillowfort account, but we didn’t have the strength to properly familiarize ourselves with it before Cohost shut down, so we’ve yet to see whether we like it there or not.
Stay strong. The world did not end today, and it’s time for us all to move on.
Orion
Len’s last-minute postscriptum
I’m writing this as its own separate section since I have 0 intention of editing Orion’s writing to align more with my tastes. I’m happy he was the one to write the proper essay, and I’m happy with the way he wrote it, I simply have my own thoughts to add since I’m the one publishing it today.
I think what I regret the most is not being more open during our short (a bit over 7 months long) stay there. There were times when some of us dared to be more vulnerable, but there were times when we shut down for weeks, only reposting other people’s posts and otherwise completely isolating ourselves from social interaction. We have a tendency to be reserved and distant, I’m probably one of the worst offenders in this regard, but looking back I realize there was more of ourselves we could (and should) have shared. Cohost was the perfect environment for us to do so, and we knew it was going to be gone someday, but I suppose we never thought the day would come so fast. We thought we had time, even when we knew we didn’t.
I’ll be sure to keep this in mind in the future, wherever we end up settling for good. It’s a lesson for us all.
Cohost was… imperfect. I’m not sure if I’ll miss it as a whole, and not just the mutuals we had and the plural community which we owe so much to. But Cohost’s entire community… look, we’re white so we didn’t suffer from the racism, the overwhelming majority of the community was white, and that is the only reason why we and they can claim the website was good for our mental health. If you listen to the POC who left the website before it shut down, their opinions are wildly different. Some of them are bitter, and very understandably so.
I won’t be getting very deep into it, I don’t want to, but I feel the need to be the voice of criticism here: the staff fucked up right from the start. I’m not sure what frustrates me more: the idea of initially inviting only your friends and family to join the website and then invite their own friends, and then being surprised that it’s become a place where people different from your social circle feel extremely alienated – or the idea of having one, single moderator, and being surprised you’re unable to properly deal with harassment against the most vulnerable users. It genuinely makes me angry. Anika already talked about this in regards to discord servers: even in a server with only a couple dozens of people you’re going to need more than 1 moderator, otherwise shit will get really bad! Even in a small discord server you can’t allow cliques to form, or the outsiders will not feel welcome and heard! And running a social media website with hundreds of thousands of users this way was supposed to work… how exactly??? They wanted to protect marginalized people who didn’t belong to their own demographic how? The POC have the right to be angry. This way of managing a social media website was doomed to fail them from the start, even if the staff didn’t want such an outcome.
(Len, why are you claiming the friends & family era was a bad thing? Here is an article by one of staff’s friends explaining way better than I could how it impacted the issue of racism on the website, do read it please; as for me, I will simply add: even without numbers it was always very clear that certain users on the site had enormous amounts of clout, but only after the announcement about Cohost shutting down did I start paying attention to who exactly they were, and almost all of them turned out to be people from the staff’s social circle, who joined during the friends & family period. Weird! Certainly a coincidence.)
I know I’m being very harsh here, but I’m simply trying to balance out all of the sadness and nostalgia I see everywhere. Orion was very kind; I have to be bad and mean. Cohost was the best social media we’ve ever used, and it succeeded in some ways (like getting rid of the evil numbers), while failing spectacularly in other ways (like, you know, proper moderation and protecting POC from racist harassment). I believe both should be acknowledged, but a lot of people only focus on the good and not the bad, so I’m making the decision to focus on the bad a bit more. If I wanted to keep criticizing the userbase itself, I would now move on to the topic of yinglet discourse and how ableism becomes socially acceptable in progressive spaces when well-liked people do it… but I won’t. This is long enough already.
I just want to emphasize this: we, as white queer plurals, found a safe space on Cohost. Many POC absolutely did not. Don’t we ever forget this while moving on to other platforms. A better Internet needs to be good for them too.
I will repeat what Orion said and what I myself said on Cohost yesterday before the lights went off: if you’re reading this, I want you to stay strong. Cohost was home to many minorities and people whose daily life sucks, people who are socially isolated for one reason or another, and I know that losing this space was a big blow. But listen: we’ll survive. All of us. Life is a long journey of beginnings and endings, and as long as you’re alive, there is a new story awaiting you. It’s taking root right now, and one day it will bloom. Stay safe, okay?
I’ll see you around.
Written by: Orion 💫 & Len 🗡️