Mourning Post for Cohost

[ysabetwordsmith]

Today is the last day of posting at Cohost, before it goes read-only on October 1.  You still have a little time to make goodbye or find-me-here posts, and do any other last-minute wrapups.

Here is a place where you can share all your sad feels, nostalgia, elegies for Cohost, etc.  If you've already written some, you can copy them from your blog or just link them here if you wish.  People are writing some really lovely stuff on this topic, and it's worth sharing.

It's okay to feel bad about a platform closing.  Don't let anyone tell you that it's silly.  If it's important to you, then you have a right to mourn it.  Disenfranchised grief sucks.  You can work through it in your own way, and sometimes talking about it with sympathetic friends can help.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> It's hard to put into words just how different this is from the Tumblr situation.<<

True.

>> When Tumblr's NSFW purge came out, it was more of a "well shit lmao, that's Capitalism(tm)", people left to Twitter without much of an argument. It was of course, different, corporate interests were at stake and speculative wealth was the driver of the conflict.<<

Compare with the Twitter exodus, though. Because there was no close analog for people to move to, and many people -- especially those with disabilities -- were using it as a primary means of contact, the loss was devastating. The changes made it uninhabitable or unusable for many people. That's a problem.

>> Cohost's unique culture and circumstance really changes the tone of the closure from the cynical sarchasm I occupy into something more painful.<<

Sooth.

>> It really was trying to do something, and it failed, and it was wonderful while it happened. There's lots of bad thoughts I have about the operation of the animal, but I appreciated Eggbug regardless. That changed the tone of my last entry into my series Ratgirl Isekai from something more angry and dismissive into something more reflective.<<

I hope that people will learn from what happened, its successes (a really great social community!) and failures (burnout and economic collapse) so that future attempts may last longer. It's a learning process. We can figure out how to build a social network that is congenial and durable.

>> If you wanted to read that btw you can see the last entry here: [Final Cohost Entry] <<

That is awesome! Thanks for sharing.

Also, congratulations, you just managed to cast the Curse of Ashes in cyberspace. It's normally done when someone holds a book-burning. You can charge the unbound ideas to disperse and find new people. It works. Drives the censors absolutely bugfuck too.

Wouldn't it be fun if, in a few months, a whole bunch of new attempts to build a positive social network spring up? And maybe one of them will survive...