Making some small mark on this site before the end. I wish I had made a point of expressing myself here. You all made it too much fun just being a lurker and watching good folk be funny and smart.
I’ll find that place to express myself, somewhere else, but I wish it were here.
Thank you, Cohost.
I’ve been struggling to think of what to say about this website ending. I think it’s unfair. This was the only good one! It should have been easier for staff to run and easier for it to thrive. This website, my friends, never compromised. Twitter sucked right away- there’s no avoiding context collapse on the internet, there’s no way to avoid it in person, or with touch, as cavemen grunting, or with telepathic instant thought transmission.
Communication is always going to require generosity, curiosity, and integrity from both parties, and there’s simply no way for a “global conversation” (or a #globalfeed, stupid) to facilitate that. Emails were no better. If you want to defend emails, you can go to hell.
Cohost was never about fixing that context collapse, but by god it was the very best platform I have ever seen for letting me control my relationship to it. I really loved Tumblr but obviously, that exploded like 3 times in a row, and currently has the demeanor of a mouldy peach that the venture capital firm couldn’t cook or sell in time, and now doesn’t quite know where to throw away (and this is the site I’m planning to use more often now!).
It seems like there really aren’t too many stable-ish social spaces left on the internet outside of instant messaging. Like I said above, what else should I expect? Empire thrives off alienation, and we live in the empire of capital, arguably its purest form. Long-distance communication technology is an easy target for that, everything is an easy target for it. Of course it’s going to turn into a killing ground for ads and false commodities! It’s a system of information…NFTs are not the tip of the false commodity iceberg.
I think we can all agree that the perpetrators of this need to found and attacked.
And in a perfect world, I think we wouldn’t consider the internet an essential piece of communication. We’d probably swim around in some sort of haptic gel, that’s my theory. We’re always negotiating between what we’d do in a perfect world (swim in the haptic internet gel) and what we must do in this one (eat yogurt while watching youtube). Sacrifices are made, and here we are. Cohost was a little piece of that better world, and like all works of optimism, it’s something that you carry on with you, something that inspires the next thing, the better thing, the better idea.
It made me so happy to use it. It felt right in my hands. Like my father’s sword. That’s a bad example cause my father actually sucked, that’s part of the reason I feel the need to waste time on the internet instead of increase share value for investors. Cohost stayed with me in my head and made me excited. I smiled thinking about it, when I was busy. I smiled about a website. I think the last time that happened I was lying about not being 11 on the MYSTCommunity forums.
That’s not the kind of post I want to make… a goodbye post. I want to make cohost posts! I have a lot more stupid shit to say! But I have to say something, cause I don’t agree that the site “failed”, or this or that. I don’t really think it’s “gone”. I still use twitter and i think that site is more “gone” than cohost ever will be. Cohost is better and stronger than any of that shit.
That’s why I’m not going to stop posting here. I’ll just be posting here, everwhere else. I wanted to post some funny joke or another today, and I just was too sad to come up with anything, but I would have if I could have. I posted differently before this- I should say, I expressed myself on the internet differently. Cohost put itself in my head, a little eggbug egg in my RFK Jr brain (for future historians reading this on the obelisk- this world was once called “earth” and RFK Jr was a Necromancer who made a dark covenant with beast spirits).
This thing we all co-hosted together is going to spread all over the earth, we were born with it, and it’s always been there. Any person who posts with generosity, curiosity, and (the most important trait for any true poster) integrity will seem frightening and thrilling to someone who doesn’t. There is no substitute for truth. The system wasn’t ready for Cohost, and that incompatibility exposes a glaring weak-point in the system that it will never cover up.
All I can say for that is thank you so so much for letting me hang out here for a while, and thank you for making it so nice. I won’t forget, nobody will forget. Cohost gets to live on in all of our minds- the world is going to have to get ready to learn Cohost. I had so much fun…I look forward to seeing all of you everywhere. Thank you. Eggbug forever.
i rly wanna get all my rss and web 1.0 shit together in the next two days but i gotta say, im mot very happy about it or want to do it at all and feel like ive already missed my chance on doing it. cohost forever. ive already regrown old bad brain pathways about fomo and not posting enough having remade my twitter in the past month. it has mostly all been private twitter. but the muscle memory bounces back more than you would believe.
stricken with grief about it all. there could not have been a worse time in my personal life for this to have happened bc i want to believe in a more simple internet and work toward it but also am in a state due to real life where i just want immediate comfort and ease and couldnt have just learned html within a month full of so much extraneous heartbreak. i am not or will never be a tech girl. i took a semester of html and css in community college 12 years ago. that's all i got or will ever have.
the internet is a hell of a thing, and it really is hell out there. it wasnt three days into me having a twitter again that someone with a fake account of a relatively big streamer friend of mine sent me a very graphically violent video of somebody dying. as soon as i signed up for a new account on X, The Everything App, the first account it suggested i follow was elon, the third was Tucker Carlson, and the fourth was Donald. it is hell out there, and there is nothing there for us anymore.
i wanna believe in something else, some other way. i wanna pull myself up by my internet bootstraps or whatever, because i want to believe in something less centralized. but the deadline is killing me and i cannot make it. i have so much i wished to have put here by monday that i just dont know if i can make happen. i just dunno, man. it is one layer of a telescoping series of grief i have not been able to handle this month.
i wish there was just a little bit more time for me to get myself together.
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