cohost was a social media website built by the anti-software software club. it was designed with the philosophy that social networks are for socializing, and it had some genuinely interesting ideas. but it ran out of money, as a lot of startups do. on october 1st of 2024 it went read-only, and as of today, it's gone fully offline. all that's left will be the web archive, which i chose not to include my account in.

i won't pretend it was perfect; it wasn't. their moderation was lackluster at times, and they only started accounting for broken stairs at the very end. but…

it showed me a lot of cool people, and gave me ideas, and taught me that i can do myself proud. it made me want to start a blog and then, when they announced the imminent shutdown, that's when i finally pulled the trigger on it.

but more than that, it taught me that good ideas do have merit. that a website being bad can be a fixable problem. that there's always another foothold, always another way forward, always another thing to try.

since then, i haven't really been on social media. i've gradually drifted off dreamwidth, not for any particular reason. i'm on the website league a bit more, and i expect to participate more as it grows and improves, but for now, it's a very small part of my life. just like cohost was – when it replaced the twitter-shaped hole in my head, it also showed me that hole was a lot smaller than i thought it was.

who knows? maybe there'll be another cohost eventually. maybe i'll find (or make!) another cozy home. maybe it will do better at moderation, at encouraging a more diverse userbase, at funding itself sustainably – or maybe it won't.

to quote myself:

so what if it's temporary? we built it on a foundation of sand. when the river of time washes it away, proves it imaginary, renders it a lingering impression in a few slabs of meat and discarded silicon – it was there. it brought joy.

and that, to me, is why we bother.