On The Demise Of Cohost, The Internet As A Dead Mall, And Blogging As A Whole

19 9月 2024

I have complicated feelings about the demise of Cohost.

On the positive side, it has rejuvenated my blogging spirit. Before Cohost, I was burnt out on writing: I was being plagiarized, getting terrible comments, obsessively checking stats, and so on. Cohost's strange system allowed me to write again, to not give a shit what people thought, and to just assume that I could write my own thoughts without fear of repercussions. It was also where I learned to meet new people of all kinds.

On the other hand, Cohost remains a social media platform. I still see the same Twitter drama (especially when it's imported) that I despise, a lot of social justice discourse that goes nowhere, and just a lot of "online" behavior that I'm sick of.

I've been writing on and off on platforms, and I still see the benefits: it's networking with a good ounce of shitposting, and it's still the best way to find new articles and people. I can see myself reluctantly joining Bluesky and Tumblr to meet more people, but I'm not sure if I want to do more than post links to my articles.

I've been wondering about my user experience when I was using Cohost at its brightest moments. It's not that the ethos was bad, but I still think social media platforms are toxic. I was still anticipating my notifications the same way I am hooked to responses, retweets, and favorites on Twitter. I want to see what people have to say. I find myself clicking on the site. Nothing really changed for me: it was a nicer, cozier Twitter experience for me. The same conflict I see on Twitter, just with eggbugs.

Even if the staff somehow survived this month, that doesn't mean the Cohost experiment was worth it. It created a lock-in ecosystem, albeit managed by people like you and me, and transferring files from the site to anywhere else was a pain. I understand that the site will soon have an export feature to help with that, but the site was clearly not intended to expedite exits (remember when deleting accounts had to be done manually by staff?).

I know that people have signed up to Cohost to read and comment on my stuff, so it makes it more complicated for me. As I move away from platforms and toward self-hosting (Neocities isn't self-hosting, but I can self-host once I feel ready), I think about how I should have written on my own site. I have more control, and I don't get distracted by the number of notifications.

But I can't kid myself: I depended on a stable community to keep me going. What is a blogger without an audience?

I think I'm just tired of constantly checking a platform for validation.

Sure, I like it when Rock Paper Shotgun or Polygon links to my articles. But it's more like a nice surprise. The sense of immediacy of social media platforms -- that someone might comment on it -- is very, very addictive, and I can't help but check the site.

I already do that on Twitter. I ego-search every instance of my site and posts, even when I know no one has commented on them. It's just a bad habit I want to get rid of.

So I was more annoyed than depressed by Cohost's demise. I would be okay with it dying (the writing was on the wall) if the staff gave us a heads up. Archiving everything in a few weeks is a pain. But other than that, I feel sentimental but also a tiny bit free.

It feels like the only platform I can belong to without some regret is a blogging platform with some webring capabilities. I'm not suggesting that hosting sites like Neocities are the end all be all either; what I long for is some kind of writing community that holds everyone accountable. I envy the neurodiversity blogosphere, for example: they have been posting their work for so long that it has found its way into anthologies, academia, and, more recently, publishers like Verso and Pluto Books. It makes me wonder why all the anime bloggers ditched blogging for microblogging and notification numbers go up -- all we did was atomize ourselves.

At the same time, I realize that I relied on Cohost to draw attention to my writing. I wonder how many people will follow my blogs via RSS; very likely they would prefer I still post them on social media sites like Tumblr and BlueSky. I have a real feeling that I may not have as many readers as I used to.

I guess that's okay. I think I need to start writing without expecting anyone to at least like or repost my articles. I already dislike tracking reader metrics anyway...

I could only write this reflection days after I archived everything that I consider important on Cohost. Reading this back for minor revisions, I sound bitter. I'm irritated that my behaviors have been thoroughly modified by social media and metric sites, and I'm trying to unlearn them. I meander because my suppresed anxieties about the future of internet communities exploded with the demise of Cohost.

I don't know what I want from the internet. A forum to share ideas and knowledge? No, it feels like we're in a bunch of dying shopping malls, opening new stores and waiting for the day when the municipal government steps in and says, "Sorry, we've got to tear this place down because we have to build condos here." And all we can do is post on our Instagram about how well our stores are doing.

Perhaps the real source of my frustration and anger is not the death of Cohost, but rather my online habits, how platforms have shaped them, and how I found myself in the same dead malls I see on another site that traps creators and audiences into their ecosystem, YouTube.

Whenever people complain about the demise of the internet and how it used to be so good until the corpos took over, I wonder where they're coming from. It's always been bad: the internet I grew up with wanted you to check forums, Facebook Messenger notifications, your RSS subscriptions, and so on. Everything is designed to keep you locked into the corpo web until the venture capitalists get bored and put their money elsewhere.

The posh coffee shops, the luxury condos, and the spanking new website that boasts a new way of accessing the web are all on life support the same way dead malls are.

The owners and their customers are extracted as much as possible before being abandoned to their sickly demise.

I see my worldview as ultimately self-defeating because the sites and communities I use on a daily basis could one day face this fate. Cohost was the first in recent memory. When will places like Discord fall?

The internet already feels like a post-apocalyptic landscape. To modify an idea from Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant in Health Communism, "it is not necessarily the case that our websites are sick. But none of them is well."

I yearn for a community that can be robust in the face of this deteriorating political economy of the internet, but I have a hard time imagining how any of this is going to work on an international scale.

Nevertheless, I know I have to keep writing about subculture and whatever else interests me. That is at least my promise to the people who read me. I don't think I can ever stop writing.

But I try not to write with the hope people will read my stuff anymore. I recognize that's the same toxic impulse that traps me in social media ecosystems. I want to be free from that.

No, I write because I want to free my mind from my hyperfixations and shout into the void. I'm so obsessed with the niche and the obscure that I feel the need to share every detail I find, and I can't help it. I find that writing about subcultural media is literally like mourning the good times and the bad times in that sense: blogging helps me process complicated feelings about a subject that inspires and terrifies me so much, so that I can move onto newer hyperfixations.

The latest hyperfixation to end up in words printed on my website is Cohost. It has some of the things I hoped for and some of the things I detested. I don't see it as a passion project, but as any other text replete with contradictions and gaps that point to something unique.

And like other influential texts, it changed something in me and made me think about how surreal reality is. Its short life provoked its members to explore new ways of writing and reading. Still, it falls into the toxic cliches that plague other texts like it.

I hope, as with every other article I write, to capture a fraction of what it's like to experience Cohost as a text uniquely situated in its material and phenomenological circumstances.

I step back and look at what I've written. It will fit nicely with the articles on subculture media I have written so far. It's time to move onto newer sites.