https://plume.pink/blog-cohost/ plume.pink ~/ /blog/ /journal/ /microblog/ /meta/ /info/ /rss/ [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] I've never used cohost. But I miss it. 2024-10-25 Illustration. Image description. Picture of Eggbug, the mascot of cohost, looking cute as all hell, as it tends to do. There is a small shadow on its belly and the background varries in shades of yellow. End description. It's a strange feeling, missing something you've never been a part of or even saw. And yet, that is what the end of "cohost" makes me feel. There has been an influx of Bear Blog users that are from cohost. Who transferred over their blog from there, and so on, and lots of them have that little stamp saying, I was on cohost. It's sad because reading them it feels like a bygone era. Something is over now and I'll never get to see it but it sounded amazing and people have such fondness for what it was. It's heartbreaking almost. And the most beautiful aspect of it to me is that no one seems bitter. Everyone that I've read talking about cohost expressed the same feeling of, I'm glad it was a thing, I'm glad it happened. It feels like something that had space to grow and that ended relatively smoothly. It didn't crash and burn, it didn't sour toward the end. It didn't leave a bad taste in people's mouth. At the end of the day, it will only be good memories. How rare and precious is that on the internet? It reminds of me of a small period during which, YouTube would often, out of the blue, recommend me a video from someone that I've had never heard off as they were quitting. You'd go in there and hear their stories, see the people in the comments who's been there since the beginning. Serving as a touching reminder that there are small communities out there, outside of the massive YouTubers and that sometimes, things end because it's time to move on, that it doesn't always have to crash and burn. A YouTuber is ending their career on YouTube because they felt like it was to move on and not as a reaction to a massive scandal they're ultimately responsible for is sadly refreshing. Good things go. But it doesn't always have to smell like cinder. It can leave you smiling, it can just be good memories. It's so rare on the internet to see something like that happen. Cohost didn't die from an illness. It wasn't murdered. It just did the best it could with what it had and now it's resting. Compared to so many websites, it won't be remembered as a shadow of its former self. It happened too many times. You spend time on a website and it grows and grows until eventually it becomes this thing that it wasn't. It starts to suffer from enshtification. It gets worse and worse and by the end of it, when it finally dies, you're almost relieved that it's over. All of the fondness of what things used to be tainted by the rottenness of what became. I'm sure that just by reading this, you've had at least something that was once meaningful to you come up in your head. For lots of people, I think places like Reddit would come to mind (even if there, oh boy, is there lots of awful shit to say about old Reddit). I think places like Tumblr would come up to. Mastodon, to some extent, I guess. Some people do miss Twitter and while I don't understand them at all, I do feel for them. For me, it's a nebulous mixture of a lot of things that I used to care about and that now are just distant memories that I can barely remember the address to. It's the places in which I invested myself and then eventually backed out, out of fear of it happening again, like some fediverse spaces in which I was really active. It's this blog, which I'm making as a solution. All though cohost had, from what I understand and what I saw, a static UI, it allowed for so many other ways of self-expression. The posts were full Markdown editor with full CSS compatibility too, which allowed users to do things that were really cool! I found an archive of that, there are lots of really cool things on it. In general, cohost looked like - and I'm sorry if that's offensive to someone because I know it has a big community - Tumblr, but much more self-expressive and also, not shit. It was built by people who were looking for something that just wasn't there on the internet and they made it for other people like them. It knew what it wanted to be and from what I can see, it went its whole short life being that, never bowing to the temptation of mass appeal. Places like cohost highlights why I never was able to build a nest anywhere, why I can't trust Bluesky, why I can't find my place on Mastodon and why this place, plume.pink, now exists. plume.pink is my blog, it's my website, and I care a lot about it. It is my baby, it's something I've always wanted to have and that now I finally do and I'm really proud of it. I finally have a space on the internet that is fully me, that is what I've always wanted it to be and that looks like what I envisioned in my head for the first time ever. I have control over it, so I know that I will never turn into something that I don't want it to, because I can control that. That's the reason why it exists. Seeing people turn to such a small space as Bear Blog after the death of co-host and transferring what they had from cohost over here to start their own blog is reassuring to me because, yeah, I'll be able to do that as well. If Bear Blog ever goes to shit (Herman, please), if things happen, if I just want to leave Bear Blog for one reason or another, I can just take everything I did with me. These are simple markdown files and a simple CSS. It's not complex. And it's mine. Tomorrow I can just simply take that and make it a static site that I would self-host or whatever. Seeing the people from cohost talking about it makes me sad because it makes me realize that, oh, that place I've always wanted to have, that spot on the internet that I've been looking for desperately for years before giving up and doing this, it existed. And now it's gone. Maybe if I had found it, this place here wouldn't be a thing. Because I did try Tumblr years ago but just didn't like it for various reasons, and what cohost described itself as being really appeals to the part of me that was seeking this. However, even in all of this, even in all of this good, there is still something bitter about co-host. And that's the reason why it's shutting down. Which is mostly a lack of funding. The truth is that hosting a platform is expensive. Especially when you stick with the principle of having no ads, no tracking, and none of the bullshit that makes everything the people who were on cohost hate about the internet. It's really hard to ask for people to donate because sadly the world we live in is one in which people to struggle to survive even in the richest countries on earth. Where a few bucks a month can be life changing money. And there are right ways to do ask for donation and wrong ways to do it (looking at you Wikipedia, I made the mistake of donating and you've been harassing me over emails and going on your website annoys the hell out of me at the moment due to how egregious you are about it). But at the end of the day, I'd ask everybody that can do it to please spare a few bucks for projects that are important for you. But it's also a reminder that centralized platforms, even those with the best of intentions such as cohost, are a financial pit. The people behind it all had jobs outside of that, it was very much a passion project and due to the nature of it, while it did burn bright, it mostly burned fast. Financially, but also, for the developers who were burnt out on the project by the end of it. In this heartfelt last post from jae kaplan, one of the founders, they express their "hope to never be involved in running a social media platform again." It feels like it was made by a bunch of people who just wanted to make something they truly believed in, because it was, but ended biting up more they can chew in their passion for it. There is an authenticity to its end, to its mistakes and to its "failure" that has become shockingly rare on the internet. In their farewell to cohost, Jae writes "go do better than we did". That's very touching, to me. When I see the blogs of people talking about cohosts, when I see Bear Blog, when I see my own blog, when I see my friend's blogs and when I see the newly opened blogs by people who come from cohost, when I see my partner trying to make her own, inspired by what she's seeing, it's heartwarming. It's what I want the internet to be. I never want this to stop and I'll never get tired of clicking on a link and ending up on this fully custom page that is sometimes just some basic CSS with some color changes but that expresses and oozes personality from the person behind it. It's beautiful, it's so human. When the massive internet, the corpo internet that exists currently will inevitably crumble, amidst all the dust and ashes from it, these little blogs, these little personal websites will remain. Everything that was once new gets to be new again. Everything can get a return. Let's make it happen. Please, if you are on cohost, if you have a small blog, a small personal website, please I'm asking you, don't stop. Don't give up on that internet dream. I'm right here. You're not shouting into the void. I'm reading what you're writing. I'm seeing what you're posting. I love it and I know I'm not alone. Don't ever stop. Don't bow down to these massive platforms who will never care about their users. Continue doing what you do. It's beautiful. It's artistic. It's amazing. I love seeing you out there and I want to see more of you. So thanks to cohost and all of the people behind it. All of the people that made it what it was, that helped run it, but also all of its community. I've never been on it. Somehow, in my search for what seems to be exactly what cohost was, I missed it. I never landed on it. And despite all of this, I'll still have fond memories of it, through the memories of those who were there. --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Comment via e-mail. Post history. 2024-10-26 01:53 * Change jae's name to make it all lowercase. * Fixed links to jae's blog post and blog. 2024-10-25 15:58 * Publishing. #blog #posts [irvTEtIoRWShsuKbIdnS] [ ] 38 [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] pride 88x31 plume.pink 88x31 page transbian 88x31 Add my website to yours! :3 [