Fourth Website Down, Three to Go :(

Cult classic “fourth website” cohost is shutting down sometime later this year, with the site going read-only on October 1st. It marks the end of life for a fiercely beloved and sadly doomed website that I am going to miss dearly for a very, very long time. I will have a more conclusive post about it when it’s locked up but I wanted to say some shit when the feelings were more raw (I am writing this sentence at 9:51pm September 9, the day cohost staff posted the announcement, please forgive any errors). I’ve spent the better part of the day sulking around the house and I’ve just got done crying after receiving some heartfelt messages from friends. Friends I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t joined back in February 2022, as well as a comment from a mutual of mine that I don’t know when/if I will see/hear from them again after the end of the month.

The thing is, the running joke about cohost being an elder millennial retirement community for some users, it’s a little bit true for some. Many of my favorite people on the site have said for months that this social media platform was going to be their last. There’s simply no other website they’re interested in, they don’t like how stiflingly hyper-capitalist the web in general has become, making even one more new godforsaken account literally anywhere doesn’t sound worth it anymore, various reasons I can’t blame them for. Some have said they’ll think about making their own website or newsletter, but some are planning on saying goodbye to posting publicly (and in some cases, being online in general) once we hit October. That’s a bunch of really nice people I’ve enjoyed getting to know over 2 and a half years that might not be in my life anymore! Or they will be, but not quite as often. It’s really hitting me in the gut! I have tried all day to stop being so sappy and sentimental and sad but I can’t. I know it’s just a website and all but to be honest I haven’t had the greatest, like, half-decade. Things have been pretty rough for a while, and I have a hard time managing a healthy social life when things are going well. The past 2 years in particular have been brutal. So this website, with its collection of feral weirdos and css criminals and film photographers and indie game devs and thoughtful essayists and linux freaks and painters and sculptors and animators and shitposters and everyone else… well, it’s been really fucking nice.

I haven’t felt this comfortable socializing in ages. There’s no incentive for bickering and quote tweet dunking or content grindset shit. It’s as real of a social space as you can get with a website that kind of looks like Tumblr. I needed this space, at first to recover from my near-toxic levels of Twitterbrain. Once I healed from that (getting banned helped) and quit drinking for real as well, cohost turned into the only website I didn’t dread logging onto. I would get heart palpitations seeing that I had X amount of notifications on Twitter—cohost didn’t even have a number attached to the notifications. No numbers sounds awful at first but it’s actually been hard for me to go back to seeing them on Bluesky, as I grudgingly post more on there. If I went from Twitter directly to BSKY, I would’ve taken all of my terrible traits with me. The constant arguing with people about shit that doesn’t matter, the Main Character hunting. Cohost legit scrubbed my brain of this impulses. It’s like I got vaccinated and now it’s okay for me to interact with grosser platforms.

Not only has it been good for me mentally, cohost has connected me with artists I wouldn’t have ever heard of otherwise and to an audience that wouldn’t have heard of me. Every time I look at my metrics on my various other platforms, the number one referral url is cohost dot org. Every time. I was so scared that my ban from X, The Everything App would ruin my widdle metwics. My metrics are beautiful and perfect thanks to cohost. Back in March, I posted something like “hey I’m going to see the Oakland A’s opening day game, anyone wanna meet me there? I’ll be in this section with a bunch of popcorn” and not only did two people actually show up? But they were extremely chill hangs! Very nice individuals! Could you imagine opening up whatever stupid app you scroll while on the toilet at work and asking the freaks on there to meet you in a physical location? There’s just no way! cohost is different though, I swear.

Now—it’s got a ton of issues, as some users of other similarly doomed websites are giddy to point out. Some of the issues they bring up are uhhhh well they’ are why the site is shutting down, so obviously not all criticism here is in bad faith lol. But I worry that any articles or post-mortems about cohost will focus solely on the negatives, the supposed failure of the whole endeavor. I’ve seen people on Twitter 2 say it was foolish of anyone to think it could ever work, it was unsustainable to make a nice website that doesn’t give you a migraine to think about using. And sure, those who are talking less out of their ass than others will point out legitimate issues, like the unclear path to financial stability. These folks usually sound correct, although I don’t know much about finances. Can someone remind me which social media platform has a clear path to financial stability? Any of them? No? What about Bluesky? Oh, weird, okay.

I could get into the whole thing with their payment processor Stripe essentially kneecapping their entire business plan without warning but my larger point is this: the tiny 4 person team paying themselves dirt at Anti-Software Software Club tried. They tried making something better. They saw what social media is like now and they had their own idea of what it could be. It would’ve been far easier to go with something more algorithmically driven, something backed by venture capital and ad revenue and the selling of user data and optimizing for endless growth. They could’ve slapped some AI in there, that’s what every other desperate tech start-up is doing. They tried something else though. It only lasted a short while, but it lasted long enough to make thousands of people very sad about its loss and very happy they got to experience it while it lasted. They succeeded. If you want hard numbers, here’s some from the CEO, jae kaplan:

“At peak, cohost boasted nearly 40k MAU against 111k total users. cohost's optional subscription had a consistent >8% conversion rate throughout its entire lifetime.”

From other posts they’ve made and other people in tech I’ve talked to, these are miracle numbers. These are numbers other social media people dream of. 111k users isn’t the biggest user base in the world but the people who got cohost really fucking got it. And they gave as much as they could to help support the platform. They tried too.

The amount of people you can find mourning the loss of this space is proof that something like it is desperately wanted and that a better internet is possible. The way I figure it? We just need to completely change how society functions and overhaul the economic system that we currently exist under. You know, the one that runs on human blood and misery. Only then do I think cohost2.org will truly flourish and succeed for a millennia. I’ll try and hang onto that URL until then.

Long live Eggbug. Bug bless Jae, Colin, Aidan, and Kara and anyone who ever left a nice comment on one of my posts. Bug bless you all.

Nicky Flowers - 09/10/24 - if you used cohost and you wanna tell me about your fave memories and such, email me and i'll include ur story in my next blog post about cohost. thanks!