It Was Like a Website In There: cohost Memories

I drafted and deleted this post 3 different times since cohost staff first announced that today, Sep. 30, '24, would be the last day of posting on cohost. Sort of feels like the Eternal September is finally starting to end, in a way. Anyway, I have so much to say and I've also ran out of ways to say it all. I'm sad and hopeful and all sorts of other things that are making it hard to write. I decided to open up my inbox to anyone who had any memories they wanted to share about using cohost, and have them help me make this post. Thanks to everyone who submitted something—you're part of why I'm so sad to lose this, dare I say it, community.

@summer:

"i have so many wonderful things to say about cohost. looptober was the first thing that came to mind. a little hashtag/challenge started by @goatsnail. users were encouraged to compose little loopable tracks each day in october. i am normally not very good at being consistent with things like this and yet in 2023 i managed to post something almost every single day. many of the pieces i composed for this turned into full-length tracks which ended up on an album i am now extremely proud of. i wouldn't have this album if not for cohost! it's making me very misty to think about. there are so many other things i can say about this little website. compost (by @hvb) is another little music challenge i enjoyed participating in, though i wasn't as involved in that one. i made a post about my cat, who will never be big, and it took off in a way i wasn't expecting; seeing my cat and my art bring joy to so many people made a huge impact on me. i loved seeing eggbug. i loved seeing ryan reynolds become only carbon. i made friends and was booked for shows and commissioned for music and saw a big community growing around love and art instead of numbers. you could put css in your posts! what the fuck! photography, ditherposting, mutual aid, artist alley, genuine comradery. idk man i'm gonna miss this weird little place, the last community-based site i felt happy on the internet"

@shel:

"I have too many lovely cohost memories to really sort through them but one of the things I remember very fondly is when I wrote a long essay about enabling substance abuse in queer spaces and was called in by a bunch of people about having some bad takes. Honestly every time I had a bad take it was just so... good? Like people truly took the time to work with me on coming to a mutual understanding of where they thought I was wrong and why and trying to work towards good without burning the relationship or decrying anyone as an evil person. I learned a lot of from those conversations and the patience I was offered was always really deeply appreciated."

@sleeps-darkly:

"I guess even though I've managed to find more acquaintances thanks to Cohost, one random event still sticks out in my mind. I generally find it very difficult to write and joke about things, so I write very neutrally about everything. It's like keeping a diary. One time, @Codarobo posts a random picture idea that shrinks every time I look at it. I'm like, read it and think -- I can do this quickly in an hour or two, and write a quick script in Python and throw it on heroku. The picture was a regular Game Boy uploaded to Commons. I send a post with the picture and go out to eat. When I return, I see that the picture has already been severely compressed, with a scary face appearing in the middle of the screen, which was just a coincidence. However, it was also very lucky..... and then the picture got somewhat messed up due to the heavy load when the file was overwritten right in the middle of another recording. And half the Game Boy. like it was bleeding. So what now? Who knows. But it was one of those memorable completely random organic events. Sequence of images merged into a video "

owls of the godless internets:

"Around the time of The Exodus, when cohost was becoming popular, there was a week. It wasn’t a good week, with people disappearing below the waves as they fled the Twitter ship. I was bummed about the posters I’d lost forever. But on cohost, people were getting busy: inventing new CSS crimes, figuring out The Cohost Global Feed, and probably spawning the tagslug. I was watching it all, taking it in, when I saw something pop onto the feed asking for help load testing. The something was https://neodetrit.us/radio/ — I vaguely recall you have a hand in it? But that day where chosters were hanging out in the radio chat, jamming … that felt like a party on the web of olden times. That’s when I decided things would be okay. That is my memory. I trust it to serve you well."

@EzioJensenTheThird:

"After getting banned briefly over some ip shenanigans and the whole carhammer explosion incident, I wanted to seek out alternatives to tumblr since it was pretty much my main social media site and I felt i should branch out so I'm not left with nothing. I have heard of cohost from posts during that incident so I figured i'd give it a shot. I might not have been a big account on cohost but It didnt really matter since notoriety wasnt really the point of that site and that was something I could appreciate. I wanted a site to occasionally find and share some neat fanart and memes and i had that with tumblr so being able to have that on cohost as well without the issues that plagued tumblr was just nice. I followed and talked with some people, saw yinglets spreading on the site. It was a comfortable place to be on and i'm sad to see it go."

@ChaiaEran:

"I really love Cohost and am devastated to be losing it. It fundamentally changed the way I used the Internet, and gave me the social space to leave Twitter and Tumblr. It introduced me to you (I still love the BBS, even if I'm not active there), and a bunch of other cool, interesting people. I think the moment where I realized how different this website would be was when a silly post I made (it was just the Wizard Pondering Orb with the orb made transparent over a static rainbow gradient that would appear to move as people scrolled) blew up... and my experience with the site was still fine. None of the bullshit you'd see on other social medias. Cohost gave me the conceptual space to bring more and more of my life offline, and I'll forever be grateful to that."

@miimaker:

"Hi Nicky!! I'd love to share my good memories of this site with you and (maybe) others reading on your blog ^_^ I wasn't active 100% of the time... My activity came in waves where I'd post a lot for a month and then put down the social media for another couple months, rinse and repeat.. BUT REGARDLESS! I just in general really enjoyed seeing people incorporate html/css into posting their art creations and making 3d illusions n such with scrolling... cohosts posting format really lets you go wild and express yourself (as much as your website building knowledge will let you) and seeing it be paired with art/poetry/music was always so so wonderful. My favorite term that was coined from cohost was 'doing severals'.. like true embodiment of that one image where the guy is like 'more than 3 likes ... impressive' Sorry if you were wanting specific memories on the site and I just kinda pulled out general thoughts!! Cohost is such a good site for self expression and I forever love the format of preventing people from seeing likes... Truly made the whole experience less toxic and allowed people to open up more and actually communicate!! Sad to see it fall so soon ... It will be missed ... "

@giwake:

"I think cohost got it right and it proves that there's definitely a path to a better internet. A kinder internet. One where quick shit dunks for likes get replaced by actual discussion and feedback and conversations. The lack of easily accessible metrics made it so that even if I only got 12 likes on something, I couldn't tell and I still felt happy that people appreciated it. Now I'm on bluesky, and I can contrast and compare to other people's posts and it just feels BAD. "I got 12 likes while this other person got 100! why do i even bother!" A friend of mine did promos across all the socials he had. Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon and Cohost. Out of all of them, cohost gave him the most interaction. Cohost encouraged people to look and interact with posts. It encouraged people to look at other users as PEOPLE, not just random words to dunk on. Another good thing cohost did: It was actively moderated. I guess that's because it was a smaller site, but I never had to block anyone for being a nazi like I had to do on twitter. One of the first things someone told me to do when setting up a bluesky account was to subscribe to a bunch of blocklists. It's just... infinitely frustrating. Not to mention the literal racism dial. It's not profitable to kick the nazis out of the bar. "Microblogging" is stupid. It's an awful system that encourages people to shorten their arguments down to memeable phrases that don't actually do anything. I'm tired of the word limits forcing me to make threads. It's a remnant of the stupid gimmicks of the late 00s/early 10s social media boom and I hate it. Losing cohost kind of feels like getting evicted from a nice place. I was comfy and happy and actually ENJOYING using social media for the first time in a while. And then the realities of capitalism come in. It's not profitable to be happy. To those making snarky comments about cohost shutting down: We're all in the same. sinking. boat. I am doubtful Mastodon or Bluesky will last without constantly becoming worse in the constant pursuit of profits."

@milliesquilly:

"Cohost feels like it's kinda the only Online Space I've felt really comfortable participating in and getting noticed. Like, in general I do not get noticed online. It's also sort of tied up with Decker stuff for me, since like it's where people who don't know me personally noticed the stuff I was doing. But like people noticed my zines and such. I feel like if anything about me had got that level of attention on another website there'd probably be some toxicity attached but I didn't get any of that, which was nice. (Obviously not saying there wasn't toxicity on the site but like it didn't feel like quite so inherently hostile) I guess I wonder if I'll just remain in online obscurity now. Too early to tell."

Evan:

"there are so many fun memories of this little website, but I think the most memorable might be the current period of Poster's Delight that we're in as we move from the present moment to the end of this month. Everyone is just Out There Posting, digging up world heritage level posts and css crimes, commiserating, commenting, and so on... I know I'm engaging more than I have in months, taking time to hunt down links for bookmarking, downloading eggbug art, etc.. the next few weeks will see quite a few small online communities burgeon like they never have, and I know we'll keep the spirit of Cohost alive in the web 1.0 underground."

@trilobite:

"When audio posts first got added and people made rhythm games with them"

@goaty:

"Befriended a coworker after randomly seeing em on here of all places"

@prophetgoddess:

"when blackle's puzzle box post came out i lost my mind. the first few months of the site as the demosceners figured out that you could truly post anything in the damn box were magical and blackle's puzzle box was the absolute pinnacle of that era."

@UnregisteredHyperCadence:

"not specific moments, but every single time i've seen someone in a comment go "hey, what are you, a fucking cop", it meant the world to me. and it happened a lot. it made me feel safe, and welcome. like, i knew from those comments that this is a place where i don't need to watch my back, that i'll be taken in good faith, and i don't have to be fucking paranoid. i'm going to miss the culture of "fuck, man, we're all too old and jaded to be cops" more than any specific moment."

@Seaglass:

"Among other things, art on here is what inspired me to start experimenting with glitch art, which has been pretty pivotal for my work."

@two:

"people on here being both very open and very accepting about some identity stuff got me to think of myself a bit differently, for the better. similarly, i think this website made me a furry, and i wouldn't have it any other way."

@fred:

"Seeing people post about neocoties prompted me to figure it out bc I always wanted a very plain, simple spot to dump my writing, so I did, thanks to cohost. Also following a ton of musicians on here got me using bandcamp way more than I ever did before, and got me listening to new music more than I have in like almost 20 years. On a barely related note, I knew of you/your art but never followed you on Twitter, but then knew you did Gay Baseball w/ Lys, and then we became mutuals here and I don't remember if we have even ever exchanged comments but when you like my posts sometimes I'm like "oh shit, that's cool." Anyway, see ya around gay baseball maybe."

@kirbymacintosh:

"The first time I ever read 'Sheev’s Plan' by @Sullivan. Learning about movies, books, and shows I’d never heard of before from all kinds of people all the time. Everything @NastyaRomanov ever posted. All of the writers like @folly and @NoelBWrites who made me want to get better at writing"

@ProbablyP3:

"Loved lovehonk, the css crimes, "He is only carbon now," many things. Mostly I just liked being on a social site that wasn't designed for addiction and provocation. I'll miss that."

@composerfa:

"COMPOST weekends were always the best"

@parttimerobot:

"When New Garfield became an unofficial mascot for the site and everyone was drawing them getting up to Hijinks. When Love Honk was discovered. @sullivan's Sheev's Plan post, which I've read out loud to people multiple times it's just that good. #Cohost Build Club, which got me back into my gunpla hobby work in a big way! The feeling of having a post do Severals and just feeling happy about that and not having to worry about the numbers."

@estrogen-and-spite:

"The NES Pictionary Bot becoming just a sitewide project as we all were riffing off of it, and submitting art, and just watching as it flourished and grew."

@Vertxsees:

"there are too many things to consider as a single favorite, but something that permeates throughout my entire experience with this website and its users is faith. And no, not like some weird religious connotation of the word - very much the opposite. I guess it could be called 'secular' faith? iunno if that's already a term that exists, but just like. the community and understanding, inherently, that other folks are okay to interact with. Faith in my fellow users. realizing maybe this is better described as 'queer faith.' This feels like a better way to describe it, since the queerness of this space plays a tremendous factor in the unspoken understanding that I've experienced. I am confident I'm not the only user who has experienced this particular sense of community, but this is definitely the most noticeable part of my experience as a user of cohost."

@diane:

"i keep thinkin about the paul mccartney christmas song chost. the interactable with the thirty audio sections"

@spiralingvoid:

"the jokes. the long posts. the short posts. the art, even the bad art. CSS crimes, every crime, no matter how stupid - we forget that the web is a creative and expressive tool, and cohost is the only social media to truly embrace the web as a creative tool. the thing that makes us human is our ability to create. cohost is for people, eggbug is our simple little goofy oval hero. just a tiny little fella. what a great guy. i'm gonna miss eggbug, too. cohost makes me think of the Strangeloop conference. Or at least what it was for a while, and maybe what it still is, where it's about the intersection of art and technology. how you make art with technology. how technology becomes art. cohost is social media for artists, creators, and the people who love to mingle with them at a weird party or even just watch them hanging out. I'll miss it deeply."

@Codarobo:

"definitely The Gameboy. I will never forget the gameboy and its sea of blood. thank you @sleeps-darkly for running with my idea and making it happen and all the people who enjoyed watching it suffer :)"

@bootjack:

"i've always been a terminal lurker but cohost let me have a space on the internet where i could feel like i could just post without the fear of getting attacked for existing. it also helped me embrace even further being a weirdo furry, and also a therian. it was a comfortable place to explore and learn and i loved reading people's high quality infodumps on various topics. also the css crimes were a lot of fun, even if i didn't personally have the skills to create a crime myself"

@mushy:

"i posted goofy dark souls art i made and someone liked it enough to print it out, make it a bumper sticker, and give me $30 about it"

@eatallyourdarlings

"@obscureenvironments was a joy and I'll probably start something like it. made sure to save it on archive.org wish i hadn't just lurked on cohost, it seemed cozy and i need internet friends"

@kobold-wyx

"idk i just keep thinking about how the site got me into actual creative css. i couldn't imagine building a website then bam we're messing with css on here and now i have a whole ass neocities and suite of open source poorly written twitch toys and it's all cuz of cohost. there is just no other site with such a low barrier to website shitposting that comes with a built in audience. i also miss the dream it represented for a better and more equitably fairer future. thought we were gonna have a world where patreon has actual competition n it wasn't owned and ruined by capital. just wish this site had pulled it off"

:,)

Anyway. Yeah. Hmm. I'll have more to say later. For now, it's time to say goodbye and go to bed.

Nicky Flowers - 09/30/24 - Eggbug Forever (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com, i want to start replying to messages in special mailbag blog posts)