30 votes

What the death of Cohost tells me about my future on the internet

Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

8 comments

  1. [4]
    NoblePath
    (edited )
    Link
    One of the things that makes tildes, reddit before it, usenet before that, and even the odd bathroom graffiti, awesome to meis that it is about ideas rather than personalities.. I don’t know how...

    One of the things that makes tildes, reddit before it, usenet before that, and even the odd bathroom graffiti, awesome to meis that it is about ideas rather than personalities.. I don’t know how to replicate that experience in day to day life.

    There have always been personality driven spaces, this is most office talk (gossip whether office or celebrity), and even, in my experience, pub and church. When i first discovered usenet i thought i had gone to heaven.

    Edit: thanks @hungariantoast

    20 votes
    1. Raincloud
      Link Parent
      I think a personality-focused site like Cohost and a topic-focused site like Tildes serve different use cases. They allow for different kinds of valuable experiences.

      I think a personality-focused site like Cohost and a topic-focused site like Tildes serve different use cases. They allow for different kinds of valuable experiences.

      13 votes
    2. [2]
      hungariantoast
      Link Parent
      Is there a word missing in your comment? For example:

      One of the things that makes tildes [...] is that it is about ideas rather than personalities

      Is there a word missing in your comment?

      For example:

      One of the things that makes tildes, reddit before it, usenet before that, and even the odd bathroom graffiti [special/interesting/good], is that it is about ideas rather than personalities

      1 vote
      1. j3n
        Link Parent
        It reads fine to me as-is. "Makes [...]" has the same meaning to me as "makes [...] what they are", with an implication that what they are is something positive.

        It reads fine to me as-is. "Makes [...]" has the same meaning to me as "makes [...] what they are", with an implication that what they are is something positive.

        3 votes
  2. [2]
    elight
    Link
    I am grateful for Mastodon to the extent that it is hard for me to doomscroll cit ompared to other socials. And I am grateful that some Mastodon communities, like the one I am a part of, have good...

    I am grateful for Mastodon to the extent that it is hard for me to doomscroll cit ompared to other socials. And I am grateful that some Mastodon communities, like the one I am a part of, have good moderation.

    Yet I share your outlook that Mastodon is less bad than others. Your post caused me to see that, even on Mastodon, I do feel peer pressures to respond to certain discussions. This seems particularly noteworthy when I'm not even @'d in the discussion—as, as you say, not to respond is somehow a moral failing or similar. This seems perverse.

    Such behaviors take away from the essence of my life. Why would I want this?

    Perhaps my life feels uncomfortably quiet or empty without such dramas? Perhaps I am addicted to drama? Perhaps most of us have been conditioned by contemporary media, social and otherwise, to be addicted to drama?

    This is where I land.

    This is a sickness of contemporary society that leads to mob mentality and to divisiveness from the other mob(s). It breeds conflict. These dramas and conflicts are packaged into memes. These memes are tuned to evoke knee-jerk reaction rather than compassionate response. They are tuned to restrict our ability to think and choose.

    And so they are used to control us: to cede authority to our meme-promoted saviors, to spend money on our meme-promoted products and services, to consume what we are told to consume.

    While a cultural anthropological (or similar) background can help one see the trap, it certainly has not helped me escape the trap.

    I would like to escape.

    9 votes
    1. Raincloud
      Link Parent
      I've recently heard about the "trashed bathroom theory". It was an old Twitter post by a person who worked at a homeless shelter. They were told by other staffers that working at the shelter, they...

      I've recently heard about the "trashed bathroom theory". It was an old Twitter post by a person who worked at a homeless shelter. They were told by other staffers that working at the shelter, they will see the bathroom trashed a lot. They explained that this is because the tidiness of the bathroom is one of the few things that the people at the shelter actually still have control over in their lives, after having lost most other opportunities to make a difference and make their dissatisfaction of their current situation known.

      When we feel powerless, angry, disenfranchised, and want to feel in control, we tend to want to destroy things that we do have control over. That's often our own social circles. I pick a fight within my own community because that's where I will actually do any damage.

      The lack of control people feel in these algorithmic platforms with adversarial design turns around and makes those very people more likely to start fights among the people they'd consider friends. You know how the "learn Spanish" subreddit is filled to the brim with beginner questions of people who are learning Spanish on their first week, but never the really advanced stuff by long-term learners? Many online communities are utterly dominated by people who never learned their lessons. They have no examples on how to properly behave themselves. Because the people who have learned, no longer browse Twitter for twelve hours a day.

      18 votes
  3. whispersilk
    Link
    I'm very sad to see Cohost go, but I also really appreciate it for what it was and (for a little while longer) still is. I'm also thinking of setting up my own website: like you, I can't imagine...

    I'm very sad to see Cohost go, but I also really appreciate it for what it was and (for a little while longer) still is. I'm also thinking of setting up my own website: like you, I can't imagine shifting to Reddit- or Twitter-alikes to fill the same gap.

    5 votes
  4. Lexinonymous
    Link
    I was never super on-board with social media to begin with, and I've found that 90% of my internet socialization these days is on smaller Discords. Mastodon, Tildes, Matrix/Element and some Reddit...

    I was never super on-board with social media to begin with, and I've found that 90% of my internet socialization these days is on smaller Discords. Mastodon, Tildes, Matrix/Element and some Reddit usage are also mixed in there, and I have the good fortune to have a hobby where the original 2000's forum is still up and run decently well.

    What surprised me was Tumblr. I have been peeking back into the site after its acquisition by the Wordpress people, and it still has a fair amount of that old-internet vibe on it.

    4 votes