Saying goodbye to Cohost
I left this day free to write a post about Cohost, because today's the final day it's operational.
In the end, I am not sure I have anything unique to say about it. I enjoyed being there, and I really appreciated that the site's design prevented the kind of harassment I'd experienced so many times on the internet before. It was a good place for me to detox from other forms of social media.
Cohost's technology is nothing special without its staff and their values, but I think the UX design was visionary. I appreciated that I could not see any numbers, and that I could post things without feeling surveilled or threatened by strangers. I blocked or muted what feels like a truly enormous percentage of Cohost's active users. I felt like I had loads of agency, and great control over my visibility there. (I don't get that agency on Mastodon.)
Most social media sites really, really need me to have low agency, low safety, and low control over my visibility. They need me to be disempowered because they need to be able to use the things I post to keep other people reading. It's good for Twitter if I am dogpiled; it's good for bluesky if I have to see some horrible, inane drama. And Mastodon is content to stumble after these services, copying nearly all their bad decisions--and adding a couple new bad ones on top. It's good for all these networks when I have a bad time.
A lot of people still enjoy having that particular kind of stress in their life. Cohost might have made more cash if it pandered to the kinds of people who like being chewed up in those machines. There are so many people who do not yet see these kinds of services as inhospitable to human life.
I'm sure it's genuinely working for some of them, but a lot of them are still powering their heart with good memories about an older, smaller social media internet. Like many of the melancholy millennials still using Twitter and bluesky, I made a lot of important personal and professional connections on Twitter in the early 2010s. But Cohost helped me to understand how dissimilar the Twitter-of-today is to the place where I "grew up." It helped me to understand how little loyalty I owe it.
It also helped me to understand how the patterns of behavior I enjoyed on Twitter were really not necessary for me. I've seen people say: without a service like Cohost, where will I shitpost? I love a good shitpost, but really, you don't need to be social-media-shitposting. You can express your sense of humor and creativity in other ways. You and your shitposts are fluid, like water: you do not need Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or even Cohost's staff to provide whatever vessel you'll pour yourself into next. You do not need these places to shape your creativity, and you do not need your creativity to appear before the eyes of 10,000 people a day. Those people don't give a shit about you. The people who see you on most social media sites, particularly microblog format sites, are barely paying any attention to you. You can make closer connections somewhere else.
I think the historians and sociologists of the future will have a lot of interesting things to say about how our taste for shallow digital relationships changed what it means to be social and what it means to be lonely in the 21st century. Plenty of people balance those relationships well with their deeper, stronger ones, but a lot of people don't. I'm not going to say that the answer to social media suffering lies in the past, though, because there are plenty of better opportunities to build robust personal relationships currently available in the world around you.
I have made my closest online gamedev friends through jams and longer-term projects, and through online communities that were closed off from the wider internet. I'm not going to recommend a platform here, but you can all probably think of the biggest one. It's certainly a lot of effort to invest that much time in relationships online, but you are going to get so much more out of them than out of the time you spend watching people from a distance on microblogging sites.
And I sound like a broken record when I say this stuff, but if you're looking for a game dev community, you can also find a local one. If you have none, you can create one. If you live somewhere rural, you might find yourself out in the woods with no mentors, only peers... but truly, genuinely, a stalwart peer whom you can grow alongside is far, far better than a mentor. I have a community of game dev friends who don't use Twitter, and I met many of them through one collaborator I befriended in rural New Hampshire over a decade ago. There are so many talented game creators who do not network on Twitter. There are so many who do not even post.
You can become one of them, too. They're serene as fuck and I admire them all so much.