Thoughts on the demise of cohost, from an observer

I apologize for the quality of the mushroom pics in the previous post. I was shrinking them down with an app called pocket paint, and I didn't realize looking on my phone how badly it was mangling them. I checked the settings, and there are no scaling options, so I assume it's just doing nearest neighbor for everything. I asked fedi for recommendations for Android photo editors, and abetterjulie at wandering shop recommended Snapseed. At first I didn't think it had a resize function, but I found it in the settings menu. Rather than being an editing tool, it allows you to set a maximum resolution when saving the file, from a list of pre-baked options. I chose to have the "long edge" set to a maximum of 800 pixels, meaning the pics will either be 800x400 or 400x800 depending on if it's portrait or landscape. Which is a very convenient setting, much better than doing it by hand. Snapseed is made by Google, I don't understand why it's not the built-in photo editor. It does all the same stuff, but more and better. It's bonkers that the built in editor doesn't have any way to resize photos, like they seriously expect me to share photos in their original massive 13MP resolution? On a phone? Unlimited data is still far from universal. Maybe they expect whatever social network the photo's being shared on to handle resize and compression. This is something Twitter and Facebook do, but not fedi software. It's one of my few remaining gripes with the fediverse, but maybe all that image processing would be too computationally expensive. Twitter and FB can do it with their massive server farms, but it might be too much to expect from a small host. Ah well, at least I know Snapseed works now. I updated the best picture from yesterday's set with the higher quality resize, the close-up of the flat mushroom with the building in the background, and it looks worlds better. I also added a bit of custom CSS to make sure it's resized to fit whatever screen you're on, so they should all be viewable in the mobile layout. I hadn't touched the style settings at all, because I still have nightmares about trying to customize Livejournal's batshit S2 system, but luckily while dreamwidth did inherit that stuff from LJ, there's also a field where you can just add or edit the CSS. Maybe I can get things looking a bit more comfy around here without it becoming A Project

See you, space eggbug

So, cohost is gone. I had an account there, and I didn't use it much because it doesn't really fit my social media consumption lifestyle: I do most of my social media-ing on my phone, and cohost was too data intensive for me to use on the reg. There were accounts that I greatly enjoyed checking in on from time to time, and it seems like it had a great community, so I'm sad to see it go but not surprised. If you were following the financial update posts, and reading the analysis of the financial update posts, it was clear this was inevitable. The team behind cohost wanted it to be a business that paid them software engineer salaries, and they never had a real plan to make this happen. Even the most despicable ad-laden social media with the most addictive dark patterns isn't profitable. Cohost wanted to avoid all the bad stuff, which is commendable, but they had no other feasible ideas for funding the operation. They were borrowing money from a rich friend to pay their salaries and the website's operating expenses. They agreed to turn over the code to said rich friend if and when they were unable to repay the loans. They sold premium subscriptions, and they had an unbelievably loyal core user base with a fantastic conversion rate, and it still wasn't close to enough. I don't think it was bad of them to try, but I definitely think they should've been more forthright about their financial situation. Not that they're obligated to talk about it, but they claimed to want to be transparent about the health of the website, and saying nothing at all would be preferable to putting out a bunch of bullshit.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I never thought there was all that much special about the cohost website. It was novel that their posting system was open enough to allow the users to hack in a bunch of interactive CSS widgets, but once the novelty wore off, it was essentially just another blogging platform. That's certainly how I used it. I was a fan of a couple people who had their blogs on cohost, and I would often see fedi posts broadcasting and boosting good writing on cohost, the same way I see links to dreamwidth, bearblog, tumblr, self-hosted static blogs, etc. There were features that I appreciated compared to its contemporaries—I really appreciate the ability to view a person's profile without the boosts and just see all their original posts, and I wish fedi software would copy that feature—but I don't see anything about the software that would justify half a million bucks in development costs. The people were what made cohost good.

And maybe I'm just fedi-brained, but I don't see what's stopping someone from spinning up a mastodon instance called eggbug.social, crowdfunding the hosting costs, and everyone on cohost signing up and continuing to have more or less exactly the same community they had before. They could share their CSS toys on neocities, they could move their longposts there or use whatever blogging platform they wanted, they could continue using the same hashtags to find what they're interested in, the difference would be minimal. In my opinion.

Instead, there's been a sort of cohost diaspora. Former members are finding each other with the #heycohost tag, people are moving to whatever instances suit them best, and they're making the fediverse a better place to be, and that's awesome. I've also seen tale that some longposters are moving their stuff to dreamwidth, which is also cool. I haven't seen any examples yet, but I see how it would be a good fit.

But I've also seen people say that they're not moving anywhere, that there can be no replacement for cohost, that the only alternative is going back to the giant corporate social media that's ruined everything and created the modern internet hellscape, cohost was the only port in that storm and now it's gone and social media is dead. I don't get it.

I think some people perceive there being some kind of cohost/mastodon rivalry, that people on federated social media hated cohost and vice versa, that they were two ideologically opposed projects, and that hasn't been my experience at all. I didn't spend enough time on cohost to see the breadth and depth of opinions on the subject, but I've certainly never seen anyone on the fediverse wishing for cohost's destruction, and I've seen plenty of people enjoy both places in equal measure. On fedi, I have seen a lot of criticism of cohost's business practices and moderation policies, very justified criticism IMO, but none of it was vitriolic. Yeah, some of it has been a little snide and mocking. I tend to unfollow or mute those people. I recommend doing the same. There are twitter-brained individuals on every alternative social media platform, and yeah there are some twitter-brained instances you can safely defederate from. Once you do, the fediverse is a great place to be. I wouldn't trade it for anything, except when I need to write more than 500 characters, in which case I trade it for... What you're reading right now! And a separate blogjournal isn't really a trade-off, I think they complement each other.

I see the fediverse as kind of a co-working space for creativity. Everyone is in a big room with a bunch of tables and chairs, sitting at their computers, doing their own thing, but at any time you can get up and walk around and see what other people are up to. And other people can walk up and see what you're doing. And you can ask questions or talk to the other people at your table. There's a lectern with the mic in the middle of the room, and you can get up and announce that you made a thing and you'll be showing it off in the game room, or the poetry room, or the retro computer room, or whatever; and everyone who's interested can get up and come check it out, and everyone who's not can keep doing their own thing.

And here's the thing: the room doesn't matter. Any room with tables and chairs and a place to plug in your computer will work. Sure, if you sit at a specific table long enough you might form an attachment to it. I was on cyber.space for 6 years, and I was sad to see it go. But it wasn't the end. I got up and moved to a different table. Everyone else on cybre space did too. We can visit each other's tables any time, but we're meeting cool people and making new friends at our new tables.

When you meet so many cool people and see so many great things, you might think "wow, whoever set this room up is a genius". But the room is just a room. The tables are just tables. The people are what's important. I hope everyone who loved cohost find their people