Pining For The Chjosts
It has been 44 days since Cohost closed, and the world is still worse for it.
I still think about it. I still think about chosting. I still think about the networks that formed and were forming there, and how those tethers, effectively, were severed.
I still think about how Discords aren't it. About how Reddit-likes aren't it. Forums weren't it. How it has changed over the years, as innovations continue in digital social circles. How Cohost wasn't perfect, but it was great.
Many folks tried their best to band together after the closure announcement, and small communities emerged from the fallout, but there's a reason that all the Cohost Leaver Discords got filled up, and then, for me, completely muted: Discord sucks. Chat rooms suck, once you get past a certain age - they're just too fast; channels are too big/prominent to be single threads of discussion, the threads feature sucks visibility-wise, and all the other forum-like features require allowing Discord even further privacy invasion.
And, IMO, forums are not the savior many folks think they are. They died out for reasons too. They also suck, in similar ways to Discord. People think forums would be great because 'you can read them when you want', and 'it slows things down' and 'they'll always be there unlike Discord'. But only the middle one is true: forums are just Discord servers in slow motion.
Whole subforums become too fast in posting, topics/threads get muted/ignored, and each individual topic is still singular in its focus, moreso than Discord due to the sometimes-days-long post-and-response cycle, just spread out in more layers of obtuse forum pages. Subforums are spun off, cliques form, social hierarchies come, fallout happens, rinse and repeat.
They were good! Don't get me wrong. They were good. It was great to be able to find and read threads, convos, from years ago, easily accessible with no fucking app in your way. But that element eventually split off to become the Diggs and Reddits and Slashdots of the world.
What remained is the desire for the social circle. And forums are just another small social circle, even if they have several hundred active users and a couple thousand lurkers. They were good, but they died out because we realised they weren't it.
And, trust me, they still get deleted. The drives they're stored on still die, and in a much less reliable timeframe than you'd hope for. Forums only persevere on the backs of peoples' effort and care, and that wanes with time, or drama. Plothook, an incredibly old RP forum with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts, games that had been running for 5-20 years, some peoples' whole creative lives, suddenly vanished, along with all its data, around July 2015. An entire, massive, old community, just... Vanished. Severed.
Even back then, in the height of 'things on the internet are forever!', things never were. Forums aren't any more the solution to community than Discord servers are. They're just an attempt at a structure to make it work, and so far, our attempts as a collective internet have been found wanting.
Cohost was better. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't a forum. It certainly sucked ass in discoverability. But it was better. Even after its first unexpected boom, when the quality of a social media platform usually begins a hard dive, Cohost stayed... Good. It was all the elements I wanted out of Social Media save for the forum-roleplay/games content (but, frankly, that's better served by the semi-automation and chat-like format of MUXs than forums.)
There was a feed, it was filled with tags you liked and people you followed. You could search for tags, but not post contents. (Because of that second part, there were discoverability issues from day 1.) (Someone made a global feed tag as a joke, and many despised it, including the staff, but I'll die on the hill that we wanted it and we made it real and not a joke, and it drove most of the discoverability on the site, which made it work for many people. You cannot convince me it wasn't worth its troubles - troubles that would still exist entirely unhindered without it.)
You could post, reblog, comment, and like. Likes were private. No numbers except total number of unread notifications. There was some really brain-warping logic around reblogging and how it affected tags/etc - I didn't understand the implementation, but it seemed to work reasonably well. Less issues than Tumblr. There were asks. There was an artist's alley for artist-paid self-made adverts. There were CSS Crimes (taking advantage of the shockingly lenient CSS allowances Cohost had to create the most incredible post customization, interactivity, and meme content I have seen online in a social media community at large, to date, bar none). It put even animated forum signatures to absolute shame.
It wasn't perfect.
But damn if it wasn't great.
... Now I'm thinking about MUX again. Fuck.
If you read this far, consider sending big ol' titties. Always brightens the day. They don't have to be yours.
