| October 8th, 2024
Alright. I guess I'll have to start this blog with something.
cohost is(/was) a social media platform that I, personally, compared to tumblr and twitter in a lot of ways. The upside to this platform was that it seemed much more comfy, and that it had a feed that just showed you everyone on the website the latest of what they posted. Due to how small the userbase was, this allowed me to find new things and people that I would've never been able to comfortably find on twitter. Tumblr, sure, but I don't really use that platform as much...
... (but i didn't use cohost much either) ...
The last time I really looked at the website seemed to have been March 1st, 2024. I had signed up to cohost around Feburary 21st, not even two weeks earlier. I believe I joined the website because of the at-the-time "impending doom" which was Twitter. It still is. And yet I still have a god damn annoying addiction to looking through it!
Well, disregarding my hypocrisy — Today, I saw a post on that same website about a woman that recorded thousands of tapes that captured TV broadcast history over the span of thirty years. Another person quote-retweeted that tweet, saying that:
"This is one of my favorite stories, not just because of the immense value of her archives but also because this illustrates so well how archiving is often seen as unnecessary or unimportant until the stuff you wish you’d saved disappears."
I've seen this sorta thing being said for a while now, and it's always struck me as quite poetic. I said this on twitter, but I had this urge to post this elsewhere — rather than on discord, or something — so I, out of the blue, remembered cohost. I found the name through my password manager, and logged on; only to be greeted with, well, the announcement of its closure.
"We have come to the decision to cease operations of cohost and anti software software club due to lack of funding and burnout. As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor; all of our money in the bank, and any money coming in from people who buy our merch or don’t cancel cohost plus, is going towards servers and operations — paying the bills so we can turn the lights off with as little disruption as possible."
You can probably talk about the grimness which is trying to start a positive social media platform in the modern day — economics and politics — but reading this just put a god damn bullet in my gullet. I don't even know why! I barely even used cohost. Maybe it's because of my current mental state, but it just felt awful how the internet has one less beacon of hope inside of it.
I don't know a lot about the internet. I have friends who could write more about its websites than I could, but what I have been doing is writing a project that involves me trying to research things from the past that I have a personal, albiet variably distance, relationship with. It made me remember the tweet from earlier; that people don't really care about archival efforts until you need something that is long gone. It's similar to a phase you've probably heard of before: "you never know what you've got till it's gone"
It really makes me wonder about my future.
Will there be someone out there that would want to archive my past?
I think that would be nice.