Cohost is Shutting Down

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

Yesterday, on September 9th, 2024, it came across my timelines that Cohost, one of the few Tumblr alternatives, would be shutting its doors at the end of the year, and going read-only on October 1st. I’ve been a huge advocate that people join and use Wafrn as a Tumblr alternative, largely due-in-part to the fact that Wafrn is fediverse connected, and therefore a lot of the stress of server costs are offloaded into that connection. Not only that, but should Wafrn ever close its doors, every single user is fine, since you can just move to another fediverse server, with most of your data in-tact. Despite all of that, it is sad to see something that was pretty cool, go away.

Since the beginning they’ve been proponents of … an isolated social experience, dressed up to look like a website from 1997. Which is cool (the part about looking like it’s from the nineties)! But, like I keep saying in every other post, federated social media controlled by users, and not corporations, is the future. Being regular people who aren’t a corporation who happened to get together as a group of 4, in order to develop a social media website, is pretty neat. I’ll give them that.

But, since the general vibe of Cohost has been to avoid federation, at all costs, and keep users within this walled-garden of sorts … well, I guess all that community building is also finished.

I’m not trying to rub salt in the wounds of people who are upset about this. Cohost was genuinely good. It definitely wasn’t Bluesky, which, since launching, has been nothing but a monster in the room that says and does questionable things, while other people pretend it’s the only choice. And, I actually really wanted to like and use Cohost, but I’m so tied in on federation, that it just made no sense at all to me to really take serious. Just like with SpaceHey, the Myspace revival project … I don’t really have any interest in sharing my thoughts, ideas, and projects on an isolated website, in 2024, just so I can also go share it on the website that isn’t isolated.

Reducing repetitive action is necessary, because, if you’re a creator, you do stuff like this a lot, and time isn’t cheap, and I don’t have a lot of it nowadays.

But, for people who are just online to share thoughts, and didn’t really have any other place they posted them in, I’m sorry. I wish I had a million dollars or two in order to save this website. It really does suck a lot to see the good ones go, when the bad places are still up and running and have yet to die (TWITTER!).

As an alternative action for those who I’ve seen via Cohost talking about how it was, to them, the only safe place online they felt they could express themselves, I urge you to create a website here on Neocities. It doesn’t even have to be professionally designed or perfect, but just make a website. Design it any way you please, and set it up in a way that allows you to speak. I think you’ll find that being able to share you thoughts on something you built, for free, and without threat of any servers dying is pretty fun. And, at the end of the day, everything you create for a website should be backed up on your PC, effectively making it impossible for your data to be destroyed (I also back up my websites in multiple cloud locations, just in case).

Those are my thoughts, though, aside from being confused at how Stripe’s policy change on tipping caused all of this. Surely, you could still offer a site-wide currency in order to generate revenue, and just give people who buy it some kind of fake little digital thing for their blogs so that it’s no longer a payment for what Stripe essentially sees as nothing. I don’t know, maybe the problem runs deeper than that.