Yo, Buddy. Still alive? And thanks friend. See you again. (A Cohost Eulogy)

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

I decided I liked Cohost when, in an act of vanity against the ethos of the site, I counted how many followers I had. I knew each push of the "show more" button loaded 10 more names, so it was just a matter of multiplication. It turned out I had more on Cohost than I did on Twitter. I nodded to myself and never counted my followers again.

It was not what it could have been; there were problems and a lot of people (mostly POC) who didn't deserve it got screwed over. Maybe it reflects poorly on me that I was (mostly, I did have to silence/block a few folks) not getting hit directly by the problems and instead talking to a lot of people who were getting hit directly by the problems. I don't know what I would have done to help. Called out some of the shittier posts I saw instead of simply blocking, maybe. I really should have just done better. Ain't that always how it goes?

From my extremely selfish viewpoint, it was a nice place to load up when I felt like it. I could post what I wanted and people usually cared to interact with it. That instant feedback beyond likes and shares (and most importantly, instant feedback that was usually insightful and interesting) did a lot for me. The pace was not as breakneck as twitter or a discord server, not as slow as a full blog. I could read good posts and interact with them. There were so many intelligent, eloquent, hilarious people to follow. I don't think I ever quite felt like one of them.

My friends joked that I was a power user or "Cohost influencer" but I have to assume I was mostly known for compiling other people's better posts, an endeavor that some assured me was an important act of curation but always felt to me like I was just riding coattails. From what I recall, my most popular original posts were both fueled by spite towards successful video games, and being known for that is just kind of unfortunate. It would have been nice to be known for like, something good... but it did show me that I don't talk completely out of my ass.

There were posts I was working on. I won't get a chance to post them now. I'm scrambling so hard to get a website up that I feel like I can't sit down and write about shit. I'm laid low by an adverse reaction causing vestibular neuritis or some shit and can't just go nuts posting as the ship sinks. I wanted to make more compilation posts. I wonder how many people read the Let's Play (@LP-7SU). I wonder how many of them liked it.

I'd like to think I made friends here. I'm not great at initiating, so it's nice that I got a few discord invites and that people accepted the ones I sent out in a panic (message me anytime, it won't be weird, it's cool). I wish all the folks I followed didn't have to scatter to the four winds, to a hundred different platforms with a hundred different feeds. It's harder to just go, "oh hey, what're they up to" with the way it's gonna be. I'm worried that I simply won't see a lot of those familiar internet faces anymore because the proverbial plaza where we met up is gone. I just wanted to hang out more and now that's harder. Most of all, I wanted to learn more things from more people.

I hope something better rises from the ashes. I suppose I'll make do, look into how to do this RSS thing, see where people go. For now... all the sites in the sky are stars. Stars where our eggbug friends are waiting for us.

the last shot of gurren lagann but the drill points at eggbug instead of a distant star

For now, you can find me at:

---
Comment Box is loading comments...