posted on shelraphen.com Cohost Eulogy & Retrospective
Part Two: Cohost Was Good For Me
A common sentiment expressed since the announcement that Cohost is closing down has been "Cohost fixed me after Twitter broke me." I will echo this sentiment. Twitter gave me mental illnesses I didn't have before. Cohost felt like waking up from a dream. It is difficult to even remember all of the wild things I used to perceive as being of incredible importance. Anarchists versus Marxist-Leninists? Bisexual Lesbian Discourse? While these conversations aren't completely without merit, they are not worth receiving death threats over, nor losing sleep. Hypothetical intellectual conversations on Twitter felt like battles for your life and it gave me incredible anxiety. Being wrong could cost you your following, your sense of community, and whatever sense of power or safety they brought you. It did not matter what you were wrong about. When I moved over to Cohost, and stopped using Twitter, all of that dissipated rapidly. Who cares if somebody has an opinion that is wrong?
Something else happened when I switched to Cohost. I stopped merely posting and started writing. I never saw my twitter threads as substantial meaningful writing. They were tweets. There was a character limit I flaunted by going on and on. People replied before they finished reading. Every tweet had to be a fully self-contained paragraph. There was no room for hedging your sentences or adding nuance. The composer did not lend itself to going back over what you wrote and editing it.