I fully forgot about this until @authorx reminded me just now, but back in 2022 I ran an 80 Days race called "80 Days in 80 Days" where the conceit was that each player could only spend a single in-game day per real-time day (for a game that's only supposed to take a few hours for a leisurely run). It's not the sort of thing that could only take place on Cohost, but it's the sort of thing where only Cohost would get into it as whole-heartedly as it did. People were emailing me their updates in full character as Passepartout, with @Zandra even sending her updates in French. @RatBaby won the race in only 36 days. We had more than 30 participants, over a third of whom made back to London.

The website I made is still up, complete with an interactive globe showing everyone's routes and a bunch of fun achievements I came up with. What a lovely little moment that was. Thanks again to everyone who joined me for it.

When Cohost goes, with it goes the era of my life I spent on social media. Now that I've tasted the rich fruit of what's possible, I'll never be able to go back wholeheartedly to a site where my timeline is constantly deluged with the latest atrocity, where there's no room for me to write an essay, where I can't even see and share porn. I have loved ones I've followed since before we were even friends whom I won't follow anywhere anymore. It is, inescapably, a paradigm change in how I use the internet.

And in many ways, that's fine. Social media brought me many good things, but even before Cohost I was getting deeply sick of the Twitter model. This is not an intrinsically necessary mode of human interaction, and in a lot of ways it's better not to have it at all than to have it in an unhealthy form.

But. But. There's still a pandemic, deep as world may be in denial, and even with all the mitigations and precautions available it's still an order of magnitude harder to spend time with people in person and another again to enter new spaces and make new friends.

While I've been grieving Cohost, this is something my heart keeps returning to. This was the last great space where I consistently made new human connections. And the way the world is right now, I don't know what can replace that, not just in terms of technology but in terms of life as a whole. The world is so much smaller to me than it was five years ago, and so the loss of a deeply valued space hurts all the more keenly.

RSS^[1] was the original federated social media. RSS invented the "share" verb. RSS is easy, simple, and sustainable. RSS never died.

I'm sure a chunk of you already know what RSS is. Probably some don't. RSS is a protocol (really just a text format) for listing the posts on a website in a machine-readable way. Readers of your website post its RSS feed URL into their feed reader software, this reader periodically checks it for new posts, and it presents all the posts in a single unified list with useful features like "marking stuff as read". (Podcasts still^[2] use the same technology.)

Back in the day, everything had RSS. Any site that had anything that mapped kind of onto "posts", from blogs to webcomics to the nascent social media sites, would expose an RSS feed as well because not to do so was to cut themselves off from what was at the time a massive audience. Even Twitter had RSS for a long time. This was great as a user, because you could easily read stuff from all across the web in a single place. It was great as an author, because your self-hosted blog wasn't intrinsically harder for people to read than anything else anywhere on the internet. It was a kind of federation, but one that didn't require each node to rack up server costs and DevOps time. If you could host a simple XML file that only updated when you made a post, that's all you needed.

If you're reading this, even if you used RSS a bit in its heyday, you may think "oh I can see why that would be useful" but you don't yet understand. All of this is just preamble. What really makes RSS spectacular is the ability to share^[3] posts across feeds. Each post comes with a unique identifier as well as authorship information, which means my feed can just contain a post from my friend that I think my readers would be interested in. It can contain any post from anywhere on the internet! Before Twitter had "retweets" and every website had a "share on social media" button on every page, RSS had post embedding.

Not that most feed readers really took advantage of that, because there wasn't a particularly tight feedback loop between reading and authoring an RSS feed. The one major exception was the late lamented Google Reader, the first high-profile victim of Google's now-infamous penchant for devouring its children. Google Reader provided its own feed for each user, and for a moment there was a vibrant culture^[4] of sharing blog posts with friends and commenting and discussing. I want this back. I want to be able to share anything from anywhere, I want to see the fruits of my friends' excellent taste, and I want to be able to have a conversation about it.

I may not be able to do that yet (although I am hoping this blog can be something like…