House of Nettles: #cohost

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

2024-10-06T08:28:25Z

Meow Wolf, Cirque du Soleil & MSCHF are proud to present:

#The Cohost Global Feed

the interactive play-within-a-play-pilled digitally-mediated real-life experiential booking slot that seeks to ask: what if the hottest babes from Dimes Square roleplayed as the "most-severaled chosters", acting out titillating versions of their "blaseballiest" content creation moments? XD!

Seattle Cohost Wake

2024-10-02T08:07:52Z

As soon as it was announced that Cohost was shutting down, I knew I at least needed some way to grieve it in community. I'm not a particularly observant Jew, but I do take to heart the idea that grief is a community experience. Cohost was never an experience of any individual in isolation, so its loss shouldn't be experienced in isolation either.

I talked to my wife and Xandra who had also made some rumblings about some sort of meet-up, we decided on a place and time, and I sent out an open invitation‎^[1]. We knew Seattle was a pretty big Cohost city, but based on the Philly and Boston turnouts we expected maybe thirty to forty people.

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A large group of masked people in a park posing together, many holding Eggbug plushes.

The last dedicated count we got was fifty-eight, but people kept showing up after that so I believe in the end we had more than sixty attendees. Lydia even came up from the Bay Area, shocking everyone there who knew her! I was completely blown away by this incredible outpouring of love for Cohost.

It was an intensely emotional mix of mourning and joy. We had a moment of silence for the loss of Cohost, we came together in a cheer of "Eggbug Forever!", but most of all people just hung out and chatted. We even had our very own rainbow:

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A photo of me, wearing a brown, navy, and tan knit dress, posing jauntily while standing on a concrete rise in Capitol Hill. A rainbow is visible over my shoulder. Photo by rilight.

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A blurry eggbug in the foreground gazes at a rainbow as the sky darkens. Photo by Alyx.

Rose and I also came up with an idea for a little local mailing list for COVID-safe events. To help spread the word, we made a zine. I only printed fifty copies, which I thought would be plenty, so for anyone who showed up after all the zines were gone or who couldn't make it at all, I've reproduced it below:

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emerald city eggbugs

A community mailing list for local events.

(Between the text is a drawing of Eggbug resting happily in the shade of a fern.)

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join at

https://gaggle.email/join/emerald-city-eggbugs@gaggle.email

follow the link! or type it in

(Sparkles are drawn around the link, and a cursor is drawn as though it's about to click on it.)

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What? -An email list for organizing events and staying in touch locally.

Why? -Digital community is great, but local community is wonderful too!

Who? -You! Your friends! Anyone in and around Puget Sound.

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How does it work?

Hosting an event? Want people to show up? Send the details to emerald-city-eggbugs@gaggle.email!

Want more opportunities for COVID-safe ways to meet people and hang out? Join the list!

(Swirly drawings adorn the top and bottom of the page.)

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important:

not just for cohost alums!

We want to preserve the spirit of Cohost and use that community as the seeds of something new, but there aren't any Cohost users anymore. Let's spread that spirit throughout the city and help thaw the Seattle freeze!

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All events must be COVID-safe!

All events must require N95+ masks
Indoor events must require negative rapid test within 12 hours
Need masks and tests? Mask Bloc has your back! https://linktr.ee/maskblocseattle
Don't attend if you've had COVID in the last two weeks or had confirmed COVID contact in the last week

Be safe!
Be smart!
Support your disabled friends!

(A photo of an eggbug plush wearing an N95 mask.)

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Moderation policy

For now, we're using Cohost's community guidelines where relevant: abuse, harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotry will not be tolerated on the mailing list or at events advertised on the mailing list.

We also reserve the right to ban people for being huge jerks, but we hope not to have to!

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(Beneath a drawing of Eggbug giving a thumbs-up)

"eggbug forever"

I want to thank everyone who came and made this event as wonderful as it was. Now when I grieve Cohost, I'll be able to hold this evening as a balm to my heart. To send it off, here are a few of the particularly adorable Eggbugs I managed to photograph while I was there:

I think this post actually coined "Cohost Wake". It was certainly the first in that tag! ↩︎

2024-10-01T23:32:07Z

guy who just happens to get really into blogging on October 1, 2024, without understanding what compels him

Cohost Eulogy & Retrospective

2024-09-28T08:34:34Z

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.

…

2024-09-14T07:23:00Z

I added the ability to automatically pull down and embed Cohost posts. I just paste the URL on its own line and my automation takes care of the rest (checking it in so it doesn't need to make a separate request each time the build runs). Hopefully this will be the first of many sites I do that with: I want to see if I can integrate the notion of the Tumblr-style "reblog" with a more traditional site-specific blog structure.

In celebration, please enjoy a post I still think back on and chuckle:

Natalie wrote:

Breaking: In an effort to push video game enthusiasts to take graphical fidelity less seriously, the Academy of the English Language issued a ruling today that the term "4K" will be officially pronounced "forkie". This ruling is effective immediately for governmental sources, but non-government entities have until the third of February to update their materials before facing fines from the FCC, CRTC, Ofcom, or other relevant regulatory body.

Immediately afterwards, California-based studio 2K Games issued a press release saying "Fuck dude we really dodged a bullet there. Goddamn can you imagine"

Cohost in memoriam: the friends and family beta

2024-09-14T02:29:00Z

Look, I know only a handful of people actually experienced this first-hand^[1]. But I think it's worth remembering anyway, because it set the stage for everything that came after. We^[2] joined because we wanted to support our pals and we hoped this could one day really become our fourth website. But we quickly realized that we were actually using Cohost as social media. Most of us came from Twitter—it was still Twitter at the time!—and it was immediately viscerally clear that Cohost was better.

It had so few features at the time, no one had made any tools for it, and the stylesheets would just refuse to load with distressing frequency. But the posts kept rolling in, jokes and essays and so so much marveling at the unforseen positive effects of not having numbers anymore. I really think this early era both established the culture of the site and helped people understand how and why to spread the word among those who would appreciate it.

You might say "there weren't enough of those in the end", but I didn't think that's right. I really think given another five years of runway and maybe a payment processor with its head less to its ass, Cohost could have become sustainable. It's not for everyone, but the people it's for love it with a burning passion. These past few weeks have demonstrated that in spades.

think I read 50 somewhere but I wouldn't swear to the accuracy of that ↩︎
Maybe other people feeling differently, but this is based on my memory of what people were saying at the time ↩︎

Cohost in memoriam: only carbon now

2024-09-12T02:49:00Z

On a site that I've seen described as "a retirement home for the greatest posters of our generation"^[1], there's only shitpost that truly shook it to its foundations. It's not my favorite @willow post, it's the only post that went so viral on here that it seemed like the entire website was riffing on it for days afterwards. (not to mention permanently altering my vocabulary). You know it, you love it^[2], it's the obituary for Ryan Reynolds:

willow wrote:

oh geez, just heard the news out of vancouver. ryan reynolds was torched to death by a beam of light from the heavens. yeah the report described him as being “only carbon now” which strikes me as a little insensitive but i guess that’s the modern world for you.

It's actually kind of shocking to me that the phrase "he is only carbon now" doesn't appear as such in the original post, because that's how I (mis)quote it constantly all the time.

I am at best paraphrasing the quote and at worst lying completely about ever hearting it ↩︎
Or perhaps you are obscurely baffled by it, or even furious at it. I don't know the inner workings of your soul ↩︎

2024-09-11T05:30:00Z

This is the first of probably a number of my posts that I'm directly porting from my Cohost. This was, to my knowledge, the first "CSS crime" on the site. I made it when I realized how broad the set of inline styles the site allowed, and this was the cleverest thing I could think to do with it. Others would quickly outstrip me, but I'm very pleased to have opened the floodgates.

Natalie wrote:

eggbug playground
move your cursor to let him play

edit: now Firefox compatible, thanks @ticky!

Cohost in memoriam: 80 Days in 80 Days

2024-09-10T19:11:00Z

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.

it's all about the pandemic again

2024-09-10T18:00:00Z

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.