(a) cohost postmortem: life after death
"postmortem" literally means "after death"1. in the tech industry (and possibly other industries but I don't work in those) it's used as shorthand for the analysis of a major event, usually downtime, and the lessons that can be used from it; this of course stems from the "postmortem examination", fancy-speak for an autopsy.
but also there's nothing in the rules that says it has to be that, so I'm disrupting the postmortem by writing about something other than "cohost as it lived". this is cohost after death. I'll write the other post some other time.
today is the third anniversary of cohost's public launch. it's been 6-9 months since its death, depending on how you count it. let's talk about what's changed since then.
I am very glad I don't run a social media website anymore
FIRST OFF: I have mostly been on bluesky since the shutdown. those who are familiar with my writing during the cohost era know that I fucking hate microblogging and don't actually like bluesky2. unfortunately, two things are true:
- the only remaining social media websites are microblogging or Tumblr
- all the artists I like ended up on bluesky
and so I mostly use bluesky.
this is in spite of the fact that at every possible opportunity to make a moderation decision which sets precedent for the platform as a whole, they have made what I believe is the objectively wrong decision. this is honestly an impressive track record and I must begrudgingly respect them for their commitment to alienating their existing userbase in an attempt to court a new userbase that hates them and most people currently on the platform3.
what I'm trying to say is that if you put me in charge of bluesky I wouldn't be doing that shit, but also if you put me in charge of bluesky I would kill you for doing that to me. do not put me in charge of bluesky.
as I said one of the times they made a massive unforced error in moderation policy,
no thank you, i greatly prefer casting judgement over having judgement cast upon me
— jae (@jkap.gay) December 13, 2024 at 2:23 PM
if I am forced to run a social media website again I will assume it's because I have been thrown into the torment nexus as punishment for my crimes of "paying myself and my coworkers a slightly-above-living wage for the thankless job of running the only social media website people have mourned the loss of."
sorry got a little distracted there. the important part is that since cohost went read-only, nearly every day has been filled with reasons that I'm glad I don't run a social media website anymore. I will never do this shit again. if you ask me to I will say no.
and if you make a social media website that isn't microblogging and allows porn I will be there day one. you should not do this, though, because making a social media website sucks so bad.
oh side note: bluesky discover page has fully vindicated me in my continued crusade against the idea of a "public timeline" on cohost. I was right, as I often am.
I've been touching grass a lot more
I now have a job that doesn't require me to be on-call 24/7/365 which means I keep getting to do things like "leave town for a few days without my work laptop" and "visit my friends".
did you know that the entire time ASSC was operational, most of us never saw each other in person? the only one of my coworkers that I saw while we still worked together was Aidan; I hadn't seen Colin or Kara since before the pandemic.
a few weeks ago I was on the west coast (where everyone other than me lives) and got to see all three of them in the same week. we kept talking about having an in-person company all-hands, but we never had the money to make it happen, so it never happened. this is actually one of my biggest regrets.
I do actually kinda miss having a locked account
I don't think that having a "vent account" is necessarily healthy, but I have enough followers that I try to be conscious about what I post, which means I can't be needlessly petty about shit. you know what a locked account is good for? being a catty bitch. I don't like to conduct myself that way on main, so I don't, which means this is mostly relegated to the group chat.
oh. also.
the future of social media is the Group Chat4
I think that posting is good5, but that trying to use things like bluesky to be "social" is often a losing battle6.
something we saw fairly often (anecdotally, of course) in the cohost shutdown was users deciding that they were done with social media as a whole and were moving to smaller communities to actually talk to their friends. whether this fragmentation and siloing is good or not is yet to be determined, but it's definitely happening; we see it on a different scale with people moving off of twitter.
the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.
I said above that bluesky was my most used social media, and this is true if you're only talking about public social media, but my posting absolutely pales in comparison to time I spend on discord7. talking to people is more fun than talking at people. and if you miss the dopamine hit of numbers, just convince all your friends to get nitro and super-react your shit8.
I'm building sixth website. or whatever number we're on
it's with some friends, it's very small scale, it is location and event specific. we're doing some location tests next year. it is no one's full time (or even part time) job. if it makes money that will be mostly by accident. if it costs a meaningful amount of money to run then we will have fucked up.
keep an eye out for news on that one, although we won't have anything to announce for several months at least.
I should have written an outline for this post
but I didn't! and I can't think of more to write, so here's your closer.
building and running cohost was both the best and worst five years of my life. the joy of seeing something I had a close hand in being used and appreciated by so many people, combined with the endless stress of running a wildly unprofitable business, was a real potent combo that I can't recommend. cohost had a big impact on a lot of people, which became especially clear in the aftermath of its shutdown.
I genuinely wish I had been able to use cohost as a user and not its operator. by all accounts it was a pretty good social media website9, and I never really got to see what all the fuss was about.
cohost was unfathomably bad for my mental health and I have spent the last six months recovering from that. I still can't look at the codebase without freaking out a little bit but we're getting closer. I promise I'm gonna open source the post renderer soon.
that's all I have for now. thank you for reading. if you used cohost, thank you for having used cohost. I'm told it was like a website in there.
I'm sorry to start with a real "Merriam Webster's Dictionary Defines"-ass opening, please let me cook.↩
newsflash! trying to recreate twitter is a bad idea! twitter was bad the whole time! and you are repeating oh so many of its mistakes!↩
brief digression: cohost legend jamie paige dropped BIRDBRAIN like right as I was finishing this paragraph and I got so distracted that it took me like an hour to get back on track.↩
including but not limited to: iMessage groups, friends-only Discord servers, Telegram groups full of furries that refuse to use anything other than telegram despite telegram being fucking awful both politically and functionally, etc etc etc↩
mostly. I don't want to spend the wordcount to get into nuance here.↩
the discover feed is a big part of this↩
to be clear I am only counting personal time here. obviously the time I spend on discord for work is going to outweigh the time I spend on bluesky, but I have two accounts for a reason.↩
opinions are not my employer's, although they would probably agree with me on this one↩
despite all it managed to accomplish, cohost never manged to replace the one thing twitter was ever good for: getting me laid.↩