RIP Cohost

It's a year now that Cohost has been gone. And, holy shit I think we've learned two big lessions from that. The first one is: it's impossible to run a website that's good that also makes money or gets funding. The second one is: social media as an idea has reached it's logical conclusion. 

I had an annual cohost membership, and when I signed up for it I did so knowing that people would eventually get mad at Cohost for some kind of slight, and also that my $50 a year was not going to be enough to keep the website going. I did more than most users of a small website would do. 

Over a decade ago I was a pretty big regular on a website called Metafilter, billed as a community weblog, but part of being a community means that eventually you develop beefs with people or the userbase starts to grate on you. But that's besides the point - it was a pretty big deal in its first couple of years and it was mainly funded through google ads - ads that would show up because it's askMetafilter subsite was very popular on google results. But then one day google de-ranked AskMetafilter, and ad revenue dried up, and the site started a decade long and slow decline that it's still in the process of now. To the point where site runners began asking for users to pay a monthly subscription to keep the lights on.

Crowdfunding in the VC era really doesn't work. When rent is cheaper and healthcare expenses aren't a factor - maybe it can work. The fact is paying american salaries - and salaries that are competative for higher cost areas - make anything that isn't funded by an indifferent VC firehose of cash impossible in my opinion. Back like 20 years ago one could have a webcomic, sell merch and run banner ads, and maybe make rent if they were popular enough. That apartment was $500 a month, and now it's $2500 a month. 

But enough of the bummers. I remember the good parts of Cohost too. I met some really good people on there. I remember the time people figured out how to do full screen CSS tricks that would stack on top of each other - which would make the website totally unreadable. I remember interactive toys and gizmos people would make posts out of. I remember the long blogs and posts people would make. I remember realizing that - in removing fave and reblog numbers - the chase of a post getting big numbers was gone. I also remember that not seeing follower counts on profiles made everything feel a lot more even. The tempurature felt like it was turned way down. People made such good art and it was really easy to find. 

I don't think we'll see another cohost. I think the future is running a forum with your friends that you pay hosting for yourself. I think the future of posting is going back to blogging where you own the whole - or most of - the stack. I think the indie web will exist in some form because people are interested in maintaining the infrastructure more than making any money off it.