Cohost
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| Website | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Cohost |
| Owner/Maintainer: | anti-software software club |
| Dates: | 2022– 2024 |
| Type: | Social media |
| Fandom: | N/A |
| URL: | https://cohost.org |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Cohost was a multimedia micro-blogging platform with social networking features operated by anti software club. It first launched to the public on June 28, 2022,[1] at which point fans from a variety of fandoms began to migrate from Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Tumblr. On September 9, 2024, it was announced that the site would be closing at the end of the year. [2]
History
Cohost So White
Final Days of Cohost
In the days leading up to Cohost becoming read-only, users commemorated the site via sharing reflections on the site's culture and farewell messages, as well as organizing a handful of memorial meetups, including in Boston[3] and Philadelphia[4].
Retrospectives and Reflections
In an essay entitled "Cohost Eulogy and Retrospective", user Shel Raphen praised the site's culture, remarking that the userbase created and enthusiastically supported a surprising number of deep dives into niche topics, which she contrasted with abrasive and superficial discourse common on social media:
Cohost encouraged and rewarded effort, as opposed to vitriol. Cohost rewarded writing passionately and at length about something that you think is interesting even if it is not of critical importance to the world. You would log onto Cohost and learn something new about deep-sea biology, city planning, obscure cameras, strange plants, or the history of a small country's brief socialist revolution. Sometimes, the topic was so niche and obscure, that you had never even heard of its higher-level category—and those posts were often my favorites. 5,000 words about how a specific kind of ski lift works and why they do not make them that way anymore. 5,000 words about why incest is so common in low-quality erotic visual novels (I did not even know that it was common in the first place! I am not a consumer of this genre.) Oh, and so very much discussion about talmud, the weekly parsha, and halakhah.
Many users shared this preference for Cohost over other social media sites, including @love, who wrote[5]:
thank you so much to everyone on cohost staff who made this past two and a half years the only good social media experience in a world where that seemed impossible. as far as personal social media goes, this is it for me, I think. this was a great experiment on if social media could be not poison, and now that I've realized what it's like when it's not, I don't want to go back to the poison.post by @love
@pervocracy also contrasted Cohost and other social media (namely Twitter), writing[6]:
Thank you so much to everyone who made me feel welcome here. Cohost healed my Twitter sickness, and made me confront the way I've been interacting with the Internet overall.I went through a phase on here where I would see posts or comments I disagreed with, start to type up a reply that was very heated and full of assumptions about the other person... then I'd take a deep breath and delete it. Even if I was right, what was there to gain? What game was I playing, what points did it award? Did I think that if I was mean enough, I could purge the Wrong Opinion from existence? Did I want the world to work that way?
Cohost was the first place in a long time that let me slow down enough to take that perspective. It's absolutely not an exaggeration to say it changed me as a person.https://cohost.org/pervocracy/post/7898253-thank-you-so-much-to
Shel Raphen also observed the creative and diverse ways users commemorated the site:
While Cohost has been in hospice, we have been seeing all the different types of creatives coming together to send-off Cohost through their own specializations. The musicians did a music jam of bittersweet party anthems. The artists drew eggbugs flying off over the horizon. The web developers made grande finale CSS crimes and guides to help the non-techies build new homes. Community organizers pulled together in-person regional meetups and built ways to stay in touch. Writers wrote long sappy eulogies. I have never seen so much of an outpouring of love for a website in its final days. It felt more like May in senior year of college than a crowd fleeing a burning building.
Fan Use
This article or section needs expansion. |
Fandoms Active on Cohost
- Disco Elysium
- Friends at the Table - Cast members of Friends at the Table were included among Cohost's alpha testers and the full cast is active on the platform, inspiring numerous fans of the podcast to create accounts on Cohost immediately following its public launch.
- Furry Fandom: The site is popular among furry artists and those interested in furry art more broadly, with an active furry tag.
CSS Crimes
Cohost allowing custom CSS enabled fan creators to make interactive posts emulating the styles of their favorite games, such as Balatro[7], Myst[8], and Disco Elysium[9].
At the final XOXO fest in August 2024, staff made a presentation that included some of these fannish creations.[10]
Controversies
Rahaeli TOS Controversy
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In November 2022, fan and Dreamwidth co-founder rahaeli posted a viral Twitter thread strongly critiquing Cohost's Terms of Service and warning users away from the website until such time as the TOS had been radically changed.[11]
Rahaeli's critiques of the TOS, which she described as abusive and coercive,[12] included its binding arbitration clause:
Right up front, 🚩in paragraph 2:
THESE TERMS INCLUDE A CLASS ACTION WAIVER AND AN ARBITRATION PROVISION THAT GOVERNS ANY DISPUTES BETWEEN YOU AND ASSC.
A class action waiver for a social product is not as abusive as it is for physical products, but it is a flat no-go for me and it should be for you too. A binding arbitration clause for a social service with subsequent terms in this TOS is fucknuts.
Clauses prohibiting misinformation:
🚩 "By using the Services or features thereof, you represent and warrant that (i) any information you submit to us is truthful and accurate--"
Have you ever made a post about something that turned out to be wrong, because your source was wrong or you misunderstood it?
That's grounds for suspension under this TOS.
🚩 "(ii) you will maintain the accuracy of that information--"
It's also grounds for suspension if you discover that a post you made 8 years ago was mistaken and you don't immediately update it.
Several clauses that made no sense in context and/or were impossible to comply with:
🚩 "You further agree not to copy, reverse engineer, translate, port, modify or make derivative works of any portion of the Services."
This is literally impossible to comply with. Visiting the website "copies" the Services to your browser cache.tweet by @rahaeli
🚩 "and (iii) your use of the Services and its features does not violate any applicable law, rule or regulation."
It is literally impossible for anyone to know this conclusively at any given time. Your post could violate some obscure federal regulations you've never heard of!tweet by @rahaeli
This is the Terms of Service of a hosting provider and/or SaaS platform that they copied and dropped in here and it makes LITERALLY NO SENSE. Like. I can squint at this and see that maybe they mean, if you sell content to people on their platform, you can't also keep that content in any kind of other repository or use any other platform other than theirs to distribute it? But that second sentence has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on literally any of the way anyone could use their site and its presence there means they have NO FUCKING CLUE.
Multiple clauses prohibiting almost all fanworks:
🚩🚩🚩 "You may not post User Content that infringes others' intellectual property or proprietary rights."
I will die on the bill that fanworks are not *automatically* an IP violation, but as written, this clause prevents almost every form of fanwork that is not parody.tweet by @rahaeli
🚩 "You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services."
Again, that's the second ban on most fanworks.tweet by @rahaeli
As well as clauses prohibiting any kind of commercial use[13] or requiring users to pay Cohost's taxes for that use,[14] prohibiting anyone from linking to any Cohost post ever,[15] and restricting the names or usernames that users may choose to represent themselves (about which rahaeli made reference to the Nymwars).[16][17][18]
Staff Irresponsibility Controversy
Many users have critiqued the staff behind Cohost for their alleged financial and general irresponsibility.
Cohost staff wrote the following regarding the reason for Cohost's financial failure:
"We had planned to bring in new revenue with eggbux (our tipping and subscription product) but policy changes from Stripe forced us to cancel earlier this year."post by @staff
Rahaeli alleged that this was never going to work, in a thread on Bluesky. It read, in part:
"well, sleep has failed but at least admitting it failed and getting up allowed me to discover that cohost has, alas, discovered the thing that everyone was telling them months ago, namely "your payment processor isn't going to let you do that, federal banking regulations prohibit it"... you cannot take money from one person's bank account and allow them to transfer it to another person, then let that second person deposit their money into their bank account without massive overhead. You can't! It makes you a money transfer entity if not a bank! we regulate these businesses! You know why we regulate these businesses? To PROTECT PEOPLE FROM SHADY CAPITALISM, WHICH IS WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO DO.
Stripe has never allowed what you were trying to do! They never will! You want to know why? Because 99.9999% of internet businesses that try to do the same thing are fucking fraud and scams, and the last 0.0001% are well-intentioned but clueless people who don't realize *they are making a bank*"thread by @rahaeli.bsky.social
Many people also expressed that they were not surprised by Cohost's shutdown, due to staff seeming financially irresponsible. A thread on the Melonland forum, titled "Cohost is shutting down at the end of 2024"[19], shows multiple different sentiments. Some negatively referenced the H1 2023 financial update, where it was mentioned that each staff member received a salary of $94,000 a year.[20]
"I'm sad to see the site go, really. But, between a staff member publicly bragging about Cloudflare forgetting to bill them, staff paying themselves 94k USD a year per person, and not accepting volunteers, I saw this coming from miles away years ago. I've been a vocal critic of how the site has done nothing in terms of feature implementation to make itself sustainable, and it seems like the second shoe finally just dropped."reply by Bede
Others argued that it was good for the staff to prioritize paying themselves and their employees.
"I know there are a lot of bad feelings around the management decisions the team made, but personally I kind of commend them for prioritizing paying their employees first and foremost. I'm sure the plan wasn't perfect, but people should always be prioritized over things."reply by TheFrugalGamer
Many users, generally, reported a lack of sympathy for staff, and a feeling of the shutdown being inevitable.
"Anyway, the site's shutdown was very predictable and inevitable. I'm kind of glad this is how things went down, there were worse ways this could have ended."reply by garystu
"i've got mixed feelings. it's a shame many people who found a home there now have to find another alternative, but on the other hand, the management of the site had a lot of issues (that others have already mentioned). it was inevitable as far as i'm concerned, after reading up on everything i could find. i'm glad the staff is giving users a chance to archive their posts and process the shutdown at least, but i can't say i have a lot of sympathy for the owners."reply by halcybutton
"I never used Cohost but when I learned that there were like 4 staff members total- who handle the technical stuff, the moderation and everything else- this news became very unsurprising. It's just not a sustainable workload for that small of a devteam."reply by wygolvillage
Web Rings of Former Users
In the wake of Cohost's closure, many users created web rings and other lists to keep in touch with like-minded people.
References
- ^ Credits. Cohost.org. Retrieved Oct 23, 2023. (Archived 2023-02-02)
- ^ https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
- ^ pervocracy (14 Sept 2022). https://cohost.org/pervocracy/post/7720893-boston-area-cohost-m
- ^ shel (Sept 24 2024). https://cohost.org/shel/post/7715123-philadelphia-cohos Archived 09-22-24.
- ^ @love. https://cohost.org/love/post/7623790-aw-man Archived 10-02-2024.
- ^ @pervocracy. https://cohost.org/pervocracy/post/7898253-thank-you-so-much-to. Archived 10-02-2024.
- ^ https://cohost.org/amypercent/post/5304033-balatro-simulator
- ^ https://cohost.org/isyourguy/post/42992-the-stoneship-age
- ^ https://cohost.org/fish/post/237372-disco-elysium
- ^ https://cohost.org/staff/post/7463450-our-slides-from-xoxo
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). Okay, people keep asking "but what even does that MEAN (it means "we have no idea what we're doing") so let's do this: why Cohost's Terms of Service are terrible and abusive and you should not agree to them unless they are radically changed (Tweet). (Archived 2022-12-08)
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). (But even then, the judgement of a business that goes live with this flaming dumpster fire of a ToS is incompatible with the nice marketing things they're saying and the legally binding one is the abusive and coercive one) (Tweet).
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). Are you an author? Do you sell the physical proceeds of a hobby, such as cross-stitch or knitting? Do you link to your Etsy, or hell, an eBay auction, from time to time? Perfume decant circles? Mention that book you just published? This clause prevents all of those. (Tweet).
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). Okay, look. Some of these terms have been fixable with small tweaks. This? This clause says that if you have ever made any paid content available on the site, and someone paid you for it, Cohost can legally come after you for EVERY BIT OF TAX *THEY* PAID ON THAT MONEY. (Tweet)
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). I am being glib here but this clause really does make it a ToS violation to link to any Cohost post, period. Or even vaguely discuss it! That's "disclosing" it! Again: they want this clause there to protect the content people make paid DLC. (Tweet)
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). 5. 🚩 "(ii) register only once using a single username" Probably the least egregious red flag from all this, but it prevents people from having, say, a main blog and a fandom blog. (Tweet)
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). 🚩 "(b) register under the name of another person;" Sloppy drafting: this is written so vaguely it implies any Jane Smith past the first is technically in violation, because that's "the name of another person". It needs a "that is not also your own", and then-- & --we get into the tough question of "what is a name and what counts as *your* name, which is. Well. We had a whole fight in 2009 about it, look up the nymwars. (Tweets).
- ^ @rahaeli (Nov 5, 2022). 🚩🚩🚩 "(d) choose a username for the purposes of deceiving or misleading our users and/or us as to your true identity" This clause literally prevents pseudonyms. I cannot, by this TOS, register as "rahaeli" as that is not my "true identity" (see also: nymwars). (Tweet)
- ^ https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=3355.0
- ^ https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up