all things are impermanent

this is part of what makes them beautiful

cohost did an amazing job of showing people what the internet could be
for our followers: yes, we can confirm the shutdown is real. the site is heavily loaded so it might be a bit hard to pull up the @staff post right this moment
when we first joined the site, we expressed that someday it would fall apart under the contradictions of what it was trying to be, and that we hoped it was an interesting ride until then
right up until the moment of the announcement, we'd been hoping for it to have a long, protracted death during which it slowly became everything it used to stand against, like tumblr
the moment it became real that the site is turning off soon, we realized that had been a horrible thing to wish on it. we're unable to reconstruct the headspace in which we wanted that.
@ireneista some people just want to watch the world burn?
@KevinOfComputer we wouldn't have put what we wanted in those terms, see. we would have been like... we hope they find some way to pay the bills
@KevinOfComputer but we're an activist and we've been around, and we know damn well what that means
@ireneista I was just teasing. It's sad to see cohost go, but not unexpected. Better this than compromising their values, I think.

@KevinOfComputer the teasing is appreciated :)

yeah, as you say

@ireneista admittedly I haven't even been using cohost much lately. I think the small audience lead to just not a lot of the content I was looking for (or I was unsuccessful at finding it)
@KevinOfComputer that's quite fair. it was all exactly the content we wanted - random furry art, deeply strange retrocomputing efforts, and occasionally somebody's music

@ireneista is it? seems to still be taking registrations lol

(did they manage to invent exports or did nothing change on that front since a year ago (when they told me "lol we don't have exports or to comply with the GDPR", in so many words)?)

@ireneista haaaa haaaaa haaaa "We have offered minimal data export for GDPR compliance for a while now, but this is a barebones system that doesn’t meet our quality standards." outstanding
@ireneista if the number in the staff post is the actual serial number, this comes out to one post every 9 seconds. and with free cloudflare CDN. a truly spectacular bag fumble
@nabijaczleweli as regards registrations, we don't want to participate in the hug of death; we'll look later
@ireneista i mean it let me get to the "enter data to register" page so that's "still taking registrations" to me
@ireneista It was genuinely an incredible experiment in pushing back against addiction loops.
@fallible enormously so. some practical knowledge of how things play out, which we're very glad to have for whatever comes next.
@ireneista The world isn't newtonian and knowledge is material. I yearn for the best possibilities for the next good social media site.

@ireneista Had a lot of glaring problems and in the end I could tell it wasn't long for this world...

But it's like getting a healthy relationship that had some problems that ended up ending it... but at least you can recognize what it's supposed to be like now.

@ireneista I didn't make much use of it, but I'm really gonna miss the CSS crimes. Especially @mynotaurus 's (and others'! I just haven't found them here yet) talksprites.
@ireneista We would like to express our sincere gratitude to you for making us aware of cohost's existence all the way back on Twitter. There's now no going back for us to the days before we knew a site like cohost could exist.
@sabrinabonfert oh hey! that's really wonderful to hear, and you're very welcome. 💜