Perfect Butterfly Angelmore then anything I think we're seeing the end of the era of social media where the promise was that all you had to do was setup a blog and or post your art or make a YouTube channel or whatever and there would be reasonable ways to promote yourself and find people who wanted to see what you do. I think a lot of people my age grew up kind of assuming that would always be a thing when it was instead a very specific very rare moment in time
I don't really know what the Internet looks like without this, especially not our modern internet? I don't know where it goes from here. This isn't just about cohost either, it's about everything; there's no real spaces you can do this on anymore. Everything is more and more silo'd off and demands more and more buying into the ecosystem. The era of not selling out is ending, it's impossible to have a non-algorothmic audience.
I can hear all the criticisms of cohost and I have em too but like
idk. Unless someone else shows up to try and make cohost-but-slightly-less-ethical-so-they-can-make-more-money.com pretty soon, and very quickly somehow succeeds in every spot that they struggled on a project that took years to build
you can say 'oh well cohost fucked up by doing X" but they were, in fact, the only game in town, and the imaginary better more perfect game does not exist lol
Dio9sys@junebug even their main "competition," pillowfort, is operating at a loss/has to fundraise every year to keep the lights on. It's really sad :(