Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.
The title of this post is a quote from one of my favorite video games (you should really go look at the post I linked above) about grief and endings. This expression of the end of a life, somewhat literal in the game’s sense, is the one that formed the basis for how I learned to deal with grief and accept that things will one day come to an end. I was only a kid, nine or ten, when I ran into it the first time and my ability to handle grief, mortality, and the change that comes from endings of all kinds is built on the understanding I gained in that moment. In the game, a dying warrior finds you, tells you his story, and asks you to fight on in his place once you’ve used your magic to help heal the wound in his heart and soul (which are the only wounds you can address). He knows that he is coming to an end, that his life is over, but trusts that someone will carry on with the work he can no longer do. He trusts that the world will continue without him, that there will still be life and beauty and music after him, and that the people he has to leave behind will learn to live without him. He accepts that he will fade away but that the life he lived will still be a part of something larger than he could ever be. After all, as he says, he is just another wave in the ocean, destined to disappear. That quote, that moment, is what has stuck with me more than any other part of the game. I can still see the entire sequence in my head, still grainy from the old CRT television I played on, still lit from behind by the large windows in my parents’ living room, still at a weird angle because we weren’t allowed to put game consoles on the floor or drag kitchen chairs into the living room so I had to sit on the floor (or the coffee table if my parents weren’t watching) to play the game.
Things change. Places and people come and go. Things we love are taken from us and things we hated slowly fade. The world shifts around us and even as the internet solidifies behind massive walls, creating warped gardens of hideous capitalistic data feeds meant only to engage with our negative emotions because that’s what generates clicks and engagement that they can sell to advertisers, life will spring up in the cracks. In the twenty-four hours since I started writing this post and first learned the news, I’ve seen so many new websites spring into being. After all, if you take all the people who want to get away from algorithms, who want to create and consume longform posts, who are brimming with creativity described as “CSS Crimes” and tell them that their current home is going to go away, then of course they’re going to build some place new for themselves. That’s what Cohost was in its ideal form, after all. A place for all of us to build something new. In time, as people move through the stages of grief and run out of elaborate shitposts, drafts never posted, and explorations of what it means to exist on the internet in this day and age, I’m sure even more websites will come into being. I mean, everyone on Cohost has already done that at least once: moved websites and made a new home. It’s not like anyone signed up for their first social media account on Cohost. Everyone there is someone who couldn’t stand being on Twitter anymore or who fled Tumblr during one of its periodic site-wide problems. We’re here because we moved on from our last homes and we’ll all find somewhere new to gather again.
Only, we probably won’t all find each other. I’ve got friends who never left Twitter or who stopped being as active on the internet after Twitter started going to hell. Every move comes with a great deal of loss and I’ll admit that this constant loss, as change strikes again and again, has made me leery of investing too much in most of my online connections. After all, there’s no telling when anywhere is going to suddenly implode. It happened on Cohost with little warning (I’ll admit I knew the writing was on the wall when the team’s plan for paying for their work fell through, which apparently many others had seen coming from the get-go, but that doesn’t make it sting any less) and it can happen elsewhere, too. Discord, BlueSky… well, I planned to write a longer list but those are pretty much the only places I have left. I mean, Facebook, sure, but I hate it there and only really keep it there because at least one person clicks the links from there to read my blog posts. Whoever you are, know that I keep posting to Facebook specifically for YOU.
It is difficult to get comfortable in a place, even when it feels like home, if you’re constantly wondering how much time you’ve got left. This whole situation makes it incredibly tempting to consider leaving the internet entirely. It’s not like most of my attempts to make social connections with people have panned out terribly well. All I’ve got to show for my efforts so far is a shrinking list of people I’d describe as my “online friends.” Even this blog is starting to feel less and less certain. I mean, I’ve never really felt like this place was my home. I control it, as much as anyone can control something on the internet in the days of constant data scraping, but this has always felt more like an office than a home. Sure, I’m being myself here, but I’m actively being myself. This isn’t a place to simply exist, this a place where I must actively (and somewhat performatively) be myself. I am not at rest here, I am acting. Cohost, though, felt like home and I will miss it dearly because no where else I’ve ever been on the internet has managed to feel as much like a home as Cohost did.
No home is perfect and Cohost was far from it. There was always something unnecessarily dramatic going on and it was incredibly white (to a severe fault, sometimes, as many people pointed out despite how relentless they’d be hounded or harassed), but it was a place that still felt like it could have a productive conversation about that (especially after the moderators stepped up and started kicking people off the platform for being shitty). It was a place where people could truly connect with each other, as messy and as wonderful as such connection often it. You could really inhabit it and seamlessly shift between lurking, posting, and discussing without feeling the need to perform a certain way. You could just be there and act like a person hanging out in a much larger group. You could avoid the stuff you didn’t like, find tons of the stuff you did like, and almost always find someone to talk to about something. As the days pass and the Read-Only day (October 1st) nears, I’m going to miss it more and more. More than anything I’ve ever had to leave behind on the internet, probably, since the only thing that could even come close is my rose-tinted memories of what Twitter was when I was most active on it. I’ll probably have more to say as the day nears and some kind of eulogy on the day it goes read-only and then dark, but for now, for the first 24 hours of processing this change, all I’ve got left to say is “Cohost, it’s been fun.”