Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.

It feels like the last month has passed incredibly quickly, even if recounting the days between today and Cohost’s announcement makes it feel like a much longer time than four weeks. I had so much I wanted to do as the site slowly wound its way towards shutting down, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do any of it. I wanted to find all the people I cared to follow and make sure that I followed them wherever they went next. I wanted to make a list of personal sites to follow as so many of us go from Cohost to personal blogs or websites. I wanted to say farewell, have lingering conversations as the end drew near, and exult in the sadly freeing knowledge that things are almost ending that makes it so much easier to take risks or get over my shyness. The read-only version of the website will be around for another three months, until the end of 2024, so I’ll be able to do some of that, but it will feel like walking in a graveyard every time I do it and I don’t know how much of that my heart will be able to bear. I still plan to find those personal websites, no matter what it takes, and even create a “recommended reading” tab or widget on my blog to share connections to all the people whose thoughts and opinions I find interesting, but that will take time and I still need to prepare to migrate my blog to a version of WordPress that is hosted elsewhere. There’s a lot of work in my future and I can only hope I’ll be able to scrape together enough time and energy that it won’t cost me more than I can afford to spend.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about all of this, to be honest. I know I’m focusing on my to-do list because that is how I’ve handled keeping my life on track when I’m too tired, stressed, or burned out to stay actively engaged in my life, but I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the internet anymore. Social media is fracturing at best and creating toxic environments that people can’t leave because we’re addicted to the endless scroll at worst. How the hell am I supposed to make friends when any website that feels alright to use could plummet into toxicity at the drop of a hat? How am I supposed to enjoy a curated, comfortable space when every single one is accused of being an echo chamber by nazi sympathizers which somehow always causes the people running that site to decide to let the nazis back in (or force them back into my carefully curated space)? I mean, I’ve been off Twitter for a year and a half now, at least, and yet it still sinks ever lower as the one tool that made it tolerable (blocking) is being picked to pieces. How long before some other shitty billionaire buys whatever other sites I’m on and drives them into the muck and the dirt? It’s already happening to WordPress thanks to Automattic selling data to LLM companies and the CEO trying to destroy another company. All I want is to be able to find people who share my interests, make some friends, talk to people about the stuff we like, and occasionally have a moment of peace in this chaotic, noisy world. That’s clearly too much to ask for, so why I am still online? Why am I still here? Why am I trying to find a single spark of joy amidst the deluge of awfulness when I could just leave?

I don’t have any kind of answers. I don’t have a reason to stay and I’m not sure that my hesitation to actually leave the internet for good isn’t anything other than an habit that it growing less and less healthy with each passing month. I’m hoping I can figure something out, that I can provide myself with some kind of meaning for staying here, but I’m really not sure I’ll be able to do that, given how pretty much everything I’ve liked about the internet that isn’t directly messaging my friends has slowly vanished. I know this might just be the maudlin feelings of saying goodbye getting to me and I definitely know I still have to process my grief over this change in my corner of the internet, but it’s difficult to find any kind of hope for the future of the internet at this moment in time. That’s never stopped me in the past, of course, but I’m trying to avoid the sunk cost fallacy here and I’m really not sure that there’s anything but more stress and grief left for me in whatever form the future of the internet takes.

Rather than continue to dwell on that, though, I have a few things I’d like to say before I wrap up this blog post. I love you, cohost, and farewell. I will regret that we only had this much time together, but there are some things you know will not last and I’m sad to say Cohost was one of them. We had a good year, before then, but it eventually became clear that this would not last forever. For any of you cohost readers viewing this, know that I feel fondly for you and will do my best to continue whatever relationship we had in a post-Cohost world, but I’ve made my peace with all this coming to an end. This is just one more online community fracturing, after all, and that’s become far too common of late. We are not exceptional for this, but we were exceptional for being a place where you could just post in whatever short or long form stuff you desired and people would engage with it in a way that wasn’t driven by feeds, numbers, or outrage. I will miss this place and you all.