In memory of Cohost

Three days ago, the social networking website Cohost announced that it would be shutting down, first by going read-only on 1st October, giving users three months to export their data, and then deleting everything in January.

This is sad, and it might not exactly be obvious why. ‘Social network’ is almost a dirty word these days. Shitty owners, poor moderation, algorithmic rage-baiting and frequent manipulation by corporations and governments have made basically all mainstream social networks just awful, if not dangerous, to use.

But Cohost was different.

Cohost had no algorithms. It didn’t display how many likes or shares anything had. Moderation was a proactive “no assholes” policy. The owners minimised data collection and committed to never sharing user data with any third-party ever.

All staff were paid a full living wage. They had a ‘premium’ subscription, but this conveyed few useful benefits, and was simply a way to support the site’s operating costs.

It was a social network that prioritised actually socialising with people rather than chasing clout. A social network that had founding principles and (for the most part) stuck to them.

This ended up cultivating a really quite marvelous community, one rich in queer and minority peoples who were handed no disincentive to being unashamedly weird and uncompromisingly themselves. That was the best way to find like-minded people on Cohost, after all.

Also CSS crimes. Lots and lots of CSS crimes. (More social networks should allow arbitrary HTML and CSS injection.)

It was wonderful. Truly. I’ve come to know an incredible number of people through Cohost’s brief existence.

And it sucks just how much that was their downfall.

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Cohost’s insistence on not sharing data with third-parties meant they never used an ad network or collected valuable user data. Their desire for useful features to be available to all meant there was little incentive to pay for the premium options. They refused offers to volunteer on the basis that everyone deserved to be fairly compensated.

Cohost never made money. Aside from a few rallies, it was losing multiple tens of thousands of dollars every single month.

The site was kept online with financial support from friends, users, and the staff eventually relenting on their living wage ideals and cutting their own salaries down to zero.

But that was unsustainable; it always was.

Cohost’s big plan for monetisation was in ‘Eggbux’, a system for tipping the creators of cool posts with real money, with Cohost taking a cut of the tip.

This had been in development for about a year until May 2024 when—with no notice—Cohost’s chosen payment provider, Stripe, suddenly banned tipping systems from their service.

Having built their entire tipping system around Stripe’s APIs, Cohost’s staff shelved the plan.

In retrospect, that perhaps felt like the beginning of the end. A latent recognition that a route to profitability would be terribly unlikely before the site finally ran out of financial goodwill… not without compromising the site’s values, anyway.

The possibility of shutting down had already been banded around a few months earlier. It now seemed almost inevitable. No longer an ‘if’ but a ‘when’.

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The announcement of Cohost’s closure has nevertheless come as an unpleasant shock.

People cried. I cried. The immediate outpouring of sadness from users was overwhelming. Fan art was created. Old posts were reshared one last time. Many committed themselves to using the website to the very end. To celebrate Cohost’s life as it drew closer to its death.

Cohost may have failed as a profit-making company, but it succeeded immeasurably at being a social network, a place that people actually wanted to be.

Cohost was something special. It sucks to see it go.