I've been thinking about what to write about the end of Cohost, and have been putting it off, but it's probably time I get this done. I don't know exactly when on October 1 that the site will be put in read-only mode, and I don't want to miss it because I waited until the last minute. So here it is, about a week before the end.
Throughout my time on the internet, various places have become my "home" on the internet to me. For many years, it was the Super Mario fan forum that I visited every day after school and stayed up too late in the weekends for, where I made friends, met a cute guy who became my boyfriend, and shared art with others.
For some time, it was a mid-size Discord server that wasn't explicitly about being trans, but in practice was 95%+ trans users, which was the space where I got to socially transition for the first time, made friends with other trans people for the first time, and met a cute girl who became my girlfriend. I'm still together with both of these cuties, but I've drifted away from those places.
For some time now, it's been Cohost, and I think it'll be the first time for me that a place like this will have had a definitive end that's out of my hands. It's not that I gradually started visiting less regularly until it was no longer part of my life, it's not that something made me actively make the decision to stop going. It feels strange. I got unexpectedly emotional when I got the news - I really did not think I would ever get close to tears over the closure of a website, but that's how it was for the first few days. I've gotten past the initial emotion by now, but I wonder how it'll be when the day actually comes.
It is largely true that it's the people that make a place special. I am in contact with people I care about through other channels, but going to Cohost didn't just mean seeing my close friends - being around people I wasn't as close to and seeing them and what they were up to every day meant a lot to me, too, as did forming new friendships and connections. Not unlike going to school every day in one of several classes of twenty-to-thirty kids.
Other social media has felt less like a communal place where I hang out with or alongside others, and more like being lost at sea. I don't want to romanticize this site too much, but it did capture a lot of the positive traits of my favorite communities I've been part of in the past, online or off, and I don't know what will replace it to me... The closest thing right now might be some of the smaller Discord servers I'm in, despite how different it is to solely hang out with people I am already friends with.
I also want to mention that I have truly appreciated having a platform for long-form writing, without the awkward restrictions of posting it across a thread on a microblogging site, and with less of the smugly toxic attitudes of sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr. I do work as a freelance writer, and I do edit and write for Wikipedia from time to time, but writing just for my own enjoyment was something I had missed, and I'm very grateful for this.
This was cross-posted to Cohost and to my blog on Neocities.