Going out on your own terms

In December 2022, I called cohost the most promising of the new social media sites.

In December 2024, it will shut down.

I’ll be sad to see it go. And while there were a few unique and interesting technical aspects of the site that I’ll miss (e.g. shared custody of pages and the backwards compatibility policy that ensured CSS crimes would keep working indefinitely), I’ll mostly be sad about the dispersion of its user base, the communities that found, no, made a home there, to other services.

I mean, hell. I still miss what I found on LiveJournal and Twitter in each of their respective heydays. We never quite manage to recreate what we had, do we? All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, indeed.

As gretchenleigh said in the excellent It's not just you; the web is getting worse, It's really tough for a distinctly human website like Cohost to thrive in a content slop world. So much money has flowed into the worst possible version of Tech, and building sustainable community-driven projects is really challenging in that environment.

All that said, I’m pleased—but not surprised—to see that jae & co. are focusing on improving export:

Development focus has immediately shifted to data export[…] We will be improving this system over the next few weeks and will issue full data exports for all users when the site goes read-only. We will continue to offer downloads of your data export through the end of the read-only period.[…]

Starting [on] October 1, 2024[,] we will begin processing data exports for all users[…] once your export is ready, you will receive an e-mail with a link to download it. data export downloads will remain available until the servers shut down on December 31.

And they’re committing to redirecting everything to the Internet Archive to prevent link rot:

[… On] January 1, 2025[,] we will set cohost.org to redirect to the wayback machine to prevent link rot. this is something we will be paying for out of pocket since ASSC will no longer be an operating concern[…]

This is how to wind down a service responsibly. This is how to say goodbye. ∎