An Elegy for an Eggbug

Well. I've spoken at two funerals, so I might as well make it three.

This sucks. This is awful. I may not have been posting as much lately, but I checked this site throughout the day, most every day, and even if there wasn't a lot of things I was personally interested in, I knew people were posting about their chosen topics because they wanted to. I've been told I have a weird habit of finding something interesting if a fan can explain why it's interesting. It seems to be true, I guess, and while I'm not necessarily a fan of everything I read about on cohost, I am almost 100% happy to have read it, to have gotten the chance to see under the hood, even if I didn't buy the car. You people are amazing, both @staff and all the users here.

I guess I should get the obvious out of the way. While there are a lot of moving parts to cohost's ending, Stripe moving to edge out pornography while cohost was explicitly friendly to it was one of the large moving parts. And that's just an evil thing, we have lost a thing because evil lurks in the hearts of men (everyone, but it's from The Shadow).

What are we losing? I've been experiencing even more grief than I had anticipated (you always do). So I've been doing the thing you do, when you have anxiety and depression and you have to try to self-talk your way back to, like, reading a book instead of staring at a website and crying. "Lots of people have landed elsewhere already; people have plenty of time to find a place, you won't lose contact with anyone." I'm an animist. I think the site itself had something approximating a soul. If that kind of idea bothers you, consider it instead a thought form, the holographic intersection of the userbase, the developer intention, the software's limitations, and the greater cultural shifts around and inside of us. That will never be duplicated again, even if someone were to get mad and clone cohost tomorrow with a billion dollars of seed money they made by winning the lottery. It might be very similar, but it would not be identical. In the same way, when a person dies, someone else might be hired to do their job, and the job might get done, but the person is still dead.

Cohost is dead. I am here to mourn it, because the vagaries of cost in a capitalist world mean we cannot even bury it.

When I first got onto cohost I saw the similarities to tumblr immediately, and I hated tumblr, always, even before I stopped using the site because of the rabid rationality bros dogpiling me. But cohost never felt like tumblr, even when a lot of people used it in that way. It felt like Livejournal. And I think that's because Livejournal was barely social media -- it was kind of just a way to write and to follow people who were writing, something folks were already doing with blogs and personal sites. It just made it so you only went to one site. People wrote about topics on Livejournal because they wanted to, not because they felt they had to. That's why I began this post the way I did. Cohost was built intentionally to give people space to get out from under the pressure of posting, to post when they wanted, about the topics they wanted, for as much or as little as they wanted.

I also found an audience for writing about literature, something I'd failed entirely at before. As a "blogger" I had gotten started writing about anime, first on my personal blog and then on Superfanicom. I slowly began to write more about literature for the simple reason that I was working on a dissertation. It was on my mind, and I didn't have time to "keep up" with current anime. I was, I remember, writing about Lovecraft and Machen on my old blog in between reading increasingly demanding emails from a professor, rewatching Hyouka at 3 am while doing simple dumbbell exercises, and cooking fish tacos for lunch every day to get out of the office for half an hour. I haven't really been able to consistently blog about anime since. But the audience for literature blogs is meager. And lo, here, people actually wanted to read about obscure 18th century novels. It's shit trying to blog about mainstream literature out there, in the rest of the world, but here, once admittedly but it still happened, someone gave me money on Ko Fi because they liked my posts. Where else does that happen?

I feel like a friend has died. Because one has. Even if I get to follow every one of you again, cohost itself will be gone. I've cried looking at drawings of Secretary Intern Eggbug. I've been shouting-alone-in-the-bahtroom angry at the Dreamwidth devs for gloating at cohost's death. That's the one place I won't follow you, by the way. I made an account and can't figure out how to delete it, they don't seem to allow one to do so. Anyway. I've been sitting under a pall draped over my head and shoulders since the announcement. I've spent hours scrabbling around in Eleventy to make a Neocities site. And hey, I've wanted a website that was "mine" since high school, so that's not a bad thing. But it's also just something to keep me busy, to keep me moving until the grief recedes.

It does, by the way. Those two funerals I spoke at were for my parents. I have never stopped missing them, or grieving them, but like the waters, the grief comes and goes. It's called "regrieving" in therapeutic language. We re-live the grief process when it hits us again, in a little tiny microcosmic form. So, if you feel like I do about cohost, it will recede. It won't really go away. But it pulls back enough that you can walk through the shallows.

I want to write again about what I'd like to suggest folks do, in addition to what we're all already doing, but that's it for this.

originally posted at cohost dot org