Ma Nishtana — Why Cohost [was] not like other websites

Note from the future: This essay was written on June 30th of 2022 when Cohost had first opened its doors to the public. Cohost shut down at the end of 2024 due to financial issues. I am preserving it because it also contains some of my reflections on Mastodon, which I know is of interest to many.

So, understandably, given what happened with Mastodon, a lot of people when they hear about Cohost just go "Oh boy, another new social media site, it's Ello or Mastodon or whatever all over again."

But, I think that Cohost is different and not because of big grandiose reasons that will change the internet forever. But for small reasons that have the potential to result in a pretty OK website that's nice to use.

Some economics stuff you probably already know

Under Capitalism, everything is about growth for growth's sake. About making money exponentially. Because of inflation, if you're not making more money then you are losing money, so the mindset goes. Especially because finance and economics people like to imagine potential value as being value they already own. Not reaching that imagined potential is "losing" the future money they thought they already owned and had made bets on.

Every social media project thus far has been about being the next killer. I spoke about this before with Mastodon, how everyone is obsessed with the idea that the purpose of a social media website is to kill, murder, and maim other websites. At the time, I believed that Mastodon wasn't like that, but I was wrong. Mastodon was always fixated on killing Twitter. Even if I, personally, was not, it was the dominant desire of the community and of the One Guy who was In Charge of Everything.

Most new tech start-ups and the like are funded by venture capital. You sell partial ownership of your fledgling company to some big rich investor for astoundingly absurd amounts of money which you use to pay yourself insane salaries and live it up big in completely financially unsustainable ways and as long as you keep growing and growing and growing you can keep your investors happy whether or not you actually have a sustainable business model. You can never not grow when you accept VC funding. You are owned by people who want you to grow. Even if you were financially stable, plateauing would be unacceptable to them. It's grow grow grow.

Every VC-backed little project, such as Ello, simply had to meet this model or it was a failure. Ello actually did end up garnering a strong community of artists who liked using it, but without constant growth, it was a failure.

The Part Where I Talk About Mastodon :(

Mastodon was different, of course. Instead of accepting VC funding, Mastodon refused to properly even be a business and depended entirely upon tons and tons and tons of unpaid labor. So much fucking unpaid labor. One Guy was in charge of everything and only One Guy had development, press, community leadership, management, everything as his actual paid job. Sometimes, small amounts of money would go towards other people, but it was still only ever one person in charge and everyone else could either beg or do free labor to get what they wanted. Simultaneously, Mastodon was all about this cyberpunk fantasy of being some sort of radical space that was opposed to Twitter in this political way where FOSS decentralized communities with Sufficiently Well Designed Technology would somehow be liberatory; would somehow be inherently anti-fascist. But "no nazis" was really just a marketing scheme of Mastodon. And ultimately, all of that unpaid labor was just taken by the literal fascists of Gab and Donald Trump's own Truth Social to become the basis of their own platforms. Our free labor to build a place free from fascists ended up building the biggest fascist's new home for him, for free. Because it was Free Open Source Software.

Furthermore, all of the moderation was also based upon the unpaid labor of whoever was willing to do it. Who better to be a community leader than some random sysadmin who has the technical know-how to run a server and the expendable income and free time to do it all for free? Surely this is how we should decide on our leaders. Mastodon isn't exactly a "failure" in the sense that people certainly do still use it, and probably will indefinitely. But my original goal, and the goal of most others at the beginning, was "make a better social media experience without fascists on it" and, in that sense, yes, we failed, Mastodon own-goaled so fucking hard it's embarrassing. I have a lot of good memories from Mastodon. Many of my most important relationships in my life started there. I don't really regret having used it. I am in fact often very sad about how it turned out. But I am also profoundly embarrassed that when you google my name many of the first results are related to Mastodon, something I put so much time and energy into and failed at so spectacularly.

I thought, like many people working on tech stuff, that sufficiently good design would lead to good social behaviors. For instance, we thought that by "encouraging talking to people instead of talking about people" (via not allowing QRT-ing or Boost With Captions) we could encourage civil dialog instead of just dunking on people and pointing at them to laugh. Instead, we just ended up with the world's most aggressive passive-aggressive community where everyone talked about each other constantly but you had no way of linking their posts back to whoever they were talking about and just had to speculate. We thought that by preventing namesearching and termsearching we could prevent people from harassing their favorite groups to target. Instead, we ended up with a situation where nobody could ever find the context for anything anyone was talking about and people could only make judgements about other social groups via the world's most broken game of telephone.

The truth is, no amount of good software design was going to stop people from being mean to each other if they wanted to be mean. The truth is, Mastodon was not an isolated society we controlled but just a little tab going on in the lives who people who continued to live their entire lives outside of the website. With all of their trauma, all of their emotions, and all of the systemic socioeconomic and cultural problems that contribute to people being assholes. People might always be assholes. A disorganized network of unpaid fiefdoms can't really handle that like proper moderation and community leadership by people who are actually being compensated relative to the expectations being placed on them.

Sufficiently well-designed technology can never liberate us. Software is not the solution to social issues in our society.

The Part Where I Talk About Cohost :)

Every tech project thus far has always been trying to change the world. The world of Tech is obsessed with changing the world in ways that make your product ludicrously profitable, ideally it becomes mandatory for everyone in society to participate.

Cohost is far less ambitious, and that's good!

Cohost isn't trying to kill Twitter. Cohost is trying to be a fourth website. Cohost isn't trying to change the world. Cohost is just trying to be a nice little website. Cohost isn't trying to grow exponentially forever. Cohost is just trying to be financially sustainable. Cohost isn't trying to Liberate us from our Racist Capitalist Oligarchy Through The Power of Posting Online. Cohost is just trying to be a cool place to post things online that doesn't damage our mental health and destroy the fabric of society.

The nice people at ASSC have been using the internet for a very long time. They've experienced IRC, BBC forums, LiveJournal, MySpace, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Ello, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, YikYak, Mastodon, you-name-it. They've studied where they went wrong and where they went right. They've been working on cohost for three years trying to really thoughtfully design a website that is healthier for its users and sustainable for its employees.

The ambition of Cohost is simply to be a good sustainable website; which I'm sure will prove to be quite challenging!!! But that's it.

And their solutions aren't even that innovative. They're humble. Their humility is precisely why they have a chance.

• Cohost isn't allowing more people to post than they can moderate with a team of paid human beings; or than their servers can handle.
• Cohost is entirely owned by its employees, and nobody else. Its employees are living modest lives, and they're not trying to swim in pools of cash.
• Cohost slows you down. You have all the time in the world to think through your thoughts and write them eloquently and with nuance. The timeline is paginated, so you don't scroll infinitely. Cohost doesn't use metrics and flashing lights like a slot machine to make you addicted. Cohost doesn't want you to get FOMO or feel like your posting is what will save the world. It's just a website.
• Cohost wants to be a fourth website. You don't need to migrate all your shit over forever and stop using Twitter to prove your allegiance or whatever. Nobody is asking you to make a life commitment. It's just a website. If you enjoy it, you can use it :)

Furthermore, I trust Jae, Colin, and Aidan. If you don't know them personally, then of course you won't trust them already the way that I do. But I've known Jae for years now and they really know what they're doing. ASSC is taking things slow and taking a thoughtful approach to this experiment. This experiment of "what if there was a fourth website and it made you happy instead of miserable." It's not The Revolution. It's not trying to be everything for everyone. It's just trying to be a nice place to post.

All the promises they make on the landing page, I truly believe they will try to fulfill them. They are not over-promising like every other social media website. The promises they make are very humble and I think they're achievable.

And that's what's different about Cohost. At this point, it doesn't need to sell itself to investors as changing the world. It's just trying to do things sustainably, thoughtfully, and in a way that's healthy for the community and for its employees. If Cohost never had more than 100k users, but it's financially sustainable and everyone is having a pretty good time? And also Donald Trump has not taken the code from Cohost to launch his own fascist platform? Then Cohost will have succeeded.

Also, also, my Unpaid Labor is not what determines if Cohost succeeds or fails :) It's really nice :) I don't have to be a volunteer to keep the place from falling apart :) It's so much healthier :)

In Conclusion

I just needed to get that all out of my system and I'm going to shut up about Mastodon forever now I promise I will try my best OK. I just needed to vent about my ex and talk about how much better my new beau is (Mastodon is my ex and Cohost is the new beau.)