A belated eulogy for Cohost
This morning I've been looking through my old Livejournal. Did you know that your LJ is still online? Because it probably is unless you deleted it.
My last post there was in August 2010, bemoaning the fact that my flist for the past six months had been almost exclusively communities and reposted tweets. The exodus had happened, and the place was a wasteland of abandoned accounts. And so I, like everyone else, jumped ship to Twitter.
Since Cohost first appeared I've been talking about how happy I was to have "no pressure blogging" again, and about how it reminded me of the heyday of Livejournal. This morning, reading through my old LJ and remembering the way I used to post, I think I've realised that what I like isn't "no pressure blogging" but is instead the freedom to write without feeling self conscious about it. Twitter taught us - very quickly - to be performative. You couldn't just idly muse about things or post vague thoughts about things that interest you. You had to have a Take. This is something I struggled with across the 14 years I used the platform, and it's something that became even more real once quote retweets became a formal part of the platform in 2015. QRTs, to me, mark the point where Twitter stopped being "micro blogging" and started being something else, something much more hostile and combatative. My struggles with the platform came in large part because I was still trying to treat it like a micro blog for the best part of a decade when everyone else had moved on.
Cohost was a return to unselfconscious blogging with an audience. Obviously anybody can start a blog, but unless you're putting in some work to promote it elsewhere (like, for example, on Twitter) it's likely that nobody is reading it. And shouting into the void is great, but sometimes you really want to have a conversation. That built in community (as much as I hate what "community" has come to mean on the internet) was a fundamental part of LJ and was also a fundamental part of Cohost.
I'm really enjoying using Bear, and I do like the fact that comments aren't a built-in part of the platform. It's definitely filling the void that Cohost has left, scratching that same itch as Livejournal used to. But I do lament the loss of the community aspect of Cohost, the knowledge that people were actually reading and responding to things. And, in general, doing it with the assumption of good faith that Twitter stripped us of.
Maybe I'll put comments on this blog in an effort to get that sort of thing back. But maybe I'll just continue posting into the void instead.