i wanna fall through the stars

i left cohost a month ago.

i didn't announce it - as they say, it's not an airport, so there's no need to declare your departure. i simply cleared my blog, set my page to private and submitted a request to staff for account deletion. (the fact that i had to wait three days and had to submit it for deletion rather than have it built in natively as an option is still weird to me.)

still, though i consider myself solidly divorced from its community, i kept up with it. even if i decided i didn't want to contribute to it anymore, i wanted to see it through to the end.

i was surprised that the end was so soon: for those who read this and may be unaware, cohost goes read-only on october 1, 2024, and intends to be fully shut down by the end of the year. i knew its finances were bad (judging by consistently inconsistent posts from staff about the state of the funding), but i thought it had more than a few months left.

i joined cohost july of 2023 in an effort to crawl out of the hermit hole i'd found myself in. i used to be more active online, but after tumblr banned NSFW content in 2018, i didn't care to find a new place to post, so i stopped posting completely. it was only in 2023, as my novel has gotten closer to the finish line, that i felt like sharing myself again. since i didn't really know what anywhere was like, i joined a variety of websites to see what culture i liked best, yearning to find a place to settle in and get cozy.

early on, cohost was... OK. aside from being kind of ugly and making it impossible to find new people to follow, i met some nice people on there! but i never thought of it as a site i loved or even really liked. in spite of my apathy towards it, i primarily held on for two reasons:

1. some of the people i enjoyed had chosen cohost as their permanent home and weren't on other platforms, and
2. i'm interested in online communities as a whole. i like smaller websites because i feel they foster more community than colossal platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. and i love checking out new places to see what's up - i consider myself a digital deep sea diver and enjoy plunging any depths to see what's beneath them.

it didn't take long for cohost to leave a very, very strong impression on me.

( ☼ continue )