It's Critter Time!

helo i too hail from cohost, rest in peace eggbug

the site and team certainly had their problems but cohost was the most natural-feeling posting space I've had since the death of forums. i met a lot of ffxiv friends there and got to hang out with the friends (acquaintances?) i made in yingletspace a bit more too

also, love honk.

I’ve never fit the cultural cross section of a website better than on cohost, being a queer, slightly informed about tech, deeply furry gal.

Logically I like forums, like I think a lot of cohost power users do and did. Linear easy to follow old web stuff.

oh wow, for some reason this post didn't get bookmarked after i posted it. i assumed nobody would have responded since it's all the way at the lowest subforum. i was wrong!! so cool to see how much attention this thread got.

vurrsys wrote: Wed Jul 16, 2025 5:16 pm I'm pretty sure you recognize me from there but yeah I'm an ex-Cohoster! I have very mixed feelings on it but it's obvious a lot of people cared about it

IMO it makes sense the same people who would use a site like Cohost decided to join a forum. Same sense of freedom-from-social-media. I think I'll enjoy my time on here a lot more

yeah, it definitely makes sense. ofcourse cohost users are going to love an independently ran website with long-form posts. i wonder how this is going to pan out since it's very different from a social media platform. what if people want to shitpost?

idadeerz wrote: Fri Jul 18, 2025 10:49 am what if people want to shitpost?

Y'all can use this thread to get your shitposting needs out of your system: viewtopic.php?t=2

Friend of Eggbug, reporting in.

CoHost wasn't flawless - In fact, it certainly did have some very real issues for folks. I will always admit that.

But I've never found a place quite like CoHost, and I'm still hurting from its loss. It didn't matter what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to post, or who I was interacting with there. I felt safe in a way the modern web just doesn't allow. What's more, whenever I did something creative, people actually engaged with it - And not in a "number go up" kind of way, either. They'd leave comments and discuss actual feelings and reactions to creative works, which is... Wow! Anywhere else was (and is) like shouting into the void, or setting yourself up to get mobbed.

I was able to talk to people there that I wouldn't have otherwise. And I got to see stuff from folks that I'd never have been able to see. I'm still sad that the shuttering of the site more or less scattered so many friends to the four corners of the web.

I appreciate the place wasn't sustainable, though. And I'm glad that, if it had to go, it did so gracefully.

Here's to you, Eggbug.

Was there. Have some pretty negative feelings about the site and its culture overall but enjoyed using it and got a lot of out it.

ah, the fellow chosties are here

I was there, though I mostly interacted through comments and didn't really post anything much; I was slowly working up to it but in the end I ran out of time.
Still, I'm happy about how many faces I recognize from there around here

never heard of it

jkap wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 3:59 pmnever heard of it

aw, that sucks! cohost was a social media platform that shut down in 2024. it was kinda like tumblr but better and different. one of its creators recently wrote an article looking back on cohost, if you want to learn more you might want to give it a read!

I was also part of za great Cohost Enclave!

idadeerz wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 4:16 pm

jkap wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 3:59 pmnever heard of it

aw, that sucks! cohost was a social media platform that shut down in 2024. it was kinda like tumblr but better and different. one of its creators recently wrote an article looking back on cohost, if you want to learn more you might want to give it a read!

Ik you're probably jesting, but that is one of the devs, lmao

I wasn't on Cohost personally, but looking back on the archives it looked more fun than Twitter (and bsky tbh)

I was on Cohost and it was cool! However I didn't really get the courage to actually post on there until like... a week before the announcement that it was shutting down.

Quite unfortunate timing, isn't it?

we were there but it got one of our friends very hurt so we do not have very many good feelings about it. it was low-stress, we guess, but we found the community atmosphere kind of impenetrable

Rejax wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 5:03 pm I was also part of za great Cohost Enclave!

At least the Cohost Enclave lives on, just mostly on fedi now, instead.

I know how to work with online socialization that is set up similar to how real life hobby clubs work (like forums, fediverse instances, Discord servers) where you show up to a place related to the thing you care about, participate, and establish yourself, and people will see you. That's intuitive to me, and that's how it works in real life.

But Cohost deliberately avoided having shared community spaces (outside of the global feed tags that staff really disliked?) so if you didn't know how to use tags effectively (including guessing which tag is the "right" one) because you don't have years of Tumblr experience, it was difficult to connect with other people. I only felt like I really managed to connect with "the community" in Discord servers and forums that sprung up afterwards to try and gather people together.

i miss cohost every day

NovaSquirrel wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 2:24 pm I know how to work with online socialization that is set up similar to how real life hobby clubs work (like forums, fediverse instances, Discord servers) where you show up to a place related to the thing you care about, participate, and establish yourself, and people will see you. That's intuitive to me, and that's how it works in real life.

But Cohost deliberately avoided having shared community spaces (outside of the global feed tags that staff really disliked?) so if you didn't know how to use tags effectively (including guessing which tag is the "right" one) because you don't have years of Tumblr experience, it was difficult to connect with other people. I only felt like I really managed to connect with "the community" in Discord servers and forums that sprung up afterwards to try and gather people together.

I think you pretty accurately summed up why cohost never felt that much better than tumblr, twitter, et al to me. Sure, the people using it were nicer, but it was still people posting single disorganized streams full of things I didn't care about mixed in with what I was there for.

There's def an interesting kinda thing here where you have "I wanna use website to meet people" and "I wanna use website to hang out with my friends." and I would consider cohost to be more of the latter and this place actually can be more of the former. For us, anyway

I met a ton of people there, but I feel like a lot of it was getting out what you put in. You had to do lateral clicking to find people, stuff like checking tags that people used, hopping through rechosts, or looking at people you saw in comments section. Or people that commented on your own stuff sometimes too.

I don't imagine it was the same for everyone but for me that's how it felt. I never used Tumblr, what little bits I saw of it over the years it did not look like my vibe at all. Cohost I very tentatively approached due to how I feel about social media in general, but it was extremely good for me overall. Hardly perfect, but a big net positive.

The only thing that will ever come close to me now are personal websites. Forums are nice, I wouldn't be here otherwise, but they're for sure much different. But even if really good RSS readers and site building tools existed (everything right now is okay at best), that workflow is still as manual as Cohost was. Surfing, not swiping.

Or to put all that the other way: Cohost radicalized me into a website poster weirdo and I'm glad it did. Posting forever.

I think a lot of whether or not you'll get much out of a tag-focused site is largely derived from how common your interests are, and if those interests have widely agreed upon names (and if you can correctly guess how people write them out; we didn't get any tag wrangling until just before shutdown). Usually when I tried searching for tags related to stuff I wanna find, I'd mostly just find my own posts and little else, and I'd try searching for different variations of how to write it out and still not find anything. Of course I've had a lot of people tell me they didn't know the thing I was writing about even existed until they saw me talking about it, so in that case no tag is going to be the correct one. It's not always a lack of effort.

It would have been nice if the tag groups/aliases landed much sooner but so it goes.

sup fellow ex-chosters

I had a really fun time on cohost, even despite its myriad of problems. Ended up clicking well with the format of the site, and am cherishing the connections I made through it. Also I made a lot of jokes. some of them were okay

I miss eggbug so damn much. They were the most precious lil’ guy