Cohost recently announced that the service will be shutting down at the end of this year.

In 2022 I wrote about Cohost back when they first launched. At the time I had not yet received a posting invite link, so my thoughts about it were mostly speculative. It did give me Tumblr vibes and I thought that maybe, just maybe, it could recapture some of the magic I remember from those days.

Once I was able to post I reposted a few things and made a single post of my own:

Hello, world!

Looks like I can post here now?

Not quite sure what I'll post on cohost yet, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

I didn't use it much after that.

I suspect this can partly be attributed to network effects: it was still early days for Cohost and there weren't that many people I knew actively posting there. Without a group of people to follow and interact with, there wasn't all that much motivating me to log in and check on a regular basis.

Again, thinking back to my Tumblr days, I didn't really get into Tumblr until college when I had a group of friends who were all on it together.

Cohost also came onto the scene at a time where I was feeling very disillusioned with having my data locked up inside walled gardens. At the time I wrote:

As always, my primary focus will be building out my own platform, on this site and beyond.

Despite not having used it much, I am sad to see Cohost go. They really seemed like they were trying to build something unique and do right by their users. Unfortunately, it would seem that alone isn't enough to sustain a business.

I want to live in a world where more people are able to build fun little communities like Cohost that aren't trying to milk their users for everything they're worth.

RIP Cohost, you were gone too soon.