Cohost - Tumblr Posts

Heya!

I thought I might as well do a first post here. With Cohost gone and my wanting to stop using Twitter as much, and stop being around the endless toxicity online, I figured it'd be best to "return to my roots"; I used to be a hardcore Tumblr user in the early to mid 2010s, and I think even now it'll be nice returning to this place if I keep in the right places.

I'm just hoping to enjoy myself and learn from fellow therians.

finally, i can be the slutty eggbug fan i always wanted to be

I'm not sure if it's too much nsfw for tumblr, so if you guys wanna check out my nsfw/gore post you can see it on my cohost :>

I'm not sure if it's too much nsfw for tumblr, so if you guys wanna check out my nsfw/gore post you can see it on my cohost :>

I'm not sure if it's too much nsfw for tumblr, so if you guys wanna check out my nsfw/gore post you can see it on my cohost :>

I'm not sure if it's too much nsfw for tumblr, so if you guys wanna check out my nsfw/gore post you can see it on my cohost :>

cohost didn't "waste" all of their money on $90k salaries

because that's not at all how funding works. two key points here:

the funder knows how much their salaries are

each time cohost asks their funder for another loan, they have to give a detailed report on how they're going to spend that money. in other words, their funder knew about their salaries upfront and signed off on it anyway. if the funder thought that was wasting cash, they wouldn't fund it. simple as.

truth is, $90k is standard pay for software depending on experience level and where they live. i think it's good that the funder agrees cohost's staff should be paid what they're worth.

funds are requested in units of time, not money

cohost doesn't ask their funder for a flat $500k or whatever, they ask for six months' worth of funding – detailing exactly how much that will be and why in the aforementioned report. this is also standard business for startups, securing enough budget for six months / one year / etc of operation.

in other words, if all of them were making half as much, they'd still run out of money in the same exact time and have to ask for more right about now.

a previous financial report was very clear that their most recent round of funding closed in sept 2023 and would run out in Q1 2024, or approximately six months.

this doesn't mean i think the latest financial report is problem-free

but i do think people are being unnecessarily harsh about their salaries and "wasting money" without understanding what's actually going on and why. please have a modicum of business sense (and tact).

i have my issues with cohost as a platform but their salaries and transparency about finances are not among those issues. i want to see cohost stay alive long enough to get past its growing pains.

the death of cohost is bringing all of my least favorite types of posters out of the woodwork, everything from armchair "experts" with braindead diagnoses of its death, to deliberately misinformed takes on other social media sites and the internet at large, and good god i'm gonna lose it

someone stop me before i end up writing 500 massive rebuttal essays of my own addressed to a bunch of people who won't listen to my words no matter how nicely i put them

I don't think it's brain dead to acknowledge how deeply flawed and doomed from the start cohost's business model was. Relying on an anonymous angel investor, running at an exclusive deficit, ignoring the reality of (shitty! i acknowledge!) laws and basically saying they're built different, and squeezing money out of poor marginalized people for a doomed project kind of sucks. I think it's fine to say that and it's okay for you to feel defensive because you liked that website but eventually you have to acknowledge the reality and not just project your anger onto people who are pointing out the sad truth.

there are two major problems with your ask and i will address each in turn.

cohost's entire business model was predicated on eggbux, their patreon alternative, which was delayed due to one of the devs getting long covid and eventually canned because of policy changes from their payment processor, Stripe, that restrict tipping and subscriptions. everything else you listed – living on investor funding, and your gross mischaracterization of "cohost plus" that was both billed entirely as a tip jar and explicitly not promoted as a way for them to break even – was in service of getting to the point of launching a product that was worth paying for. you would know this if you actually read the financial reports.

i didn't actually like using cohost all that much, so to call me "defensive" tells me you're here just to argue. i did want to like the site but ultimately i kept bouncing off of it, and i made my issues with it known on several occasions. you would know this if you actually read anything i've posted about cohost.

no i'm mostly just annoyed at the braindead takes from folks who don't know how to read. like yourself!

i've set up a page on cohost if anyone wants to check out my stuff on there :)

i'll gradually be embedding my tumblr posts on there in chronological order, so you can still see them there if i ever decide to abandon this blog!!! i honestly am starting to fall out of love with tumblr a bit due to their recent changes and actions, so i might move over to a place where i feel like i can actually shitpost into the void and not worry about a thing. it's a pretty cool site and i think a lot of you will like it there. unfortunately you can't make a custom theme for your page (which i'm personally kinda sad about), but the website itself seems really promising!!!

here's the page!

you might not remember it since i barely talked about it, but earlier this year, i made an account on cohost that i considered moving to in case tumblr started REALLY going down the gutter. it was kind of an impulsive decision (i like jumping from site to site and tumblr was doing some awful shit that caused a lot of people to move to cohost) but it was enjoyable, and though i stopped using the site as much, it was a fun experience! unfortunately though, cohost is shutting down at the end of this year due to a lack of funds and resources. the site will become read-only on October 1st of this year before finally closing its doors on the 31st of December. this is,,,, very saddening to me. it's sad to see a small yet fun website go down, and though i kinda thought this might happen in the future, i didn't expect it to be so soon into its lifespan. i'm a huge internet history nut and i care a lot about archiving my stuff even if it's just silly small ideas and stuff, so i've made a masterpost on cohost of archived versions of all my posts on there if anyone would like to read it :D (and yes the masterpost is also archived)

here it is :)

if archive.org hits me with a "job failed :(" ONE more time while i am trying to archive cohost css stuff im going to explode into a million bite-sized pieces

something about Cohost going read-only last week feels very... deeply saddening to me in a way i'm not sure i can verbalise with emotions alone. like there's a sense of bittersweet sadness seeing everybody pour their hearts out for the dying platform, celebrating the life it had, saddening eulogies and pieces of vibrant art, joyfully commiting all the css crimes they can before the inevitability of read-only mode hits them... and then suddenly, when the clock strikes 12 on the last day, it all goes silent. the posts stop being posted. the endless voices of the users go eerily quiet. the site freezes in time, not quite dead yet but very much not alive anymore. it has effectively become a rotting time capsule, slowly waiting for the day everything goes offline for the final time ever. we all knew it was coming, and yet it still feels like it took us all by surprise when it happened. Cohost is now a shell of its former self. it feels like walking through a hall of crumbling stone people, captured in their final moments of celebration, sadness, reflection, all no longer living but still looking as though they were, terracotta ghosts slowly rotting away.

i think the quote "I felt a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced" fits really well with how this makes me feel. this sounds like a VERY strong way to feel about a silly website with eggs and bugs and css tomfoolery, but it's always sad to see a cornerstone of the internet that held a tight-knit community of thousands of people disappear into the ether, especially in such a slow and quiet way. looking at the site in the state it is now gives a lonely sort of sadness. staring in the face of a community frozen in time and knowing it was once vibrant and lively just a year ago. it's a very weird feeling.

I'M SO FUCKING SAD

Cohost was going to be the site that I would use for posting after all the AI shit with insta and tumblr, and twitter being musky as hell.

But now it's being shut down. My cosy, silly, lovely cohost, that made me feel like home, like the old tumblr.

No-one sees my posts on tumblr, and I feel unsafe posting here because of fuckjourney (m|dj0urn€y), and I have been fantasizing of deleting my instagram account since the app makes me anxious and sad.

But where do I go now? There's nowhere to go. The cosy little site I thought was going to be my haven is being run down because of lack of funds...