Cohost

» see cohost.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

cohost launched in june 2022. the company behind it was anti software software club, a not-for-profit software cooperative with four employees. colin bayer led engineering. the rest of the work was split between jae kaplan and aidan grealish. the pitch was a sanctuary for the post-twitter web, built specifically to avoid the patterns that had broken every preceding social network. the masthead said "the antisocial network".

the features were a deliberate critique of every social network that had come before. like counts and follower counts stayed hidden by default. boosts did not propagate the way retweets do, and the timeline ran in reverse chronological order with no algorithmic ranking. the writer interface accepted markdown plus raw css inside the post body, which spawned a culture of "css crimes" that turned posts into interactive art pieces inside the container. the eggbug mascot showed up in elaborate fan illustrations across the network.

the cohort that signed up was specific. heavy queer representation plus a strong indie game development contingent. the writing tended to be longer than tumblr posts and shorter than blog posts. an off-platform vocabulary developed: "eggbug" for the mascot, "shares" for what other networks call retweets. the audience peaked at around 227,000 registered accounts by august 2024, with monthly active users sitting closer to seventeen thousand at the same period. for two and a half years it was a real community that ran on its own internal logic.

the funding model was always fragile. the not-for-profit structure ruled out venture money. the team relied on a primary funder plus a small subscription product called cohost plus. in march 2024 the company briefly lost contact with the primary funder and ran cash-tight for several weeks. by mid-2024 the founders were openly burned out. on september 9, 2024 the announcement went up. the platform would go read-only on october 1, then shut down completely after the archive team finished a full mirror. the final shutdown landed on january 12, 2025. cohost plus subscribers got refunds.

i never used cohost. by 2022 i was on twitter watching the post-musk migration from a distance, and the post-twitter alternative that pulled my attention was mastodon and later bluesky. cohost was a small US-coded indie network with a heavy queer-and-furry audience and almost no presence in turkey. i read the september 2024 shutdown announcement on hacker news the day it went up. by the time i actually looked at the platform itself, the read-only switch had already flipped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it tried to be ~

a deliberate alternative to every algorithmic timeline. the cohost team's reading was that engagement metrics drove user behavior in bad ways, so they hid the metrics. the format encouraged longer posts, which encouraged different kinds of writing. for users coming off twitter or tumblr the difference was immediate. the platform asked you to write a thing rather than perform a thing. the user base that responded to that pitch was small but unusually committed.

~ css crimes ~

the html and css support inside posts was the cultural differentiator. cohost let writers insert raw css into post bodies, with some safety checks for site-wide containment. the result was a flowering of what users called "css crimes": posts that played as interactive games or remade the page around themselves. the eggbug mascot appeared in elaborate fan art. the format was technically a security risk and the team patched edge cases as they came up. the wider community treated css crimes as the cultural signature of the place. when the platform shut down a lot of those posts went static-screenshot only, since interactive css is hard to archive faithfully.

~ how it ended ~

the announcement on september 9, 2024 was unusually candid. the post said the company had run out of funding and the team was burned out. there was no pivot and no acquihire. the read-only switch flipped on october 1, 2024. the archive team mirrored the public posts over the next three months. the final shutdown landed on january 12, 2025. cohost plus subscribers got refunds. the indie web wrote a lot of farewell posts, and the eggbug mascot did one final wave on the way out.

~ what remains ~

a working proof that an algorithm-free social network can build a real community at small scale. cohost held about 227,000 registered users at peak, with monthly active numbers closer to seventeen thousand at shutdown. those numbers would never have been enough to support a venture-backed product, but they were enough to support a four-person not-for-profit for two and a half years if the funding model had held. the lesson was the same one ello tried to demonstrate in 2014 and app.net in 2012. an indie social network can ship the right values and still run out of money before the network reaches stable size.

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