Well it finally happened. I noted in a prior status update for the site how I moved off Cohost in favor of Bluesky for a variety of reasons I rambled about, but chief among them was a fear the site just would not be sustainable; mainly due to blatant evidence that the site was bleeding money while staff were increasingly unwilling to bother doing anything about it besides very minor concessions.
I mentioned on Bluesky that when this day would come, (and it was inevitable, hence why I reluctantly joined Bluesky back in April) I would write about it. Now while I could have made this a gargantuan “history of cohost” post and talked about everything that went wrong with the entire website and the history of it, better people than me have done that before, will do that in the future, and I’ll even cite one of those said better people when I talk about finances. So thus, I’ll just explain today how I stumbled upon it, and how I truly, honestly tried absolutely everything to make it my main social media for Seafoam Gaming from late 2022 to April 2024, and why it ultimately failed.
Buckle up folks. A lot of venting and rambling will come your way, but that’s what some of you enjoy, isn’t it? No worries; I think at the end of the day hopefully people will understand why from a content creator’s POV, I found Cohost very lacking, and honestly a bit hostile toward a writer like myself. There’s a reason you don’t see many people on it anymore in this industry, even before the shutdown announcement.
Escape from Collapse
You probably remember what kicked off your first exposure to Cohost, unless it was news of the shutdown. A certain bigoted manchild bought Twitter out in 2022, and the site has gone horribly downhill ever since. I wrote about why I left last year, and that was mainly because even that site was hostile to my content; engagement was dropping and reaching new people with my content was next to impossible, plus Nazi and transphobic shit was all over the place.
Well, one site recommended by some of my furpals was a small, quaint one known as Cohost. It seemed pretty good on the surface! Sure it was way, way smaller than Twitter, but I’ve done fine in smaller communities before; I had an ancient small tumblr blog where I hung around a PMD Ask blog community for a bit, and the amount of discord servers I’m on with small niches and circles of friends is plentiful. If more likeminded retro game fans and furries joined Cohost, maybe I’d set up shop there!
Thus, I opened my page, right on the prelude of my big 2022 video on Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. I found some people from other sites fairly quickly, worked a small network from there, and soon found a comfortable feed of people to enjoy content from. I alternated between it and Twitter still for the next few months, getting a little concerned by the traction of my video, but hey, videos as long as the Tomie one are tough to sit through, so I didn’t think too much of it despite really hoping for a miracle.
Soon enough I’d keep finding some interesting pages. The GDQ runner for the Explorers of Sky randomizer was one I followed, along with some more furries and new artists/streamers I found on the website by punching in random tags. That being said, this experience did get me to realize the first major flaw to Cohost; discoverability is abysmal. If you don’t tag your post, it might as well not exist outside of your following group. This seems fine for those who want the extra privacy, but if you’re a content creator or an artist this just ends up being a huge pain to get the word out or find like minded people, especially if you have a subject that could be tagged multiple different ways.
Like video games? Well, hope you enjoy the tags Video Gaming, Video Games, Video Game, Gaming, Indie Dev, Indie Games and Retro Games, all with their own unique posts to them. No, the site will never show you how many posts are in what tag to figure out which one works, and no, you can’t just search for posts by body text, as that would be silly!
Yeah. This awful, horrid design choice was pretty darn bad once I started my work on trying to you know, network myself. Meet new indie devs, get in touch with other writers and reviewers, all that was made really hard due to the godawful tagging system. Something the site staff continued to be stubborn against changing due to a silly vision of being “anti-numbers”.
Considering how said method made even finding new people tough to do though, I really don’t get the notion that showing what tags are most used by people when trying to tag a post is “addicting people” or making them “too fixated on numbers”, as I’d commonly hear as a retort. Still I had a semi active feed of people to follow, so I stuck around, even if I continued to grow more frustrated at my own content sharing efforts.
Then April hit, and well, Twitter got so toxic for me I decided to make Cohost my full time social media platform, despite the baggage. Surely that’d be a decent idea, and maybe if I hammer it hard enough I’d at least get a small but dedicated group of followers there to enjoy my writing. I still had my semi-active feed I was enjoying content from daily, so it wasn’t like I ran out of stuff to read on the site; funny game trivia, cool game flyer scans, and silly CSS memes all made my day, and I genuinely found a few cool new friends in the process despite the site’s philosophy working against me as a content creator.
Crumbling Safety
Unfortunately, the decision to move fully to Cohost, looking back, was outright stupid on my end. Cohost isn’t really a place that liked people advertising stuff. Not even for artists, which only changed near the end of the site’s life due to backlash and an increasing lack of funding. You couldn’t buy banner ads, and you couldn’t even have the staff consider a community event where people could maybe do an art challenge for a week/month and the staff would pick their favorite works. Discoverability was just bad, but at least for artists, the #art tag was pretty darn active.
Another active tag was The Cohost Global Feed and Cohost Meta. These in turn ironically became a fantastic way to find new people and content, as it was the closest tags that were universal; a place you could find all sorts of cool stuff. The problem is, the staff clearly didn’t intend for a global feed to be a thing, so they’ve been on record more than once complaining about it. Thankfully they didn’t bother doing anything to it, but that wouldn’t be the first time the staff would ramble on their personal accounts about situations they didn’t particularly like, nor would they hesitate to dunk on people asking for easier discoverability.
All my efforts to share review and written content kept bombing, again and again, and Cohost eventually turned into a thing I barely felt the urge to post on. I ran statistics, and more than once a cohost post I’d stuff with every single tag possible, linking to a review on this very site, would only return like, maybe 10 views at most. Considering how much I got from other places, even private discord servers and Facebook groups, and how in turn, I also got more feedback in those places, this pretty much meant my written content was hitting a brick wall again and again.
Yet I still was stubborn to move away from Cohost for another place. Twitter was bad, and I didn’t trust Bluesky with Twitter’s big Cryptobro Jack on the board of directors, nor it being an invite only platform. I still was again, getting some good content on my feed to read daily, so I enjoyed sticking around, but I noticed some troubling trends. People who followed me or I followed began to post less and less in general, usually in favor of other social media sites. The friends who invited me to Cohost basically stopped using it, and I eventually felt like the only one left in my friend circle still trying to use it daily.
And heck, I still didn’t want to give up! If the site could just get off its ass, let the users contribute more content and promote artists/writers/creators, the site could really take off and have a fun niche! They added an ask feature that was pretty fun, but I only got like 2 questions ever from it, but at least it made it enjoyable to ask friends stuff and goof around with them. There wasn’t really a true DM system to be fair, so that was the closest you’d get to such a thing, too.
And while all that was going on in my head, Cohost had several weird moments that would honestly have made me quit the site way earlier if I knew they were going on. Bad actors being reported and not being dealt with, an unusual tolerance of NSFL content and uncertainty on whether the site disallowed it, leading to some really cringe takes, (for the record, all sites absolutely should ban that stuff, no exceptions) and most common that I would even see at times, hostility towards “outsiders”. Turns out, this would end up being a thing I’d see quite a bit, especially as the inevitable would strike.
Dueling with Tides
More than once, Cohost would have an influx of users from other sites depending on what situation was happening. You’d get the continual increase of Twitter users obviously, along with users from Tumblr whenever that place would have some random controversy of the week. Technically being one of them, I can say at the very least, the 2022/early 2023 period seemed very gentle to newcomers, at least in my Twitter/furry circle.
But as 2023 progressed, and as 2024 kicked off with some funding uncertainties, I began to see the tides turn heavily against people from other platforms, mostly people who were confused by Cohost’s bizarre discoverability. More than once, a social media platform would do a bad, then people would join and try to find new friends. While a few people would stick around, most would bounce off the site harder than a ball hitting a Pong paddle.
See, when you join Cohost, without doing anything else, you’re recommended a small list of site accounts to follow… All of which were the staff accounts. You follow them, maybe they’ll reshare something or you see a tag on their posts to find people from there. Go down many rabbit holes, and you’ll hopefully build up a nice feed to enjoy.
Except that isn’t always practical, and might I remind you, the Cohost tagging system is really hostile to discoverability. Unless you knew ahead of time to click on the Art or into The Cohost Global Feed tags, you might struggle to find people with similar interests. Me as a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fan, I easily found those people by just knowing their names from other places, but looking at some of their pages now, I can sure tell you they barely tagged their stuff, or used different terms for that series (Mystery Dungeon, PMD, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, EOS) that might not be easy to find. Thus, even building a feed is hard unless you already know how to build one. That’s the trouble newcomers often faced.
And boy, did they rightfully complain about it, or just get confused. I’d see in the global feed or Cohost Meta tags newer people asking how to find new people, or how them as an artist/poster/etc can find out what stats do what or what are the right tags and more often than not the Cohost community in response would just… not respond in kind. The amount of snobby “oh Cohost isn’t a numbers site! stop being obsessed with numbers” type replies I saw in response to newcomers asking how to get their content/art seen or how to find new pages to follow due to tagging being awful was waaaaaayyyy too many times to count. Usually from the same, bigger accounts too.
A lot of subposting of this type (something insanely easy to do on the site since well, not tagging your post basically hides it from all but your followers) would flare up anytime a new wave of Cohost users hit the site, and it just continually irked me seeing common complaints and feedback just dismissed with such vitriol by the community, because the site staff made it their own mission statement to reject the notion of number counting or an algorithm to the point of not letting people use their own website to discover friends. I’m sorry, and I know I keep repeating how bad the tagging system is like a dead horse, but it truly is insane to think that someone being thrown onto a website with no following, guidance or any other people they know, and struggling to thus find people to fill their feed, and getting heckled by veteran members over it is a sign of a good community.
This constant pushback, done by both big members of the site and even some of the site staff, just led to this unpleasant tug of war going on anytime the site remotely gained traction for a bit. It was like the staff didn’t want newcomers to flood the site because then they’d risk asking for changes they didn’t want to do, even though some changes would help the site immensely. so thus they had to work to make the site as much of a tight club as possible so if you didn’t “get it” with how the site worked, you’d basically lose interest and go home. I basically did this with sharing SFG site content since every attempt in the book to spread reviews or articles just fell with a heavy thud, but my feed was semi-frequent enough (albeit with the same 5 or 6 people, way down from the earlier days) I stuck around even if I had to give up on promotion due to this hostile nature. And the only reason I was following said accounts, is because I joined the site knowing friends already on it, and those friends shared from those accounts which just so happened to stay active up until the closure of the platform. If I wasn’t part of someone else’s following, my feed would be pretty darn dry on content because again, bad discoverability. Still, the road was set, and I long gave up on sharing my reviews on Cohost despite my efforts. SFG stats held up decently well despite the setback from that, so I kinda stopped caring and just enjoyed the vibes of my feed for the most part. Well, until 2024, that is…
Payment Pains
When you consider Cohost’s financial situation and a really stupid gamble on a tipping system, it’s honestly a miracle they even managed to enter 2024 at all, since Social Media sites are not cheap to run in the slightest. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in 2024, Cohost would run out of money and abruptly have issues with said money many times. First off, the big thing Cohost promised people, which was incredibly dubious from the first minute of these plans being public, was the possibility of a Tipping system ala Ko-Fi.
They wanted to do this via Stripe, but considering the wide variety of content on Cohost, including tons of NSFW content (and credit to Cohost, their content filtering system was pretty darn good and worked great as a warning for sensitive subjects, too), it was pretty much raised almost immediately that the site would certainly not be able to get this working with Stripe under how things were currently ran. For those unaware, NSFW content is heavily frowned upon by payment processors, and thus a lot of payment processors, usually related to Mastercard or Visa, block websites/platforms from using said processors if they get carried away with it.
The only reason sites like Ko-Fi and Patreon can get away with 18+ content is due to setting tons of strict guidelines and monitoring that stuff very, very closely, to the point sometimes NSFW policies on these platforms can change on a whim to prevent the platform from getting cut off. A lot of experts are involved with this process, and it really isn’t easy at all to maintain it. Thus, the notion that Cohost could use Stripe and just casually allow their site to let members tip each other on the site was absolutely absurd. Especially when Cohost was not a bank in any way, had no financial experts involved ever, and had so much NSFW content that even with content warnings, it would be a red flag that might get a payment processor angry, especially toward a super small website.
I have also been informed post the publication of this article, (thanks to Kib, the person who wrote the handy financial history I link to later) that stripe also just flat out doesn’t allow tipping at all on social platforms like Cohost; so even if everything NSFW evaporated from the website, they still wouldn’t be able to get Stripe to agree!
Sure enough, plans fell through and they canceled tipping. Cohost blamed “recent changes” in stripe policy, but most of the ones cited were there for quite some time and their NSFW policies have stretched back years. Either Cohost had to follow every last guideline to a T without a single error and probably hire experts who know how to run tipping platforms, or just give up the thing altogether. I was kinda bewildered to see some people act like it was all on Stripe and it was something new they did for spite, but when furries I follow were shouting and yelling and warning about that being a very predictable outcome back in early 2023, I can’t help but feel Cohost is to blame for not somehow seeing past that.
Thankfully, the staff did do one feature I thought was cool; Artist alley! This was basically an official spot for artists to pay for space to share their artwork and give users a nice place to scroll through and find art. You could pay for a short period of time, share your art, and maybe get some new people outta it. I found a few cool art pieces out of browsing it, but once a few days past, I kinda ran out of art to look at, and that was the first problem with AA. The next one was how despite the artist alley ad buy expiring for some people, the listings were still online.
More than one instance of people having their listings still up despite the limited purchase was confusing, and it ended up being an error that was shortly fixed, but that definitely concerned an artist I followed who shelled out the cash for a week and ended up getting more, uncertain if they’d be charged again for the extra time or if it was just a bug. Alas, more than one artist did track how many people followed their page or checked out their content via Artist Alley, and it still seemed like even advertising on there wouldn’t do much to boost your post; sure it’d be in a place anyone could look at, but Artist Alley wasn’t a front page, top of the website tab you could jump to, it was kinda hidden and you had to look for it on the sidebar. After a month of it being active, I barely saw any posts on the Alley and it seemed to have been a total flop.
Then the truth came out.
IT’S A MONEY VORTEX OH NOOOOOOOOOO ITS STEALING ALL OUR GOLD
March of 2024, I made a post indicating I’d try out Bluesky as Cohost seemed to have signs of imploding. I rambled about it then, but to make things short, Cohost announced very abruptly that they lost contact with their original funder and might be on the hook for a lot of money, and the site wouldn’t be sustainable at this rate. Mind you, the site staff promised frequent financial updates and didn’t really provide that.
Finally, I can link to the super big, handy post that details it better than I could, (and if I get consent, I’ll share other things this handy user points out about Cohost over time, since they did really great analysis almost the entire time the site was active) but case in point, Cohost was not making money and was bleeding constantly, month after month. Turns out running a website where people can’t easily find stuff and only circles of people that know each other from other places posting the bulk of content on the platform, is really darn expensive and not profitable!
So yes, they relied on a single funder, and paid themselves pretty silly wages considering the type of website they were running. This mystery funder would eventually post on Cohost itself, but came off as an utter asshole who didn’t seem to grasp the value of money at all and even dismissed someone attempting to work out the site going open source solely due to the name of their proposal. Why the staff ever trusted that funder with their entire site’s well-being is beyond me, but sure enough he was single handedly running the site, and then he was gone.
Panic ensued. Lots of people worrying, lots of others posting how the site clearly wasn’t viable for some time and the lack of funding transparency was a bit concerning, and lots of people bickering about those pointing that out. To me, it felt incredibly obvious to treat that announcement as if the site would close in 2 weeks. Thus, I made a bluesky, and I think I did the right call by getting over my stubborn mindset on the place and moving there. Even disregarding the improvements for my outlet and sharing reviews (with lots more feedback on that coming my way than I got even on Twitter), I found way more new people in the gaming industry on Bluesky than cohost, and discovering new content via feeds and gasp searching stuff you like was way easier! So case closed, story over, go to bed now right?
Well… Not exactly. Yeah for me I was basically done with the site. It was clear it wouldn’t last much longer, and if a miracle happened it wouldn’t last much more than maybe a few months. By some miracle, they got extra funding under the stipulation they’d post more frequent funding updates… Only to miss several occasions and even forget to list their expenses one time, basically going back to the same old lack of transparency and dodging questions when asked. No answer on how they’d resolve a repeat of the situation, or how others could help pitch in for the site besides buying their (useless) Cohost plus subscription service. (As an aside that’s definitely gripy on my end, but something I have to vent about even if it may make me look like an ass, but I was disturbed at seeing more than one person on the site lament at spending the last of their spare funds/non rent money, or even dipping into their rent savings to buy a subscription because they really didn’t want to lose the website. People made a comfy home on the site, and the fact that the staff were still not fully transparent even during that panic just disgusts me)
Even among some active people I followed on the platform, they too left for other places or made a backup spot in case things would inevitably come crashing to a halt. For years I was convinced if Cohost went out, it would be like Vidme. One day you go to the home page, and bam, shut down with no way to say goodbye. Well, thankfully it wasn’t like that, but it was still close to what I expected. Weeks ago, Cohost announced it’d go read only next week in October, and would shut down at the end of 2024. I had done my escape plan, as had others. For those of us with fun memories of the site despite frustrations, it was still a somber moment. But for those who relied entirely on it, my heart honestly broke for them.
Seriously! It may not seem like it with how much I rip into their tagging system and very very stubborn staff, but I still had fun with Cohost and had a nice curated, if small feed of people I enjoyed following in the end (Super shoutout to Gosokkyu, the best Cohost account that to my knowledge, will not move to another site despite providing god tier Japanese game info). And lots of other people who just wanted to make their own feeds and got that done, or found a friend who stuck around and thus, caused them to stick around too. For that purpose, I think cohost was fine, even if a lot of problems could have been fixed if the staff just listened to critics every now and again, and not be so hostile against feedback. Since in the end, the people who suffered most from cohost’s demise, weird choices, and bad discoverability weren’t really content creators or artists like me who just wanted to get more people to give us feedback…
…But rather, those who made it their home, and were given a false illusion it was somehow stable again and free from financial turmoil after the March scare, when the writing was starting to show up on the wall before then. The fact those people just trying to enjoy the website and have their own cozy niche, basically get blind sided by poor financial responsibility and lack of transparency just makes me really, really angry. Because where will those users go to? Those who did CSS crimes, or wanted to use Cohost as a fun experiment to relive the early 2010/late 2000s eras of Web forums, will not really have another place like it, outside of maybe Tumblr. I’ve seen some of those posters start their own independent websites in the aftermath of the announcements to continue said experiments, and honestly?
Maybe the one bright spot from the demise of Cohost could be that it sparks inspiration for us all to make our own homes on the internet, just like the classic days of everyone having their own Internet homepage in the 90s. Maybe the solution to the current SEO internet mess, is to go back in time…
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