Cohost was the last social media site that was still fun to use. A place that I could actually enjoy and felt I was sharing and building something good with people, even just by making nonsense jokes. It was a place where I felt safer posting kink on main and genuinely learnt and explored new parts of myself. And a place where I shared silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes and other silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes, or post intros to TV shows or more silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes.

Cohost was designed for people to use and have fun with. It allowed users a degree of freedom in creating posts that no other site like it does, leading to a proliferation of unique, shareable experiments and toys like NES Pictionary abd that we called CSS crimes. It’s a silly name but it felt genuinely transgressive in the face of the homogeneity of the social media giants. It gave people a taste of that “old internet” freedom and a lot of us found ourselves unwilling to go back to the endless churn of other social media sites in the same way afterwards.

So I built my own website, as did many others. It’s a little addictive, honestly, having this little project I can always tinker with, tweak and style how I like. A lot of people did go and make blogs, post twice about how they are still figuring things out and then never update again, but many are still posting and I now have a collection people in my news reader now who I have chosen to read, who I care about updates from and who I hope care about updates from me.

And most of all Cohost taught me to be deliberate about how I use the internet again. That what I do with it is a choice both in what I post and what I spend the time to read. So thank you, Eggbug.