a winding goodbye post for cohost, which i enjoyed lurking very much and would have gotten around to posting if i’d had more time

i was so young when dial-up was around that i remember my mom giving me access to her instant messenger (yahoo?), me clicking every single colorful emoji in the list, and promptly crashing our internet for several hours. i don’t really remember dial-up internet. i remember the sound as a re-telling of that era, and i remember the stories my parents told me. but despite not really having experienced dial-up internet myself, i do feel a fondness and longing for it, and the culture that surrounded it. i feel nostalgic for dial-up internet. but it isn’t my history, per se.

this has happened to me a few different ways. i ran into an old dreamcast bulletin board a while back (btw if it redirects you to https, you don’t get images or css) and got punched square in the face with nostalgia about it. but i never had a dreamcast, i had my dad’s old SNES and then a wii. and i was never on true bulletin boards or news groups, i was on forums from like 2010 through 2016. and yeah, the forum is a descendent of the bbs and newsgroup, so maybe that’s fair. but it’s overwhelmingly not my story, not my memories, not my place to feel nostalgic.

maybe that feeling is silly. but i’m pretty sure i’m not the only one who feels others’ nostalgia. (and please please tell me if you do too). i often act on that feeling, trying to recreate experiences that were long gone before my time, trying to preserve things that haven’t mattered to anyone in years or decades. as a microcosm of this, i got on a kick of making my toki pona site display properly on the nintendo ds browser. no, not the 3DS or DSi one. like, the one that came on a cartridge. with a second cartridge for RAM that went in the GBA slot. and it was really fun, genuinely satisfying to make my site work on there. let alone its age, there are so many little quirks that make it hard to design for! it’s a miracle that browser exists at all, and i love it.

anyway, i am probably the only being to have loaded my site on the ds browser.

you might have guessed that i feel this nostalgia for cohost, too. i knew of cohost for maybe a year, but i only joined a few weeks before it closed. literally a week after i joined, the closure announcement came through. devastating. i didn’t even know what we were losing yet. but that feeling was back- i knew a lot about cohost from the way people talked about it, and from a handful of posts i’d been linked. reading through posts (which i did a lot of in the leadup to the closure), i recognize the culture here; it feels familiar to my experiences in small communities in VRChat, and in some parts of the toki pona community. there’s a level of personal-ness and sincere excitement on cohost that i don’t think you can replicate in audiences like tumblr, or arenas like twitter, or floods like discord. and i identify so strongly with the community here in a way i did not expect to when i signed up. but for the most part, i never got to experience it.

and so i am here again, feeling somebody else’s nostalgia. but how do we re-create a community, a culture, like this? i’m going to think about this question for a long time.

goodbye, cohost. i hope we meet again.