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While cohost's users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.
We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn't know who I was without the swirly profile picture.
There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn't get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don't know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.
It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a regular thing like 1st-Sunday-of-the-month. I hope meetups like this continue in other cities too.
There were long conversations about how none of the current "alternatives" to cohost manage to capture the "short or long form posts", the "stuff from other people just outside your circles", the "lack of metrics and algorithms", and the "ease of posting regardless of device" quite yet. Here's hoping stuff like The Website League or Topghost's Octobug or something else like that take off soon. I still need to set up webmentions, but now I have asks and comments going at least.
Photo taken by Coda
It wasn't until I wrote a post or two on Nicky's Cohost 2 roll of paper that I realized how much I was missing an outlet for shitposting. My current blog takes too much time for me to update to ever feel like that sort of thing is worth it.