It's sad that Cohost is shutting down. That sucks.
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I keep thinking about this. I'm really going to miss a lot of the art that was posted on Cohost, and while I'm annoyed that it captured the Rust posting community to a great degree, I'll miss having an easy way to follow all those folks as well. (I did so over RSS, but via Corobel and then Cohost's RSS feeds.)
But what's really sad, to me, is that not only did we lose that art; not only did a bunch of people lose a space they cared about; but we get *nothing*. No code, no meaningful data portability [1], and thanks to the hagiographic bent of a lot of the posts from users of the site, no real, comprehensive post-mortem from which people can learn. Perhaps that will come with time, but the environment seems outright hostile to it.
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1: Yes, data exports are available, but the follow only one's own data, not comments or reblogs-with-comment (rebugs?) and so lack almost all context. It's the same problem I have with Mastodon's data export format.
The team has said they want the Wayback Machine at archive.org to archive the site, but take a look at some archived Cohost pages on archive.org; they're straight up broken, up to and including blanking themselves after a seemingly random amount of time and requiring a refresh.
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@noracodes i never got into cohost because it gave me what i shorthand in my mind as "ello vibes". and like a lot of similarly shaped undertakings, "we're not gonna learn any big lessons from this and neither will the next people who make a doomed ello-shaped object" almost seems like a defining part of the thing.
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@noracodes (i don't mean this as shit-talking, it just... there's a pattern, i guess.)
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@brennen I honestly can't disagree.
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@noracodes I have a mutual working on a long piece (several thousands of words) on cohost and I expect it be what you are talking about, more post-mortem than hagiography
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@packetcat very very very excited to read this tbh
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@noracodes same.
that said, I think anybody who was on cohost and was seriously invested in it in any way will find themselves very hard to have a sense of detachment in such writing
for such people they are mourning the loss of a social space
I understand what you mean by hagiography but I don't think it is fair to describe current users of doing that tbh
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@packetcat that's fair I guess. I'm specifically referring to posts along the lines of "cohost was too good and pure for this world" but maybe I should be more tolerant of that given the circumstances
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@noracodes aye. its been frustrating to read discourse on cohost from both "sides" of the matter recently which is why I mention it
I had to add a filter for the word "cohost" for that reason heh