Why cohost is good

Posted on April 6, 2024

And why it might be important to remove gamification from our online social interactions.

Update: Unfortunately Cohost is no longer a thing. But it is still a really fascinating case study on multiple fronts. It was extremely well received by its userbase, and ultimately the team just suffered from burn out and lack of funding. It will be interesting what future projects learn from Cohost.

Note there’s no screenshots here, this is a big wall of text. I’ve been meaning to post something like this for a while and wall of text is all I can manage right now. Sorry.

Cohost? What is that?

Cohost is a comparatively tiny social media website that is owned and operated by its development team. It also deliberately avoids metrics and gamification. Cohost doesn’t care if you keep scrolling. Actually they do care, they want you to stop scrolling.

I feel that the fact Cohost is operated as a co-op directly informs the product design, and that gives me a lot of confidence in its long term sustainability provided it can get overcome its current short term financial challenges.

By avoiding investors and non-worker equity Cohost has a significant financial challenge to overcome before it can reach long term sustainability.

Conversely I don’t have a lot of faith in the long term sustainability of other social networks that only focus on the technical challenges of decentralization. Centralization was never the problem. Centralization can be incredibly efficient and simple. The problem was always a conflict of interests between the users, the workers and the owners. By collapsing owners and workers into a single category it is possible to still have conflict but workers have an interest in long term sustainability in a way that owners simply don’t. Investors see products as interchangable and fungible assets, whereas workers naturally are more invested in the stability of their own income stream.

In this post I am going to explore some of my thoughts on Cohost as product, the interesting features it has, and how those features relate to its business model and ultimate market fit.

Another goal of this post is to potentially intrigue users to give it a go who otherwise wouldn’t. I think Cohost is a great place for different groups to make their own little non-predatory corner of the internet. It may also be a great place to run small online businesses in the future.

Financial Viability

Cohost Plus

The business model? well its early days but apparently it is two pronged. The first is the good old patreon-like subscription model. The bet is people will pay to use the website because it is different to every other social space and has a higher probability of staying that way because of how it is structured.

They call this “Cohost Plus” but the “Plus” implies unlocking some kind of extra functionality. While it does do that its really there as a way for the community to keep the site they like running. Its $5 a month. It is a way to convert community good will into revenue. Which means Cohost is incentivized to maintain community good will.

Their conversion rate is 17% (which is pretty high) but also not high enough to sustain them. This model is no longer new but it is new for running a social media website. Time will tell if the good will is persistent.

User subscriptions

The second prong (🦐) is user subscriptions. Cohost followers can subscribe to paid posts for a user they like. So maybe there’s a podcast you like, and they post their podcasts on Cohost, you can pay that user $5 / month and Cohost will take some kind of small cut.

There are other avenues as well. They are about to launch tipping. You could tip an artist for example on their platform and they’ll take a small cut.

I really like how open they are about their business model, they have financial updates, they walk through the challenges in a lot of detail.

E.g. check out this example Cohost Financial Update

Ad-free social media is, thus, at somewhat of a disadvantage. by being subscription-based, we’re dependent on our users deciding that they want to pay us, as opposed to advertisers wanting to pay us. advertisers are pretty easy to lie to; users won’t pay for a site they don’t like.

In that linked post they talk about other possible models including untargeted ads. Which is super interesting. A normal company would never choose to do that, untargeted ads are necessarily going to be less profitable than targeted ads, but for a co-op its not necessary to be the most profitable just sustainable.

I can definitely imagine people who would want to advertise to the entire userbase of a site. Even if it was untargeted, if the price was right the value is there.

Tell me about the features

I said the business model and corporate structure of Cohost has a direct impact on its feature set.

Here’s some examples of avoiding gamification / metrics

When you “repost” something, there’s no count. You cannot know if something was reposted by looking at the post.
You cannot see if a post has been liked at all, by anybody
You can “like” something, but no-one can see you liked it except you and the poster.
There’s no full text search. You can only search for tags. This was deliberate to avoid abuse campaigns. But it also makes tags actually used and useful. (More on tags later)
You can see how many people commented but you have to actually click into the comment thread to read it, and comments aren’t posts, you can’t broadcast them to your feed. This means the comment thread is more of a conversation between you and the poster and not you just showing your feed how clever you are.
Your profile does not show who follows you, or how many people follow you
There’s no infinite scroll, you explicitly click “Next page”
There’s no “trending” section

All these decisions are deliberate. It makes the site less addictive. You don’t post something to earn likes, you post it to… post it.

You don’t think a post is important because it has 500 retweets, you think a post is important because it says something that you think matters.

They aren’t really features, more anti features, but they are radical in this era.

But let’s talk about actual features.

Bookmarked Tags

As I said, tags are important on cohost. They are great way to build communities. You can follow tags. When you look at the feed there are two views: “latest posts” and “bookmarked tags”. Just always click “bookmarked tags”, it completely changes the experience for the better.

Bookmark a few tags and you instantly have a vibrant feed without having to follow a ton of people.

You will notice a lot of posts talking about stuff you are not interested in at all. That’s okay because you can mute tags. Definitely mute tags that bother you. There’s no algorithm learning your behaviours - you need to cultivate your own experience (ugh work!).

Bookmarked tags and muted tags work in concert, you expand your scope with a bookmarked tag and reduce it again by muting some subset.

Bookmarked tags remind me a little of using Tweetdeck. This is one aggregated feed of all your favourite tags, so it isn’t multi columned like Tweetdeck. But it feels similar in that you curate your own experience by deciding explicitly what you want to see. It is arguably less accessible to have to do that initial setup but that is an interesting UX design problem that feels solvable.

Following “Inbox”

Have you ever had this problem where you follow someone who posts all the time and you never see posts from other people (perhaps more interesting people) who have a little bit more self-restraint.

Well Cohost has a great little feature that works a bit like an RSS reader or an email inbox. This feature is pretty new but I already use this more than the main feed.

There’s two panes. The left pane is for the people you follow (sorted by who posted last). The right pane is the posts for that user. This simple UI makes it very simple to quickly click in and out of different user’s post history.

On twitter you could go to the users profile to see their posts. But that is nowhere near as easy to navigate. You’d have to somehow know which users posted last and then maintain a mental list of which users you need to catch up on.

This is a way more relaxing experience. You never feel like you are behind or that you will lose a post to time. It is so easy to scroll down the left pane to a user and then catch up on the three posts they did in that month.

I think this small UI design is actually pretty revolutionary. Other social networks could easily do this, but it makes no sense for them to do that. They want the feed to be as dynamic as possible, to feel like if you step away you will miss out on something. There is a deliberate attack on the chronological feed - not just because targeted advertising wants to guide you towards particular decisions - but because you can catch up on a chronological feed. When you feel you have “caught up” you get bored of scrolling and walk away.

If I was a shareholder of twitter, I don’t want you to get bored and walk away, I want you to keep looking at ads so that maybe the website could be profitable one day.

If I work as part of a co-op with subscription payments, I don’t care if you go enjoy your day after catching up on your friends posts. Go do that.

I like that simple UI changes can have a momentous impact on user’s wellbeing. It is so easy to forget that when working in the web space commercially. The UX decisions we make can actually impact peoples lives for the better.

CSS crimes

On Cohost you can use HTML and CSS in your posts. You can do some pretty amazing things. Check out the #css crimes tag for examples.

Maybe this could lead to phishing scams, I really hope not.

How does the business model relate to this? Other sites want you to post as quickly as possible and throw that content into the void to generate revenue. They definitely don’t want you spending hours creating some elaborate CSS instead of looking at ads or posting quickly.

They also want posts to be consumed quickly, posts should be fungible. The last thing you want to do is make any particular post snap you out of doom scroll hypnosis and want to go and learn CSS or do something creative.

RSS Feed

Every Cohost profile automatically has an RSS feed, here’s mine.

Sidenote I’d love if Cohost could also become an RSS reader.

Why would a site that profits from ad revenue want you to be able to read content off site? Hey maybe that’s why Google reader died 🤫

Why Cohost is interesting?

Cohost reminds me of Tumblr many years ago. Its vibrant and creative. The community has a sense of humour. There a lot less dunking and bitterness because ultimately the site doesn’t reward that behaviour. You can write posts as long as you want, you can use CSS. When I was on Tumblr many many years ago people used it for their band pages, for their online shops, as little zines or community newsletters. There was a stark difference between Tumblr and other social networks that always felt so sterile.

I think Cohost will continue to grow but unlike Tumblr I don’t think it will ever be sold to the lowest bidder.

Tumblr self owned itself continually (much like Twitter) because it had to appease advertisers and shareholders. When you have to appease shareholders the product and company direction is never stable. You always have to grow and grow. But Cohost has acknowledged in their financial updates that growth is important for now but also increases maintenance and moderation costs. Growth is a trade off.

It is completely within the realm of possibility that Cohost grows to the size it needs to be and then stops. And once it reaches that sustainable tipping point it will likely survive at that size for a long time. Because it can. Both the users and the worker/owners would be fine with that as long as it is sustainable.

But it is also possible Cohost will continue to grow just at a far slower pace to its competitors. But as it grows they will have to come up with new internal tools to make co-ownership scalable in a tech company.

And that software really interests me.

Cohost for normies?

I don’t think Cohost is currently well suited for your average user currently. There is definitely a particular demographic on Cohost. It makes sense. Politically I think the vast majority of users are left of Bernie. There’s a lot of tech workers. A lot of furry / queer and NSFW posting.

I can imagine a lot of users signing up and immediately feeling its not for them. They just want to catch up on the news, or sports, or fashion or who knows what.

In order for Cohost to be sustainable it likely needs to reach out to that audience and provide features and content that that audience expects and enjoys. That may happen organically but if it doesn’t it could be Cohost’s achilles heel.

For me, I’m a bit of a normy but I’m also a left wing tech worker and a nerd. So I get by just fine reading about music production, or star wars, or game dev.

I think it’d be cool if there was a welcome experience that helped users pick some tags to follow and some tags to mute. Spotify does this when you sign up, it gets you to click on artists / genres you are interested in to help seed its algorithm. But Cohost could instead just seed the users tag list.

I think this problem is solvable.

What kind of internet do we want?

I was born in the late 80s. I’m young enough to have always been surrounded by computers and computing, but I am also old enough to have seen the rise of the web, mobile computing, social media and now AI.

I used to be genuinely excited about the possibilities of twitter - the global town square. Through twitter I got to see first hand, on the ground footage of world events that would never be aired on mainstream news networks. Twitter helped me contextualise world events and learn about all kinds of amazing things that just wouldn’t never have been part of my world otherwise. Twitter instilled in me a healthy distrust of corporate media.

A lot of the reason twitter was good wasn’t sheer good will, it was that twitter just wasn’t as good at juicing their users attention for revenue as their competitors.

Twitter grew up in era of cheap money where investors were happy to make long term bets on non profitable businesses providing they were seeing user growth. That era is over and consequently we’ve seen it transform into what we have today. You will struggle to find funding for any business at the moment let alone for long term bets that are bleeding cash.

When I log in to X, I have 20 notifications, always tweets that aren’t directed at me, but simply tweets I “might be interested in”. The platform is desperate for me to care, and I don’t, I can’t. I see it for what it is.

Facebook was never good at doing what Twitter did well, but it was good at turning a profit, by harvesting your attention and often redirecting and rewiring your own thought and behaviour patterns to get that extra 20 minutes of ad revenue.

But Facebook has been usurped by Instagram and TikTok, and now it seems every social network has some variation of TikTok’s video shorts. As AI becomes more powerful these tools will become better and better at predicting exactly what you need to see to stay on the feed.

And consequently what you need to see to stay on the feed is almost never some information or content that makes you stop and reflect, or engage in the real world. These algorithms want every minute of your life. These companies have no remorse.

So what kind of internet do we want?

I don’t think Mastodon is the way forward. I also don’t think just making things decentralized or open source solves the fundamental problems of our current social media age. We need to focus on ownership and power structures. We need to analyze capital flows and form new structures that are immune to short term financial speculation. The impulse to de-centralize technology as a solution for reducing corruption is political naivete.

I’m not sure if Cohost is the answer. It might be destined to fail and become forgotten. But it is completely within the realm of possibility that it grows organically and sustainably and can continue to be a counterpoint, a beacon. Much like American’s who refer to European social democracies when discussing Medicare for All. Slim chance anything will change, but the chances are even slimmer when there is no visible alternative.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to reach out you can get in touch on Mastodon, BlueSky or Twitter.