The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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An edit of a painting from the TV series Severance. A bearded white man is brandishing a whip against a small group of people and one goat. The logos of Bluesky, Twitter, and Cohost are laid over their heads.

One of the biggest reasons that the early internet was a wonderful wild west of creativity and new culture was because it was decentralized. This public good has gradually been co-opted and enclosed upon by large internet tech companies, destroying this free platform and turning it into a machine designed to constantly generate profit off of attention.

If you believe we can escape this by building another centralized platform, you have been lied to. The centralization of internet platforms in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc is the origin of the problem. It feels awful to be on the internet these days, and it is not possible for well meaning individuals to build something new out of this trash heap.

Bluesky will not solve this problem. Cohost failed to solve this problem.

The Cohost landing page as of Sepember 11, 2024. It displays in big letters "posting, but better" alongside their mascot the eggbug.

Developed by a group called the Anti Software Software Club, Cohost was pitched as an alternative to Twitter, with many people jumping to it in the early days of Elon Musk’s purchase and subsequent ownership of the platform. The ASSC had lofty goals of presenting an alternative to corporate social media, one that was for the users and not the other way around. Cohost recently announced that due to a lack of funding they would be forced to close down before the end of the year.

The ASSC was misguided from the start, being borne out of a fairly nominal startup-culture ideology. Cohost was developed as a centralized and controlled platform despite the existence of other methods of building social media that directly challenged the status quo on an infrastructural level instead of just a superficial one. Because of this as well as poor financial management, Cohost will pass out of internet culture with little impact on the ravenous corporate social media machines it sought to take down.

Cohost's front page, which reads as follows: our core ideas nobody has gotten it quite right yet we think existing platforms have some good ideas, but no one’s managed to create one without profound flaws. we’re borrowing liberally from other sites, but we want to build cohost into something that works well and serves its users rather than just another clone. there is value in being in the same place as everyone on a web without functioning search engines, blogs and friends-only sites may be okay for some, but they leave people who are scraping by on public visibility and word of mouth in the lurch. …but nobody wants a digital panopticon on modern social media, there is an ever-present fear that someone will see your post, have their own bad faith interpretation, and decide to ruin your day over it. platforms are often built to encourage this sort of behavior to drive up engagement, but they don’t have to be. metrics are ruining our lives modern social media is designed around a vicious feedback loop that keeps users Engaged at the expense of their mental health, all in order to make their executives more money. the value of social media is its posts we aren’t the ones providing the most important part of cohost — you are. cohost exists to give you ways to express yourself and stay in touch with your friends.

This will all keep happening until we decide we have been tricked one-too-many times by centralized platforms. The only way to escape the hellish state of the current internet is to pursue options that drag the network back towards its decentralized state; a state where corporations are unable to control who we talk to, what we see, where our attention is for five or more hours a day, every day.

This will keep happening until we abandon centralization and choose and free, open source, decentralized future. Or else the beatings will continue until morale improves.