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Now at this point, I feel like the timeline needs to get a little more narrative based. After all this isn't meant to be a history of cohost, it's meant to be "here's how I feel about the whole thing, but I want you to understand why".

End of October 22, only a few months into the site, is when the first lolicon debate happens. There's been plenty of posting about that, but the tldr is they said they wanted to get community input on it. The community is split between "of course you should allow it because some people use it to cope" and "what the fuck why are you even entertaining the thought of allowing it". The devs say "we've talked it over and we're working on the community guidelines so we can get the wording just right, hang tight."

The guidelines don't show up. In January 2023, Kaara gets onboarded. There's some conversations that they were waiting on a full time community person before releasing these guidelines. For a few months nobody knows if the site is going to allow lolicon or not despite this being a big deal breaker for people on both sides.

Just to keep track, as of March 2023, they have been running on loans for 3 years. I haven't talked much yet about the financial updates. July 2022 was the first one. At that point they were expecting "a few years" to break even. They started slowing activations to try to keep costs down. In September 2022 they talk about securing funding for 2023 which is hard because "they don't know how many people they'll need", especially for the features they planned to ship, suggesting they somehow expected to be able to hire more staff for development work (so not just Kaara who would be hired for community management). It sounds like they expected to have at least 6 people all with equal salary.

November is the big financial update, where Twitter forced a lot of people to look for greener pastures. From the previous update to November, Cohost almost tripled in user size from the Twitter exodus. Cohost sees this as the big time, and actually makes a profit this month. A lot of this however came from people buying year subscriptions, yet Cohost seems to think they'll be making this kind of money for a while. It's reminiscent of Homer expecting his pumpkin stocks to take off after October. Somehow they think during this month that due to their revenue their fourth employee is going to be "effectively free". This is what they say. In December things have slowed back down, and, most notably, we do not get a "monthly" financial update again until June 2023.

In May 2023, there's an incident where a Jewish Cohost user has had Nazi accounts harassing them on Mastodon. One of those accounts signed up on Cohost, with an identifiable name. The user reported it, and Cohost basically replied that the user hadn't broken any rules and wouldn't be removed. Obviously this caused some outrage when made public.

Now, moderation mistakes happen. Maybe they misunderstood the context. Maybe they didn't look at the links in the users profile where they link to their Nazi fedi instance account. Cohost prides itself on banning bigots on sight. But either way they botched it.

That would be fine, except that Kaara (as community manager and the person who made the wrong choice) posts a long post about how people are attacking her in bad faith, how mistakes happen but people need to trust the staff to make the right choices, that the staff are their friends, and how unfairly she has been treated. This post is so bad that the Jewish user who got the bad ruling felt the need to apologize for what happened. Despite being the one owed an apology in the first place, whose only crime was telling people about it.

This is an important event to me in the Cohost Mythology. The staff of cohost, not just Kaara but in general, have absolutely no boundaries. The staff will routinely talk about how they didn't get features shipped because they were sick, depressed, have ADHD, whatever. They feel the need to announce who is or isn't in the office every week. They frequently refer to themselves as the users friends. They have no division between their personal and public pages. They've gotten mad at users for reporting things too much on the weekends and frequently, frequently remind users they aren't working on the weekends or holidays or after hours and more or less imply you should leave them alone. They post about how much people being negative about the site (even if it's just pointing out a bug or disliking a UI element) makes them feel like failures.

I point this out because this overly familiar posting is going to weigh heavily on my wrap up.

I've gone on such tangents that maybe you've forgotten about the lolicon community guidelines update. I think that they were hoping everyone would. But people kept asking. Their excuse is that they had to hire Kaara, then Kaara had to get settled in, then actually work on it. Also they wanted to consult with "other people in the industry". Frankly, this is something they should have had a rule about day one, these people are too online to not know it was going to come up (and by the end I have strong feelings about why this happened this way).

On 06/05/23, the community guidelines update is posted. The long and short of it is that lolicon is banned, but cub art (the furry equivalent of lolicon) is allowed

Again, fights break out. Some people are mad lolicon is banned. Some people are mad cub porn is allowed. But within 24 hours, Cohost reverses course and says cub is banned now too. Somehow despite saying they consulted with professionals and took half a year to decide what to do, it only took a handful of hours to say "sorry sorry we're trying to delete it". The staff post passive aggressive posts about how stressful the whole thing is for them.

Something I forgot to mention before, the first lolicon debates highlighted that the site had no way to delete your account. Several people wanted to be removed from the site and couldn't. And when I say couldn't, I mean the devs couldn't figure it out. They publicly opened a site where accounts couldn't be deleted. After far too long they finally made it possible for THEM to delete accounts, but those requests would sit in their queue for a long time. One user requested a deletion, waited so long they started to change their mind, then had it deleted a month two after the original request (their request to not have it deleted hadn't been looked at yet). This is still the current state of the site.

One staff member shortly before the next financial update posts about how they hate having to decide what to work on based on what will make money, hinting at their financial problems being worse. However the same staff member repeatedly made personal posts like "hmm vote on what feature I work on today", and often landed on things that had no financial impact. Almost every staff patch notes says they're working on Tumblr style asks for weeks and weeks on end, another unmonetized feature.

A week or two after that we get the first financial update of 2023. Turns out they're losing over $40k a month, and have also given themselves a raise, now $94k salaries for everyone. They can't make payroll the next month (July 15), but don't worry everyone, cohost isn't dying at all. They don't want to take more rich friend loans after 3 years of debt. They'll secure funding to the end of the year (there's no detail here about if they've done this or how, we still don't know. They added some new merch to the store. After asks ship, they'll start working on a tipping system.

We've caught up to the current day, so it's time for my pre-post-mortem.

Here's where I stand on cohost:

I don't think the devs set out to run a grift. However, I do think the following facts are true:

- The cohost devs aren't all new to startups, so ignorance can't really be used as an excuse

- They took loans from a friend for three years with no expectation they were even close to breaking even

- They gave themselves significant raises ($87k to $94k) in the face of significant losses every month

- They were paying themselves such high salaries in the first place despite running an unprofitable startup

- They call themselves a non-profit or sometimes a not-for-profit in public, despite being a registered for-profit LLC

- In all this time since Cohost started development, the only monetization they have is $5 monthly subscriptions whose features are currently a few special avatar shapes, a larger upload limit and later .beat timestamps. While I love beats, this seems to be a feature few used that was just added for the fun of the devs. The signup page for plus advertises "custom cursors" coming "soon" but this graphic doesn't seem to have ever been updated since avatar shapes are "soon" and beats aren't mentioned. Well, and they have a merch store that sells stickers and mugs, but when they recently added new items, it was clear most users didn't know they had a store, because they link it only in the bio of the @ staff account.

- Despite having monetization ideas (whether or not they'd be useful) for things like tipping users, subscribing to users, user submitted ads, their focus for months has been on implementing a Tumblr style ask system. Even now that it is implemented, their focus has been on rolling it out slowly to every user.

With all of this info, my conclusion is that the Cohost staff was a little naive and rose tinted about how this would go, but largely they have made little effort to actually make the site sustainable. They've increased their own salaries while shipping nothing whatsoever that would bring in more money. Heck, they still keep saying they'll eventually get around to adding a donation button, they have users who want to just give them money and in over a year they have not implemented a donation button.

In terms of finances, it's hard to see Cohost as people who are just idealists who want to make the world a better place when they've done nothing at all to make the site stay alive. They can't make payroll in two weeks and they're still just fiddling around with whatever features they find cute. This is their job, and beyond that, they have hundreds of thousands of users they're responsible for, and it doesn't feel at all like they're worried about what happens. They seem ready to write it off and give their buddy the source code (the loan collateral) and move on.

Thats largely focused on the financials, but there's more.

- I think they were being deliberately dishonest about being a for profit LLC. I think they know that makes them sound corporate and that's why they call themselves a co-op and a non-profit/not-for-profit (both legal designations they do not meet). I think this is fully an image thing, they want to be the cool leftist co-op and not the company run by former Big Tech employees.

- I think they have cultivated a parasocial relationship with their members. I am undecided on whether this was deliberate or if they just don't see the problem with it. They are far too personal about what they post and they explicitly want people to see them as friends, going so far as to saying you need to trust that they're doing things in good faith because they're your friends. Your users don't need to hear about which members of staff are in a polycule together. Your users don't need to hear that bug reports make you feel like a failure. When you make policy choices that cause the site to get into massive fights over them, you shouldn't be posting little jokes about the discourse. Trying to shame users for criticizing a moderation decision you made for not trusting you is absurd, they AREN'T your friends and can only trust you based on the actions they see from you, and if they don't trust you based on that you don't get to chastise them for it. Your hundreds of thousands of users are not your friends. But it was effective, because anyone with any criticism is shouted down by people who seriously think the staff are their friends.

- Posting that you are worried about paying your rent or mortgage because of the sites financial situation to your userbase, leading to people posting that they can barely afford their own groceries but they'll give you $5 that won't come near helping the $40k deficit, while you post about trips you're going on or furry conventions you'll be at, is vile to me, whether you're trying to be manipulative or not.

- In early days of cohost, during the first lolicon debate, I reported two people. One was someone going to a users posts and commenting that they should just fuck off and leave the site because they disagreed with them about the lolicon thing. They then posted screenshots of that user on Twitter to further make fun of them. I reported this as harassment, no action was taken.

The other user, during the lolicon debate, was angrily demanding someone who was anti-lolicon reveal whether they had been sexually assaulted as a kid or not, because they shouldn't have an opinion otherwise. Obviously, this is an inappropriate thing to demand of someone in the comments of a community update. No action was taken.

I've seen posts removed for far weaker reasons than either of these.

I later found out user 1 was friends with the devs, and user 2 was the spouse of one of the devs.

This immediately soured me on them as community leaders.

There was also a fight that broke out in the more recent lolicon threads where user A argued that such rules are too messy because, and I quote, "how do you fairly account for some people being more neotenous, like Asians?" User B called them a clown. User B's post got removed (or hidden I forget), User A's did not, even after being reported by several people for being racist.

And finally, I have to talk about the cub stuff.

Debating allowing this content once, out of some misguided sense that you're helping people with trauma, is one thing. Clearly an unpopular thing because you walked it back pretty fast, or seemingly did.

Coming back six months later and saying "no lolicon yes cub" tells me you want that content on your website.

There are at least two staff members I now know from info elsewhere are into cub art.

It's extremely obvious to me now that they desperately wanted to allow it but too many users said no.

Even if they came to the right conclusion of "no" later, why the fuck would I look Kindly upon people who really really wanted it there and tried twice to allow it?

Also one remaining stray thought, I've been really annoyed the whole time by their treatment of NSFW content in general.

From day one they keep talking a big game about how WE will allow porn and WE'RE friendly to sex workers and WE are even going to let you monetize your porn (after asks ship, of course). We aren't like those bad sites like Tumblr!

Tumblr banned it because payment processors said fuck off you have to. Even Pornhub has been fighting payment processors over this for the last few years and it's a massive struggle. Onlyfans has had similar struggles. Payment processors hate porn because of how much fraud and chargebacks there are with porn sites.

To come in and say "we have no idea what we're doing but WE'LL always support you", while sites like Switter had to close down due to various government and corporate pressures, is just...fuck you honestly. If you want the techbro mindset here it is. "Nobody else is doing this because their Morals are bad and our Morals are good!" People who actually have done the hard work of trying to make safe spaces for sex workers failed, but no, I'm sure you all will do great. If they ever ship tipping (at this point I can't see it happening before they fold but let's pretend) they're going to eventually get cut off from their payment processors when it's being used for mostly porn and they're going to learn why everyone else had to quit and then they'll have to pull an excuse out of their ass for why all their grandstanding in the past just fell apart. It disgusts me to pretend like some big ally to sex workers then do this little research into what it actually takes to support them.