Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal are central figures in Beirut's alternative scene. After years of working in parallel on their own projects across the Lebanese capi..
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.
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.
A custom eggbug made by Bethposting out of foam clay, acrylic paint, mod podge and armature wire
For the longest time, on cohost, I kept saying "man, I should try to organize something to meet up with the Bay Area folks".
It almost became a running gag because I would post about it, and never act on it for many reasons. So when the shutdown of cohost was announced, and after seeing the Seattle and Philly "cohost wakes" being planned, I went "fuck it, we ball".
I posted about it, people said they'd be interested, Nicky and Diane helped me actually find a spot and time, and I announced it. I was diligently keeping track of who had replied and how, to have an at least vague idea of how many people would show up.
18 days later, earlier today as I write this: we had 40 people show up!! I don't actually have a group picture to show because I wasn't the one who took them and not everyone wants to be visible publicly in such a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.
In fact, I barely had any time to take many pictures myself! The only ones I have are of Cohost 2, a huge scroll of paper that Nicky brought so we could make posts by hand.
It was a lot of fun, wish I took more pictures. But I feel chatting with people, recognizing folks from the website and having a good time was more important than taking pictures, you know?
People hung out, some of them played a fighting game with specialized controllers1, people talked about the website, nerd shit, linguistics, and a bunch of other things. Emails were gathered so people could organize and try to make this a more recurring thing, now that we know we can motivate at least some people to meet up.
Cohost really was like a website, it was a website that somehow got us to actually touch grass and is making us think about touching more grass in the future. And I think that's really neat.
Eggbug forever,
- damien
P.S: if you were there and have pictures you're willing to share with me, I'd love to see them! Email me at damien@erambert.me.
I know these weren't sticks, but I'm also a fighting game noob lmao↩
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Photo taken by Coda
