Hello, it's me, your unofficial Cohost correspondent, and this month's case study in not linking to things is the the Cohost demographics debate. Please note: this subject concerns discussions of race, references to previous discussions about suicide baiting, and people just generally being annoying.

Previous case studies:

• August Accessibility Debate 
• November Dark Mode Debate

The subject of user demographics on Cohost is nothing new, in the abstract. Well-trod remarks include that the Cohost userbase is disproportionately white, transgender, tech-oriented, and furry. It's not always that exact combination, but those are some of the common observations. Here is an older example (not comprehensive) of how people have referred to the site's demographics before.

With that said, Cohost demographics became subject to a more concentrated posting spree this month (February 2024), when a confluence of factors came together to make things go sour. The first factor I would point to is that two particular posts on demographics -- one focused on race, one not so much -- were timed within just a few days of each other. The second factor I would point to is that Cohost has such an established culture of vagueposting that sometimes people will just assume you're doing it even if you're not. This, of course, gave rise to even more vagueposting, which intermingles with and is inflammed by whole other strains of vagueposting. Very quickly the whole thing becomes a mess.

In this post, I'm aiming to untangle at least some of that mess, so let's start at the beginning.

The subject of Cohost demographics resurged this month with this initial round of posts:

• On Feb 4th, Alyaza Birze, Chimerelda, and TrashBoat wrote a reblog chain about not seeing many other Black people on Cohost, leading to Alyaza's followup posts about reasons why and promoting TrashBoat's suggestion of a Black users group
• On Feb 6th, when Bluesky announced open registration, Nick suggested that "some fraction of bluesky dunk energy might be usefully reallocated to thinking about some of the reasons why some non-white folks are there who are not here or on mastodon"
• On Feb 6th and 7th, Keeble theorized about why Cohost has a hard time retaining people who aren't "tech-oriented furries/queer tech people/the sorts of people who incorrectly assume all trans girls are programmers because they always end up in places where they meet programmers"

Here we have two discrete starting points for the conversation: observations about Cohost's low population of Black people (or people of color more generally) & observations about Cohost's disproportionate appeal to users with tech-oriented niche interests (or who are assumed to have those interests). These observations may bear some relationship to each other, but they certainly employ different frames of emphasis.

Cue a spree of posting about "techies" on Cohost, who is or isn't one, whether or not there's a lot of them, and whether or not we should care, with a standard sprinkling of condescension and hostility in the mix. For example:

• Inc0's post about being "the mythical 'Cohost user that isn't a programmer'" and reacting to "the seventeen billion #Cohostmeta posts a day, by said programers LARPing for 16 paragraphs about how I am not using this website" 
• Folly's post asking whether or not the tech-majority narrative is true 
• Webster Leone's post saying that "no one I follow even posts directly about tech stuff" 
• QuestForTori's post saying that "I swear Twitter has poisoned people's brains into thinking that every site needs to cater to everyone or it's a failure"
• Mechagarfield's single-sentence post: 

i agree with the nerds that there are too many of them on here, but: it is funny when the nerds say there are only other nerds on here

• Dante's single-sentence post:  

"cohost has way too many [x]" is an extremely funny self-own given the degree of user-customizability there is in what you see on this website

Some of those posts may or may not be what prompted these:

• Alyaza's post saying "i do find it a bit irritating people seem to be crossing the streams of critique" 
• Marm's short post about others "deflecting criticism"

Still, the conversation continued, featuring

• More posts about whether or not everyone on Cohost is in the tech industry 
• Jasper's post saying "I am in tech, but I'm also transmasc" 
• JcDent and Pendell's remarks about how Cohost's UI relies on markdown and doesn't make it easy to insert an image, which has impacted who sticks with the site and who doesn't 
• Alloy's demographics survey, asking users whether they are a tech professional and whether they are queer, white, or a furry 
• PossumSkull's single-sentence post: 

a lot of "talking about what cohost is like" feels like the parable about the men touching the elephant

From here, more people began to remark on the direction that posting had taken and/or resumed the conversation on race. See for example:

• Alyaza's post saying that it "kinda feels like we're going through another round of context collapse" and remarked that the tech-oriented conversation "(unintentionally) hijacked" the conversation about race 
• Josh's post about how "it's extremely clear when people are dropping the 'white' from 'white tech'"
• Olivia's short post about people "[making] the issue about something else entirely" 
• Mint and Shark's reblog chain about users of color on Cohost, which touches on a pattern of conversations getting "ran through a bleaching process until it's a completely different topic" 
• Mae's long post about whiteness and homogenity
• Rotsharp's objection to "vagueposting about vagueposting about vagueposting"

At this point, a few people began to bring up something that I have refrained from pointing out up until now. The user who started the multi-user reblog chain that has been positioned, at least by some, as the "start" of the conversation... is a user who was also at the center of a previous debate over suicide baiting. Given that people may have blocked each other over that debate, it is possible that blocks/silencing may have played a role in how many people did or did not encounter that original reblog chain from February 4th.

At least three users have drawn a connection back to those events:

• Petrichor's comment on one of Alyaza's posts that "a lot of folks might have you blocked/silenced" 
  • Alyaza was skeptical and replied that "i just cannot imagine that i have such gravity that people muting or blocking me would influence the discourse in this manner"
• Katja's post about "how white users on here seem to allocate their anger," which characterizes the criticism of suicide baiting in terms of "white fragility" 
• A comment on Maddie Lin's (login only) post, where a different user told me that she has Alyaza blocked
  • (in this same comment, she remarked on how all she was seeing was people talking about the conversation without actually linking or specifying what was actually being said)

On that note, regardless of how much blocking/silencing may have played a role, what has definitely played a role is vagueposting. Vagueposting leaves users to fill in the blanks what other users might be responding to, and this presents a hazard in that, if people are encountering different samples of posts, then people can wind up interpreting a post with the wrong context. For example, in a comment Alloyed summarized the chain of events in a way that matches what my initial impression had been: 

A. cohost is so white, what can we do about it?
B. (addressing A) of course it's so white, this site is built for jaded tech workers
C. (addressing B, but notably NOT addressing A) um actually it's fine. we got things other than that

However, when I asked Keeble, they told me that their post was not a direct response to the conversation on race, and in fact, the posts I linked as examples were posts they hadn't even seen yet.

People were also seeing vagueposts that they interpreted in terms of the conversation about race rather than strictly in relation to the Keeble post, which changes how they interpret those posts. Nick remarked on as much here:

Saw a post about how cohost doesn't need to be for "all demographics" which at a glance sounds super racist, but digging into the comments the poster clarifies later that she had only seen posts about cohost being too nerdy and was unaware that part of the active conversation is about cohost being too white. 

In any case, various users continued to make metadiscursive posts while, again, not quite indicating which posts exactly they were reacting to or disagreeing with. 

• Alyaza remarked on the conversation getting "morphed by telephone into a clusterfuck" and asked if it could get back on track 
• Problemnyatic lamented that "there seems to be a consistent pattern in this discourse of everything becoming this shitty game of passive-aggressive telephone" 
• Nire Bryce objected to people assuming the worst
• Gabby objected to people getting defensive 
• Evelyn announced an intent to leave the site 
• Reth posted xkcd 2071, a comic about not knowing what other people are reacting to

So as you can see, the conversation has significantly soured.

That's not to say that nobody has picked up the original threads -- I saw a couple of posts by RoyalAssassin and Cass which try to address both the two conversations, and Alyaza also elaborated more on the difficulty of finding other Black people on Cohost.

Still, overall it's been a bit of a trainwreck, and it didn't need to play out like this. People didn't need to confidently assume that Keeble's post about a tech-oriented userbase was in response to posts about a lack of Black people on Cohost, people didn't need to act so snide while vagueblogging about Keeble's post, and people didn't need to assume that everyone had already seen the same set of posts. When you directly ask people which posts they're reacting to, you have the opportunity to learn whether or not you had the right first impression. People can also preempt this problem by more frequently linking to what prompted their posts, rather than always leaving it to others to fill in the blanks. So like I've said before, this debate reflects how a culture of public vagueposting has the potential to be needlessly inflammatory.