I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.

Because of this as well as poor financial management, Cohost will pass out of internet culture with little impact

Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would've killed it regardless.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Would it have helped Cohost survive?

Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it's one of one, the only one.

Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It's only remarkable cause there's just one instance.

[–] mke@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That's a very different cohost we're envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.

At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.