(The original title was something like “Reflections On Efforts To Foster Sex-Celebratory Community Within Niche Online Spaces”, which is SUCH a dickless piece of jargon-ridden flotsam even if it IS technically-accurate.)

When my friend Aidan contacted me back in March of 2022 & asked if I wanted to join Cohost, the new social media platform she was building along with two other people, she was simply inviting me as a friend who she thought would get along with the other friends and family who were being invited to kick the site’s tires during their months-long pre-launch beta. I immediately liked what I saw – the site’s functionality was limited and it ran like molasses, but the team had a bold vision for the platform that included no advertisements, ever, and an extremely progressive approach to pornography. Given the precarious state that porn existed in on the few social platforms where it was allowed, I was excited at the prospect of a social media website that was sympathetic to the web’s pornmongers, and decided I would do my best to get the word out.

After the site had its official public launch, I talked it up on my public Twitter account, hopped into the mentions of a number of my favorite artists (many of whom had been expressing distaste with Twitter as a platform as the Elon Musk takeover loomed), and evangelized the site in several porn-oriented Discord servers. Beyond porn being generally-permissible on Cohost, I also liked to emphasize its other strong selling points – no ads! A chronological timeline! Tagging on the way! I also had a number of more-or-less canned responses to common misgivings – yes, there aren’t many people yet, but there’s high engagement among them. Discoverability is an issue but search is on its way. There might not be video but there IS gif support. And so on.

This post is less to sing Cohost’s praises than to highlight that I personally worked pretty hard to bring in as many porn creators and porn-interested users as I could, and then worked harder to keep them there. I’m writing down my thoughts and experiences related to the work I did along those lines with the hope that it might be instructive for anyone trying to do similar community-building work in the future.

It Turns Out That If You Act Like An Authority Figure A Lot Of People Might Start To Believe You

First of all, I need to stress that my efforts were entirely self-motivated. I had no ACTUAL authority, nor did I have any top-down mandate from Cohost staff to push the site beyond personally liking and believing in its potential. I enjoyed a greater-than-average amount of access to the devs by virtue of being friends with several of them, but beyond asking the occasional question regarding site rules or etiquette I never really attempted to leverage that access. I certainly didn’t have any influence over the site’s policies or features (aside from that one time where I made a post saying that it’d be nice if people’s profiles had a button on them that would hide all of their shares so you could quickly see only the posts that user had made, and then two days later that button existed. I’ve always felt pretty good about that one, and think it’s baffling that it isn’t a standard feature on all social media websites that allow sharing). I was literally just Some Guy (my good friend Shel expressed a similar kind of bewilderment about her experience becoming a kind of assumed authority over in her recent Cohost eulogy.)

Nevertheless, I believe I WAS viewed as a kind of authority figure, both by users and even by the staff – soon after Cohost’s public launch, Aidan told me in a DM that she had been referring to me in internal Cohost chats as the site’s “unofficial porn ambassador”. While there were specific efforts I made along those lines that I’ll get to in the next section, here are some general things about me that made me well-positioned for this kind of presumed authority:

• I was extremely porn-literate. I had been consuming porn in multiple formats since a younger age than is perhaps wise to be consuming porn, thanks to a combination of high technical competency and a father who, understandably, never expected that I would ever teach myself to pick the lock on the cabinet where he kept his own pornography collection. I knew about different studios and production houses, different eras, different lineages of influence. I had an extremely strong working knowledge of the past two decades of adult game releases outside of Japan, and a decent grounding on those within. I knew every piece of cumbrained lingo under the sun, and was even known to invent new ones for my own dark purposes. I followed hundreds of porn artists and could identify their work at a glance. I knew my shit, and people could tell.
• I had skin in the game. While I wouldn’t have called myself popular as a porn creator, I had been working on adult games for several years at this point and had even launched a couple of my own projects, one of which was picking up a bit of steam. I could speak to the challenges faced online by porn creators, as they were challenges that affected me personally.
• I was a known quantity in the community. By this I mean I not only had a lot of friends who made porn, as well as many friends who were full-or-part-time sex workers/performers, but I was also known as a community member. I was a semi-frequent commissioner of several artists. I was active in several popular porn-oriented Discords. I was a regular commenter on new artworks. Even if I might not have had the raw clout of a super-popular creator, I was nevertheless not appearing out of nowhere. I was someone that some people knew.
• I could communicate convincingly. I’m a writer with years of experience. I like learning, and I’m good at arguing. I’m good at research, and as stated, have a wide body of knowledge to work from. I know how to tell a joke. These are all necessary skills if you want to construct messages that people find interesting and influential.
• I was not crass, but also not ashamed. There is a sense of griminess around a lot of porn-focused communities – a lot of communities that allow and encourage porn posting are populated by the kind of person who tends to see the world in not-especially-savory terms, and that kind of person typically does not possess either the interest or the ability to generate goodwill outside of those communities. By contrast, I was able to talk, at length, about enjoying and creating porn from a standpoint that was palatable to progressive people who might not have identified as porn consumers themselves. However, I was also very frank, and did not cringe away from seedier subjects in an attempt at preserving some ideal of respectability.

Specific Efforts – Discovery, Legitimacy, Recognition

Discovery

In order for a community to coalesce, it’s imperative that people know that there are enough of them around to HAVE a community. One of my longest-running efforts along those lines was the creation and maintenance of the Cohost Porn Creator Master Post. The Master Post was simple – I did my level best to locate people who created NSFW content on the platform and would then link them in alphabetical order alongside a brief description of what kind of content they made. These descriptions were frequently submitted by the creators themselves, but if I was just adding someone I had discovered I would use whatever description they had written in their profile (if they had no description, I would do my best to write one myself based on a quick scan of their page).

The Master Post was extremely popular, and at the time of this writing has around six or seven hundred different creators listed on it. I mostly stopped updating it in March of this year, as I felt Cohost’s reputation as a porn destination was well-established at that point, but I do credit the Master Post with helping the site attain that reputation. Beyond being a useful directory for anyone trying to discover porn on the site, the Master Post sent two very important messages to porn creators joining the site. First, it informs porn creators that there are already a lot of them there – and not just big names, either, everyone appears to be welcome. Second, it tells porn creators that someone cares enough to help their audience find them, which is not a welcome porn creators can expect in very many public forums.

Legitimacy

In my first year or so of using Cohost, I wrote several longish essays about porn games (my chosen medium) in the style of some of my favorite longform writing on sites like Waypoint and Rock Paper Shotgun. These essays – among them “Make Porn Games That Are Porn Games, or, It’s Time To Accept There Isn’t A Better Porn Game Format Than The Visual Novel“, and “Porn Games Aren’t Going To Get Any Better Without Coverage” and “Porn Game Content Expectations Are Legitimately Insane” and “Opportunity and the Bona Fides of Queerness & Coziness” – were, at the time, just ways for me to get a bunch of thoughts outside of my head and onto the page so I could stop thinking them. However, these essays were also surprisingly well-received and widely-shared on the platform, which led me to consider what kind of an appetite there might be for collections of such writing. In August of 2023 I posted on Cohost soliciting pitches for articles, received two dozen pitches, and thus the Adult Analysis Anthology was off to the races.

I’ll talk more about AAA as a project in another post – right now I’d like to focus on its value as a community-building exercise. Enthusiast media is a powerful force for shaping a community’s ideas about itself, and the mode in which media is presented can greatly affect its perceived prestige and validity. Writers for AAA were paid, their pitches were vetted, their drafts were edited, and the final drafts were presented in a tasteful anthology format (“anthology” was a very important piece of nomenclature, as I wanted the project to be extremely distinct from a zine). To a reader, this communicates a sense of value and thoughtfulness about the subject matter before they’ve even read a single word of a single essay. AAA‘s mission as enthusiast media is to promote the idea that sexually-stimulating games and the experiences and culture they produce were worthy of consideration that’s every inch as serious as that received by their non-pornographic counterparts, which I think is a pretty powerful message to send to a class of creatives who so often have their work denigrated and critically discarded. AAA was very much a product of Cohost’s porn-celebratory culture, and I’d like to think there was a sense of communal pride around that fact.

Recognition

Discovery is one thing, legitimacy is another, but recognition – or, as I like to think of it, celebration – is the last crucial piece of the puzzle. It’s so very easy for people creating art online nowadays to feel like they’re just tipping their work into a furnace, that it simply vanishes into the ether without any impact. This is doubly true for people creating any form of erotic content – if you make porn, of any kind, it WILL be stolen, or reuploaded without credit, or simply saved to a million hard drives for a million coomers to jack off to in silence. It’s a lonely existence, which makes it crucial for any community built around creative expressions of eroticism to have an inbuilt culture of active positive engagement.

My personal effort along those lines – beyond just being a frequent sharer and commenter on my favorite creator’s works – was in the form of a VERY long post filled with a LOT of pornography called My Favorite Cohost Pornposts of 2023. This post involved a truly demented amount of backscrolling through 78 full pages of reposted pornography to gather up 52 of my favorites from the past year, and then trying to come up with some kind of interesting compliment to append to each one. It was a fairly exhausting exercise, but also a perfect project for the temporal no-man’s-land bridging Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

This is less to call attention to a cool awesome post that I made (though I AM quite proud of it), and more to offer said post up as a template for the kind of thing I think any porn-celebratory community ought to consider doing. It’s SO important to creators to have their work discussed and praised, thoughtfully, by the exact types of people they want to reach. I also think it’s very valuable for people to attempt to articulate the joy that the media they enjoy brings them, as doing so can only deepen that joy.

Outcomes & Limitations

Cohost managed to foster one of the most vibrant communities of NSFW creators I think the web has ever seen. I’ve heard from SO many people about how they became more comfortable with porn and sexuality as a direct result of using Cohost, how the site made them think entirely differently about porn as an enterprise. Cohost was especially replete with extremely niche forms of pornography, from vore to modular to guro to diaper to transformation to mind control to petrification to plushies and so, so, SO much furry stuff. There was longform written porn. There was roleplay. There was NSFW audio and JOI. And, even more miraculously, there was all of this smut living essentially side-by-side with the typical social media fare of cat photos and shitposts, empowered by the platform’s tremendous timeline-curation tools. Everyone had access to the precise mix of stuff that they wanted to see, and outside a few pretty-funny situations there was very little unwelcome mixing between SFW and NSFW experiences.

I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that a couple not-insignificant groups of NSFW creators never really managed to find much purchase on Cohost, those being sex workers and porn performers. For the former, I think it’s mainly that it was never really made clear whether they would be safe to advertise on the platform, which made it a nonstarter to invest in. As for the latter, lack of video support and the relatively-small user base made it pretty unattractive. Had the site continued to grow that might have changed, but I suppose we’ll never know.

We’re All We Have

The dissolution of a community is not value-neutral. I love my friends on Cohost’s staff and am glad that they get to move on to better-paying jobs where they will not be subjected to hideous amounts of stress daily. However, it upsets me when I think that the unique, joyous culture Cohost nurtured around porn might disappear when the site goes offline at the end of the year. It’s my dear, desperate hope that something about the experiences I’ve shared here will be useful to future porn community-builders.

One thing I need to stress is that I believe those communities must be built OFF of major social platforms. Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr and the like are useful for acquiring community members, but it’s imperative for the health of any porn-focused community to not be reliant on a large external organization for its continued existence. If you make porn, whether as a hobby or for a living, I implore you to build out your own web presence off whatever major networks you use to promote and distribute your work. It can only benefit you in the long run, and you’ll be that much less vulnerable to a sudden social apocalypse. If you do this, I further implore you to then do the work of building visible, joyous connections with those others within the porn creation community that you respect and enjoy.

I’m hopeful, believe it or not. Even with Cohost sunsetting, I take comfort in the people it brought together & taught how to express their appreciation for the things they loved, even when those things involved a lot of cum and probably some kind of musk. The site shutting down does not change the fact that we still exist, each and every one of us, as does our work. It’s simply a matter of connecting, of staying together, of remembering to celebrate and support each other whenever and however we can. We can only keep getting better.

Subscribe to the RSS feed!