Was just having a nice long chat with my friend @tiffbun about the whole-ass weird-ass and extremely fucking opaque use case that cohost is clearly designed around, and realizing that I'm actually, literally going to have to reframe my relationship with this website within the context and expectations I have from social media writ large - assuming that the team manages to adhere to whatever those design principles are, of course.
Honestly, at this point I'd love to know exactly what those principles are so I can better understand what to expect from this site rather than wishing for functionality that I was never even intended to have, because it's not what the team set out to create in the first place. As a "contentΒ creator" online I'm inclined towards treating these platforms primarily as tools, and tools are meant to solve problems, right?
Well, not cohost. Cohost is starting to feel to me like its own microcosm - it's not here to solve a problem, it's here to provide its own experience. If you joined cohost simply as a replacement for Twitter, as I did originally, you're gonna be sorely disappointed, as I know many people were from their (and yes, my own too) repeated complaints about it. I still think some features would improve users' quality of life on here without compromising that experience too much but, by and large, I think I'm gonna chill out a little bit about that, moving forward.
It feels a little hypocritical of me to be putting out niche content based on my own tastes, interests, and yes, my own philosophy too; then show up on this site that's so well made and clearly based upon clear intent only to expect that it bend to my whims, just because of what I've been taught to expect from previous platforms I've used.
They've already implemented tagging pretty much perfectly, which anybody who's followed me for a while knows is one of my biggest bugbears with just about every fucking content sharing platform as a variety fetish artist. Letting users curate their experience online is as important to me as my own freedom to express myself however the fuck I want (yes, terms and conditions do still apply), largely for the exact same reasons.
I really should be happy with the rest of what we have to hand, learn how to make best use of the featureset that we've got, and see what new and crazy stuff they might come up with as a result of them remaining largely unbothered by chasing after whatever standards were established by other platforms before it.
I just want to know if there's a way to better understand where they're coming from, so I can more easily get to that point, and I might even learn something in the process too.