CyanSorcery

Game Developer

Plural Collective | ΘΔ& | Game Developer | She/Her | Pan/Demi | 37 | California


🦊Roxy, the programmer
🐭Mika, the artist
🪐Willow, the musician
🦨Ashe, the girl who gets things done
🦝Coco, the generalist


Links and More
https://cyansorcery.carrd.co/

Commissions
https://cyansorcery.com/commissions.php

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in reply to @CyanSorcery's post:

The financial situation is uncertain. Cohost Plus is currently their only real way they’re making money, and that’s making nowhere near enough on its own. One anonymous person is currently funding most of the site’s development, but it’s up to them to choose to give the site another loan before features like the Patreon-competitor or Project Wonderful-esque ads can be implemented to hopefully get closer to something sustainable.

It's really weird seeing different takes from various people I follow on multiple platforms, because some (like you) say they get no interaction here and others say they get way more engagement than anywhere else and I genuinely have no idea what the difference is.

Not to discount your experience; I really like this site but it sucks that some of its glaring issues really haven't been addressed.

The problem is like, after 15 or so likes on a post, you don't get to see any more, which is great BUT my art usually gets anywhere from 70-200 likes on Mastodon and even more on Twitter (when I posted there) so it's like, I have no concept of if my posts are actually getting liked and shared or if I'm only getting a handful of likes which come out to much less than I get in discord reactions from posting art in my chat lmao

edit: by the way this is not to say that 15 likes are not appreciated, but when I have to go through the effort of manually posting here and uploading half the stuff I post to my website to even post here, and when I'm pretty sure a lot of my followers just follow me on other sites anyways, it becomes a bit cumbersome

Yeah, understood that it feels hard to justify when this is a platform for your work and not just like, a place you casually post on when you feel like it. I probably don't feel that as much because I don't have a lot of followers anywhere, so any post with an uncountable number of notifications is "blowing up" for me and the scale beyond that is mostly irrelevant/based on rough feelings.

The real bummer is I seem to remember discussion early on of giving creators who need those metrics more insight on an opt-in basis, but of course that hasn't materialized.

yea, I'm glad you understand at least because I've tried to explain this to some people and they just don't get it, and I'm like, my whole living comes entirely from the money I get online so I can only look at it from a business perspective haha, and from that perspective I really, really need to know where my posts are actually being effective so I dont waste my time (like when I tried to break into Reddit)

but yea, there's been discussions about giving creators metrics like that, but the only thing that has materialized so far was that "Numbers(tm)" april fools thing, which kinda made me feel like they don't actually take that seriously and that they'll probably never actually do it

I'd say that maybe they intend this to not be the platform for people who need those metrics, but with all the talk about Patreon-style subscriptions and tips that seems like exactly the niche they're targeting, so: ???

Anyway, in the meantime I do appreciate you posting here; it's a nice platform as long as it exists.

yea it's like, if they really intend this to be a site that allows creatives to create a sustainable audience on it, then yea those kinds of numbers are necessary like it or not

and thank you 💚 I dont think I'm gonna hop off here just yet, but the way it's going, the site might hop off me instead haha

I think it comes down to audience differences between different places.

Say, Twitter is big, but if you've drawn a creature and posted it in a space where creature enthusiasts gather (or, better yet, your own Discord), that can still have pretty good numbers because that's what everyone is there for.

I make tools for GameMaker (a game engine). It can be hard to perceive the value of these unless they solve your specific problem. Posts about these don't much traction on cohost (in fact, @CyanSorcery is the only regular participant of the #gamemaker tag here) and do only slightly better on the game development Mastodon instance that I post on, but are always well-received on GameMaker-related communities.

And then I still get notifications about my old CSS crime posts because that's an evergreen topic on cohost.

Ah yea I get you, actually part of the reason I am gonna start posting back to Twitter again is because, like it or not, my game dev posts get looked at there. Yea, they get looked at on Mastodon too, but there's still more of an indie dev scene on Twitter than any other site and I miss it

I keep forgetting to actually look in the tag view so I didn't know that people weren't really posting to it, at least to the gamemaker tag

Yeah, that's been a common sentiment I've seen - that if you're not of a very specific demographic/interest group, there's not a lot here for you. Which unfortunately kinda tracks on a site with only 12k active users. That simply can't sustain many niches, and without better tools to filter through stuff, it's hard to accommodate more people.

(Also, hi! I play a lot of NT, so it was a surprise to see your name pop up here.)

personally I don't think that's going to amount to an implosion any time soon, it's moreso that the long term sustainability of the site is in jeopardy. It's by no means uncertain, it's just going to take a lot to keep this place off the ground for the long term. the fact that it exists in the capacity it currently does is already a huge wonder imo. I wouldn't count ASSC out just yet

To my understanding the only ads they're even considering is more like the kinda ads Furaffinity runs, which is like artists buying ad space to advertise their open commissions and such. They've been pretty open about how they would sooner see the site actually go down than rely on an ad network with analytics.

Hopefully if they can get that implemented, those will come with more feedback re: impressions being displayed to you and such.

fwiw I do see the difference there, personally.

Yea, but the fact of the matter is that the sign-in page said there would be no ads and no tracking and they're already going back on the ads. Even if they're just community ads, they're still ads

and it's like, I don't mind ads, but it's just another example of them saying something and then rolling it back

It was an aspirational and probably naive statement that I don't think I'd hold against them for realizing it was unfeasible. What I don't want is them to conclude "well our ideal vision isn't possible so we should scrap the whole project."

I'd feel different about them doing something like google AdSense or whatever but I don't really see the appeal of admins who set things in stone. They wanted to do it a certain way, got overconfident with how they pitched it, found out they might have to make compromise. It's a bummer but I can see it being done in a way that at least isn't completely giving up on the spirit of that aspiration.

Of course this is all hypothetical because they haven't even announced any solid plans to do so, so much as defining what level of compromise they'd be Willing to consider.

Yea, I feel like Cohost is full of a lot of idealized stuff like "oh yea this will totally work!" and now they're finding out about how this stuff doesn't work

like the whole "we'll never have numbers" but this means that I can't know if my posts do good, making me not interested in the platform, making me want to leave it, meaning no content for others to engage with. I don't think I'm that important personally, but I feel like I'm far from the only one

I think everyone has at least a little creativity, but more to the point, this site really doesn't facilitate people trying to make social connections nor does it facilitate artists and the like just trying to put their art out there

Creativity and creative ability are two different things imo, but back to the actual conversation.
"this site really doesn't facilitate people trying to make social connections"
Nail on the head, is a huge thing that makes the whole Cohost experience... Really lonely really. Like, even when i already have a bunch of accounts followed i can't help but to think "where are you people". The lack of DMs specially does not help with that.

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