Dex

Big hearted fluffdragon...

...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, ฮ˜ฮ”.


Masto ๐Ÿ˜
scalie.club/@Dex

pervocracy
@pervocracy

"The reason Cohost is so much more civil than Twitter is because the features..."

look that's fun analysis and all but if we can be honest with ourselves for a moment

the reason Cohost is so much more civil than Twitter is there's like 2000 active users and 1900 are queer furry computer nerds*

yes, the lack of Algorithm and ability to explain yourself at length are nice, but let's face it we aren't the people who were starting pissfights on Twitter in the first place

*every adjective in this sentence is a compliment


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @pervocracy's post:

They definitely are, and with a refreshing use of actual judgement instead of "technically they didn't say the words so there's nothing we can do." And I think that becomes self-reinforcing as prospective fascism-enablers can look at the site and see they won't find a supportive community here.

I feel like one reason Cohost is different is because its founders recognize that it isn't features that make a place more civil, it's moderation and banning assholes. Society has gotta stop assuming that some new tech feature (or lack of one) will fix social media.

So I'm hopeful that even if Cohost gets larger and moves beyond the current userbase, it'll stay pleasant to hang out in.

(fact check: we have about 10x that number of active users)

the big issue with being small is Money. four staff is kind of an effective minimum for us to operate in any productive capacity and, despite colin and i being paid Well Below Market Rate and our overall expenses being relatively small, weโ€™re still nowhere near financially sustainable. short of PWYW dramatically bumping our per-user revenue, the only way we hit sustainability is More Users, which itself leads to the issue of โ€œwe need to staff up to support these usersโ€, which costs more, etc etc its a complicated thing to balance and figuring out how we get there is tricky.

It's this, 100%. I've seen plenty of the same bad behavior as twitter here, it's just that when you have such a small userbase and a site where discoverability is way different, you're less likely to ever see it. A lot of new social media sites make the mistake of thinking they somehow have different users than other big sites, but it's the same users as anywhere else, just less of them, so they're a lot easier to manage than millions of users. So I actually disagree about the "we aren't the people starting pissfights on Twitter" part, queer furry computer nerds start PLENTY of pissfights. But it's not the design of the site keeping that from overwhelming the site, it's the low userbase. If Cohost had Twitter numbers, it'd be the same cesspool as anywhere else, because you can't have a moderation team big enough to handle it.

Honestly one of the things I find most interesting about Cohost as A Social Media Site is that on most other alternative sites that launched in the past ~5 years it was taken for granted that if everyone didn't decide by some mysterious process that the stars were right and migrate over to it en masse, it would simply fail and die. And that was often true because of the funding models, but also because they didn't have a site culture that could sustain itself with a smaller number of users.

I don't think this is an obvious mistake they should have seen coming or anything, because they were responding to what people want from modern social media: to network easily and find content easily. Those two things are not possible for every topic unless you have a vast number of users. But because Cohost seems to have attracted a lot of people who were specifically looking to have more low-key interactions with a smaller audience--and who are more likely to have had formative online experiences in smaller communities--I think there are some encouraging takeaways here for people who want more alternative sites but aren't in any position to build a Twitter Replacement.

I think the problem is...well...jkap's response up above. They are nowhere near financially stable, and what that stability would look like is growth...except, growth means needing more staff, which then eats away at the additional income. It's easy to say keep it small for a side project, but cohost is now several people's full time salaried positions. Keeping it small doesn't pay the bills. I think you can start to see why other alternative site builders aren't just content with keeping a small userbase. Unless it's a side hobby for you, like most people running a Mastodon instance or heck phpbb forum, it won't cover staffing costs. Pillowfort just broke even recently in costs and the math made it seem like they're paying themselves minimum wage.

Yep, that all makes sense. To clarify, what I've seen is that users will refuse to populate a site until they're dead sure it's going to be The Next Big Thing and achieve exponential growth, which basically ensures that no new site is going to get to that point except under wildly, improbably favorable circumstances. I was a KS backer for Pillowfort, I tried to get people to give it a chance, and a few people did--but it was like a middle-school dance where everyone was standing around the walls waiting for somebody to get the party started. I think that's a natural human thing--I'm guilty of it, too--but my experience was that there were many clusters of interests with one or two posters who didn't know each other and couldn't bring anyone over, so they felt like they were talking to themselves.

I knew no one on Cohost when I got here except via name recognition, but I felt comfortable posting because there was already a pretty clear sense of Site Vibes. Money aside--which I know only works in the hypothetical--it had gathered enough people talking to each other that those people could probably continue talking indefinitely as a small community. And, critically, it did not matter if they shared much common ground in the form of stuff like fandoms or hobbies or jobs. A lot of the early posts I saw had the sentiment of, "It should be cool to talk to other people here about whatever," because that was what people were looking for.

So the encouraging takeaway is not really about business model or even size, but rather that by cultivating some kind of encouraging/reassuring direction for casual interaction, that's something that users can immediately get invested in rather than thinking, "Well, if everyone doesn't move over there, is there really any point in having an account?"

There's actually some wild parallels here with MMORPGs in World of Warcraft's prime, now that I think about it--a lot of people feeling like they had to pick one game to invest in, and if it wasn't going to kill WoW and take all its users, you might as well play WoW. It wasn't until WoW started naturally declining that people kind of shook out of the idea that a successful MMO had to be that size to succeed, or that smaller games (which are still massive, because MMOs also need to have a ton of users to be profitable) would just burn out and die.

IMO Site Vibes also contributed to reducing Pillowfort retention too - a lot of bigger posters I ran into there fall into the longform critique and in-depth discussion vibes, and in trying to bring more activity and response to other posters, would end up... for lack of a better word, debating people in comments if they didn't fully explain themself in their original post? In an attempt to start up more discussions?

I have to assume this wasn't the entire community vibe, but it was a common enough vibe that "the site is full of smart essay types" was a common reason people weren't using it, and was part of what eventually put me off it too - I don't have energy to write long essay posts 75%+ of the time and being on Pillowfort just kinda made me feel like I wasn't smart enough to be posting. (Not intentionally on PF's part, but the focus on PF being good for constructive discussions definitely skewed it towards people starting those under many posts.)

Cohost still has longform content but since the site vibes are more chill and goofy I don't feel like I'm... intruding? When I post silly brainless thoughts. Sometimes you just wanna rotate an eggbug, and the Site Vibes it started with/staff gives off makes it feel much more comfy.

Yeah that was the EXACT vibe I got from Cohost that made me feel comfortable, like people were posting long-form stuff but it was mostly about their hobbies, and there were people explicitly saying, "Let's make it a thing here that it's good to comment and try to keep the stakes low for doing that."

I think that's probably one of the things that's challenging to scale; I tried to untangle my thoughts about it a few months ago, but the short version is that it's really hard to have peer-to-peer casual chats when the people with the most attention on their posts are getting an avalanche of replies, and an unknown number of those are people trying to get attention by starting shit. Especially on Twitter, I've seen a lot of misunderstandings between popular posters and people who are genuinely trying to add to a discussion. The two most common types of engagement there are "you're SO right" and "you're SO wrong," and a comment that's neither--that's just, "Oh, that makes me think of a related interesting thing" or whatever--often gets read as the latter because that's the safest bet.

I guess my point is that it doesn't really matter if users are invested or not (or possibly WORSE if they are) if the site can't keep itself running financially. And right now Cohost is not in the position where it is sustaining itself financially. Its vibes or its userbase don't really change that unless you magically get a userbase where everyone on the site will pay you, which will never happen anywhere. So it truly is about business model in the end. You could have the healthiest community on earth but if you need to pay four full time devs to do it and they can't pay their salaries, you're out of luck.

hey, i'm nowhere near qualified enough to be a computer, not even in the days before computer's jobs where taken over by machines!

all i saw in the deep notes when signing up was a steep lean against incentives. if one doesn't get anything from socialising, then cohost doesn't give 'increasing numbers' to placate one. wasn't until i was actually browsing profiles that i saw the warm n fuzzy and smoothly scaled trend. either way, the affinity here is indeed inherently far from the pissyfits and shit wringing of the unnatural world.