You're welcome to think Cohost's design is hostile to whatever you want to get out of social media but it's kind of dumb and, at the present juncture, fairly assholish to call the developers 'naive' by saying they should have built something more similar to some other social media platform that is also, at present, wildly unprofitable (they all are!)
Yeah the fact is that every social media platform is unprofitable right now. The only real exception is Meta, but they're not making money from social media per se
I think that even if you're not a right-winger there's a tendency to harbor some "get woke go broke" intuitions about Cohost, like they try too hard to be pure and they should have wallpapered the site with ads and they should have encouraged Skinner-box addiction dynamics and they should have promised not to moderate Free Speech and they should have sucked up to corporate sponsors and then they'd be as financially successful as...
Twitter or Tumblr?
well that's where that line of reasoning breaks down
There's an impressive trick right-wing ideas have played, where they define themselves as "tough but practical" and we are in such a rush to point out that "tough" is actually "evil" that we unconsciously concede the point on "practical"
This is so, extremely, ridiculously true, and it even pervades our historical lens on the most evil right-wing ideas in history. The idea that fascism is "brutally efficient" is great for thought experiments, narrative tension, and gameplay balance--with the drawback of being completely untrue.
"Societies must balance their needs between social justice and economic prosperity" has never actually been true, it's just a way to make resistance to social justice sound like something smart and complicated that Serious Grownups would do as a Reluctant Sacrifice.
Anyway. I don't know the future of Cohost but I do know that the typical user in here is much more committed to the success of the site, more personally aligned with its goals, than on any other social media I've used. I have vastly more hope in that getting us through--people are practically begging for more ways to give the site money--than I would if Cohost started running crypto ads and algorithmic outrage bait.
Seems like as good a time as any to drop in and point out that Mussolini did not, in fact, make the trains run on time
The US postal service, back when it was written of as a marvel of the modern world by people like Lenin and Bismarck and Kropotkin (and try to find another subject on which those 3 all agreed), was the pinnacle of social justice creating economic prosperity. It offered non-predatory banking. It allowed cheap, supervised transportation for children, sent to safety with family living elsewhere. It was also a marvel of efficiency with all the strengths of bureaucratic information sorting, but still had the human sinews of people who could make humane decisions when the rules didn't make sense. In 1936, a network of postal workers (mostly Black; which speaks to how mail carrying was a job open to Black people in that time, another point in favor of the post office) was instrumental in compiling the Negro Motorist Green Book.
There's evidence to show: not only on the personal, but also on the mass systemic level, when people are given agency and a mandate to help, we do. And it works.
Like, this isn't where you make connections, this is where you hold connections.
Like this is where you filter the real connections you make on Twitter or Tumblr to create friendships.
CoHost is not designed for this either, but it's worth thinking in my humble opinion.
