Gale

I want to say that I love it when a Social media site is FOSS and Federated, but I must admit that it being Federated is the more important aspect. Using the ActivityPub Standard allows interconnection between sites, and can let us interact beyond URLs. It being FOSS just confuses users a ton.

This is 100% me throwing shade at Mastodon because the site seems so good on paper, but the huge variety of Instances makes it SO user un-friendly. Like, if the user either creates their own Instance (which is expensive), or joins an Instance that caters to Niche Interests (which is difficult), then they're fine. But if they don't know what to look for or are poor, they're going to try to go to Mastodon[dot]Social specifically; which is an instance so big that folks can't get any help moderating trolls, stalkers, or other such people. It truly sucks because these sites have such potential; but it takes so much work just to get in to the things that most users won't find them worth it.

So there's a feature that CoHost has that I really enjoy, and that's the ability to install the site like an app (even though it's just booting through Chrome). It allows the devs to not rely on Play Store/App Store, but rather to update their sites on their own terms. CoHost allows us to do this, as well as other sites like Mastodon, MissKey, and Lemmy.

Alternatively, some of the new sites don't give us this option. Sites like BlueSky, Itaku, and others have a "Save to HomePage" button, but that just saves a link that opens up the Chrome App (Basically a glorified bookmark rather than a psuedo app). I have no idea how hard this is to implement, but I sincerely feel like more apps should be doing this.