Huki

like it's fine i'm not interested in building a new foundation on a place that will inevitably also crumble. it's just a "i wish i could see these people's artwork here" because yeah i see their posts when i log in there but overwhelmingly, despite only following friends, i see nothing but garbage and drama when looking at that site's feed

I'm starting to think Cohost should go back into invite-only because clearly seeing "invite-only" triggers something in people's brains that makes them think a place is better than it actually is. Bsky is lacking features that Cohost, Mastodon, Misskey, whatever already have and so much more, but nope. Bsky gets the attention for whatever reason.

when you recommended twitter demetricator to me it changed everything, numbers are brain rot

Cohost should put random numbers beside each post. We will all know they're fake but Twitter refs will think we're doing a popularity contest here

The funny thing is someone ran the numbers awhile back and Bluesky isn't even that much bigger than cohost is right now? Like with all the hype I expected it to be 10x or 100x bigger, not... kinda comparable

honestly like cohost kinda helped me w that cause I too was infected by numbers but just looking at my notifs and counting myself, a lot of my art has done WAY better here than it ever has done before and it actually feels good to know that ppl are seeing and enjoying my stuff more than "succeeding", whatever that actually means in this day and age

on the one hand it really is nice to have people who are actually, legitimately interested in seeing the work I put out. like i don't get the same feeling i did on twitter where it feels like the work i'm putting out is just lost in the noise, and that's only gotten worse as twitter's user experience tanks.

but on the other i am still like a little stressed out about the fact that i am still trying to make art my livelihood. bsky doesn't look particularly great for building an audience and i don't really think i understand cohost well enough despite liking it more. if anything i sometimes feel like posting art is less predictable here.

at least it is for me since i didn't exactly have a huge following on twitter before moving; like just over 1200, and i was kind of relying on commissions up to that point to make cash as an artist.

(side note that really is fucked that 1200 isn't a huge amount. that's like an entire graduating class in some colleges. jesus.)

i don't have a pre-existing audience that i could draw here from and building something up that i can actually survive off of in a capitalist hellscape is a bit of an ordeal.

It feels very weird that without metrics I can still tell that I get way more engagement here on the eggbug site than I ever did on the bird site

I personally would like to have some metrics visible at least behind a gate. follower count would be nice to be able to gauge what sort of follower-base I'm working with when I advertise things like commissions. but I love the largely metric-less UX on here, it's refreshing and alleviates a lot of pressure to appeal to trends

what cohost is rly missing is the ppl i follow on twitter

I wish there were some sort of metrics visible here. I know how much socmed numbers are brain poison but the damage has already been done and I have no idea how big my audience on here is

I have a guess to why people overlook cohost:

the Tech Journalists want to talk about "which social media apps are winning". They don't take into account communities or what value they offer. They do their research in exactly one way: looking at the number of downloads in the Apple App Store

and therefore Tech Journalists just don't even think about cohost as a thing that exists, and the general public doesn't hear about cohost

it's numbers all the way down

I have no idea why everyone is so excited to move to bsky or threads. Like, yeah, let's move from a platform run by one ultrawealthy nutjob to another one run by an ultrawealthy nutjob. People are addicted to engagements numbers I guess.

I think too many people are getting lured into stupid fediverse services too, but at least they're not run by an ultrawealthy nutjob I guess?

is “detoxing” the best word to use here?

It's been so frustrating as someone who never liked twitter that much, who only made it my main home after the major tumblr porn ban exodus, and wishing and waiting this whole time for something more like a better tumblr to come along. the musk effect has memory-holed every single bad there was to hate about twitter before his arrival, to the point that everyone's acting blind to all the nearly identical red flags of bluesky. does nobody remember the years and years of futile pleading to ban the twitter nazis? Isn't Dorsey also pro-crypto, pro-NFT, pro-AI?? there's literally no reason to believe your bluesky posts won't be scraped too.