Kay

i totally agree about notifications! i made a post last week that got a ton of likes and shares, and it's great that cohost just told me "several pages liked your post" and "several pages shared your post" instead of giving me a bunch of numbers to obsess over and compare my post to.

but i would have preferred to find that out by checking an activity tab the next day, instead of a big bright icon at the top of my feed encouraging me to click it every time another person hit the like button. i don't need updates on my post's performance every time i look at my feed! i can technically work around this problem by filtering out all types of notifications on the notifications page, and then every time i want to check my notifications/activity i can go to the notifications page, manually enable each type of notification one at a time, wait for the page to load again after each click, read my notifications, and then manually disable them all again. but that sucks.

It’s funny, all these are interesting points (I especially agree I wish I could see who was liking and reblogging posts from me, that was the best part of tumble interaction).

But also kind of amused I feel like cohost is the first social media site in a long time, outside of forums, I actually have gotten to know people a bit more and interacted with them a bit,

I think it’s mostly the vibe and the crowd of the site though, not necessarily the design. But still! Heh.

when it comes to likes i kinda need that to exist or 90% of my interaction with people here disappears. and people will probably feel like no one is listening when they talk, even though i do - i just don't want to reply most of the time.

as for the pagination, i do find myself getting to the bottom of a page and just going "that's enough, let's do something else". i don't scroll until i catch up to where i left off. so my experience is that has made a difference compared to twitter.

i agree that it would be nice to have the numbers and not get paged by them. like checking your downloads/views on itch. they don't notify about it (that would be madness) but you can check when you feel like it.

Full agree on the bit about seeing who shares your shares. I met a good number of my Twitter acquaintances through those notifications, and honestly, the motivation to share stuff because I think other people might like it is still 100% here. I just only get to know that my share was worthwhile if I’m already following the person who reshares my share and I happen to still be online to catch that they enjoyed it.

I will speak in favor of pagination though, as someone who doesn’t try to stay 100% caught up with everything that gets posted here, the next page button really is a helpful reminder for me to consider closing the tab.

You can turn off the notifications badge! It's in the settings under "how other parts of the site look".

i don't mind pagination just because twitter would always randomly zip right back to the top just as i was starting to read a good post deep in the scroll

Agreed, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine an internet without likes. Even tho I'm from a time before likes, and when Twitter likes were stars (so more like bookmarks? did it even notify you when people hit that?), it's just become such a convenient tool to engage without engaging--
--which I guess is a problem too huh
When it comes to reaction engagement, I think I prefer Discord's current setup. While emoji reactions still replace real engagement, at least you get to personalize how you're reacting to stuff

I don't think the dopamine hit is a big problem tho, it's at least the good kind of dopamine. And having funny short posts along the way makes the long effort posts stand out more (and gives a breather while browsing)

My problem with infinity scrolling is that I cannot trust it not to break my browser's Back button. I have been burned too many times.

i feel like the reason we don't have infinite scroll is the performance issues, the sheer difficulty of optimizing. look at how much twitter lags, for example.

this post made me realize that yeah, a reason cohost feels a little empty to me is absolutely the lack of notifications when your mutual likes or reposts something you reposted. being able to see this happen on tumblr and be like “heehee they liked that one” is definitely something that makes the site feel more social

I sort of agree? It annoys me when any concern about notifications is dismissed as if the entire problem with social media is the existence of numbers. Like no, actually, being able to see how many people liked a particular post is useful information especially when it comes to art and things like posting commissions. Which post was more successful than another to tell what might be more worth focusing on? Who knows! Go click through every section to try to figure it out. It's the same information and activity as elsewhere, but significantly more annoying to get. Make them user facing instead of public, if necessary, but metrics can in fact be helpful to have.

I support pagination for the simple fact that infinite scrolling always breaks. It might take a while for it to happen, or it might be on page 3...and again on 5...and again on 6...but inevitably it will lose your place or glitch and kick you back to the start and your only choices are scroll again and hope it doesn't break again, or give up. Generally I give up. Pagination means if I hit back I will go back to the page and the most that will happen is new posts bumping things back a little. I hate the unreliability of scrolling.

as an artist, i desperately miss the notification count on posts, but i do like that its not public-facing in general, it would just be nice if we had user-facing note counts so i could glance at my posts and see what did well and what didn't, as some other people mentioned mostly for metrics and to feel less alone, like people actually do care about my art and are listening to my posts.

Some very good points in this post!!

In particular though, the tag thing. The "why are you including tags with the post". Iirc, that's a way to retain some context and intent when a post gets reblogged far outside of the original OP's sphere.

Often on tumblr or twitter I'd see some mud getting slung around because someone made an extreme assumption about a post, but at least with how it's handled here there's much less chance of an embarrassing "i can't believe this person seriously thinks (whatever)" reaction when someone can just scroll down and see the OP tagged it with "shitpost", or similar.

Admittedly some of the problems Cohost faces come down to its users bringing to bare practices and expectations that run counter to the philosophy Cohost itself wants to encourage in said users. Tags are the obvious culprit here: they're meant to be the main means of finding and creating community, but because so many users treat them how they'd treat them on Tumblr - as a second commentary field for whatever quip you want to append to your main post - activity within tags tend to be pretty barren beyond that, making it that much harder to actually find community. (Example within example: I follow the game criticism tag, and rarely see any activity in it, even though there are more than enough game critics on the site that it should be pretty active.)

That being said, just as significant a cause behind these problems is Cohost's negative approach to fostering community leaving it, at times, unclear what exactly they want community to be. (The irony in this being that the team behind Cohost made the decisions they did because they wanted a more clearly defined, hence more openly negotiable, sense of community.) Comments are the example this time. Putting them at the bottom of the post ensures a well established context, meaning any discussions will likely be focused on what's actually said in whatever you're commenting on. But it also means that discussion is locked up entirely within that post, unable to connect with and inform any other conversations on the site which it could be relevant to. This is almost certainly an intentional design choice on the Cohost team's part.

I don't know. The end result of all this seems to be that the best way to find community is through people you already know elsewhere, whether personally or because those other people have built up an audience on some other platform *cough*Twitter*cough*.

now i may be wildly off base but i believe the original reason for removing the ability to see other people rechosting your posts was because the original system had rechosts post the post with whatever tags you added to it,

so people were reblogging private/semi-private posts and then tagging them with "#cohost global feed" and then suddenly these untagged posts were on the space where everyone could see them and unsurprisingly people were responding to them. which went bad. and was like. peak of that specific tumblr problem of people taking posts by (for example) trans people and putting them in front of transphobes. and so that died whole stop and hard. it's also why you see the original post's tags alongside the rechoster's tags

i do however agree that you should be allowed to see (maybe only people you follow?) reposting/liking posts you've reposted?

I'm so relieved to hear it isn't just me who misses the notifications for other people interacting with posts I've shared. One of my favourite things to do on sites like this is share things that I know people will enjoy seeing - a cute Spheal for the friend who likes those, a cool pixel art for my pixel art friends, oh here's some neat architecture this one person would Love to see, etc. etc. like... I dunno, it's just fun to share posts for people like I'm leaving them a little present for when they log onto the site. It always feels so weird when this gets written off as the "wrong" kind of social interaction, as if the only interaction that "actually" matters is between Post Viewers and OP Of Post.