Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


arachnixe
@arachnixe

I'm sorry, but if your response to people complaining about your favorite platform is "ah, you don't understand the vision, you're missing the point, you're just confused, your expectations are wrong, let me help educate you," this is not a very compassionate or helpful attitude!

It is entirely possible that some folks have needs that you don't consider. Maybe some people understand perfectly and just disagree! If you treat folks like their stance—on something as personal as how they connect socially—must necessarily be the result of ignorance, don't be surprised when they feel insulted and trash talk you elsewhere.


Keeble
@Keeble

this on top of the fact that bluesky and even twitter are already relatively niche compared to what most people use to communicate with others (instagram in particular, but also tiktok, fb messenger, whatsapp, discord to a certain extent, etc). Twitter already felt like a combo of the Place Where Everyone Is and the Niche Hidden Secret of The Internet to, like, most people.

this isn't even getting into stuff like userscripts. if you even know what that is, you are in a minority of minorities. CSS crimes posts are cool but a) they're an extreme minority of posts here and b) are not easily user replicable.

social media, even this, is a time waste and time sink. it is not anything else but a holding pattern that can be done creatively. as ive said before: most people's average time on any social media site is scroll, scroll, scroll, and don't post. Social media is media and any sort of way of marketing a platform where the empasis is placed on, like, "doing posts" rather than "seeing posts made by others" misses the point of why people use these things

And, yes, most of the time i go on cohost i don't post either. i scroll, and look, and laugh at some stuff, and log off. it works for me, but it works for me in merely the same ways that other social media time sinks do, in the way that my algorithmically generated YouTube Content Mush™ does, in the same way that a tv station you're too lazy to get up and grab the remote does


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in reply to @arachnixe's post:

Yeah, I get that the way things work here is probably really helpful for some folks who found other platforms encouraged bad habits, but there's this assumption that actually we all had the same problems as they did, and if we think we didn't, we're just insufficiently introspective or something.

some posters just want to pretend that their toxic behavior was all the fault of some numerals, and won't really dig deeper than that.

the irony of believing that one aspect of technical implementation can guide site culture, but that cohost is "different" than all the others trying the same gambit, isn't lost.

luckily despite claiming to be the antithesis of clout-poisonned twitterbrains, speaking up enough about how shitty that kind of behaviour feels will get you blocked by thousands of the most annoying accounts on here, so it's a self-sealing wound!:)

I genuinely feel like some of my needs of being able to Just Freaking Socially Interact with my friends are not being met, and it's disheartening when something that really REALLY negatively impacts my ability to feel like this website is a home gets dismissed with so much vitriol by some people.

It's not even that I am new and I don't get it, I've been here just as long as pretty much everybody else. If anything the lack of being able to connect socially and actually interact with my friends is getting more and more unbearable as time goes on. But "I don't get the philosophy" or whatever.

Yea, yea, I feel like it's a lot quieter here, too much so often, but also I feel like I have to be more thought out and wordy with my posts, so at the same time I'm not posting as much myself. It's a shame because I do like it here a lot.

seriously it sometimes borders on feeling like a barren featureless site cynically trying to market itself as minimalist on purpose. like I'm cool with the anti-numbers stance, but I at least need an equivalent amount of information and data to exist and be accessible, and some way to crawl through the web of connections made between this supposed social platform?

Cohost is a fun experiment, but people are... well, for lack of a better term, "drinking the koolaid" way too hard. I don't know why people perceive social networks as some kind of moral choice.

It really does echo a lot of Mastodon's True Believers, and frankly I am not a fan. It gives the place an ivory tower vibe. Seeing the site as different from the norm is acceptable if people recognize it for what it is. But if it instead gets normalized+moralized its just... bleh. It feels out of touch with reality.

I liked the thinking about this website way better when people sold Cohost as a "third website", not the main social media platform but a more quiet side-site. I guess since becoming more popular(???) that line of thinking has been dropped, and now people simply insist things are better this way. Which is a big lol.

especially since it feels like we're finally presented an opportunity where we as users might actually be listened to and get a chance to improve the site for everyone. Why wouldn't it be a good idea to critique? I think there's something really good here and I feel like it'll be worth refining