Some thoughts that I had bouncing around about the recent discourse.
The problem I see with Cohost is that the only filtering mechanisms available are either muting tags, or entire users.
Muting tags is a good solution for some cases. It's more elegant than the content warning system that Mastodon had in the beginning. CWs were incredibly annoying there because it resulted in a wall of CW-ed selfies and food. But showing everything was also not an option, because there is some shit I don't want to see. Both have the same problem in that you have to rely on somebody else to apply the tags, and its incredibly annoying to be asked to apply a CW or tag for something you consider normal.
Blocking or muting an entire user is a sledge hammer solution to the problem. Only a small section of users are so annoying that I never want to see their posts. For most of you it isn't as black and white. I'd like to see your insights into a certain subject, or the things you make. There is some value in seeing all the things you want to share, but at some point I don't want or need to know.
Which makes it frustrating that there is no way to block a couple of key words, creating a possibility to filter out only a couple of posts. Yinglet speech is the lightning rod here, but with elections outside my country coming up being able to mute "Starmer" or "Trump" is even more important.
The thing that bums me out about Cohost is that I'm not seeing any of these type of features appear anytime soon. The interesting thing about Bluesky is that discourse about a certain issue pops up, and a week or two later there are tools to alleviate these issues. The tradeoff is that Bluesky is burning VC money at a probably terrifying rate, while Cohost's goal are more sustainable. The jury is still out which one is better. What I do know is that having to suffer through days of discourse to be able to change something is very tiring and it's making me want to leave.
