(EDIT: I've written a companion piece to this post titled Good Behavior Makes Website Features Happen. Check it out after you read this!)
Back when they started making Cohost, @staff had observed that most people would divide their social media stuff between ~three of the Big Platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, and so on. The vision for Cohost throughout its development was for it to become a "fourth website" - a place unlike all the other big hangout spots with a set of features & culture all its own, that wasn't meant to compete with the big players so much as coexist alongside them.
Fast-forward to today, with the continued viability of one of those big players (Twitter, obviously) as a large-scale platform for general existence is very much in doubt. This has, understandably, led to a disproportionately large number of Twitter users coming to Cohost all at once. This is good from one point of view - the site needs active users to reach sustainability, after all - but has also created a number of technical, logistical, and cultural headaches as everyone sort of mills around trying to figure stuff out. @staff have done an admirable job managing the technical & logistical side of things, and this post is my attempt at helping with the cultural stuff by making a few things explicit about Cohost's design that might help people manage their expectations.
This Isn't Twitter
That might seem obvious, but it bears repeating. Twitter user punished3liza had a recent popular tweet about Tumblr that I believe is extremely applicable for Cohost as well:
tumblr is really good now but if you come back there and post like youve learned to post on twitter you will be torn apart like a meat pumpkin in the wild dog exhibit. so wipe your feet first
Let's explore some ways in which Cohost is not Twitter, and how some of the bad habits from the latter website are incompatible with the former.
Virality Is Deprioritized
Strictly speaking, it is not IMPOSSIBLE to go viral on Cohost. You might very well be following me due to a post I made in the "welcome to cohost" tag that still seems to be getting a lot of traction. However, the motivation to smash the share button is greatly diminished compared to a platform like Twitter. Posts on Cohost take up a large amount of screen real estate, and when you see that a post has already been shared into your timeline two or three times, it feels superfluous to share it again. This is by design. Cohost is intended to be a slower-moving, cozier space where you can prioritize the content you share according to what you'd like your timeline to look like, without feeling pressured to always surface whatever content is the most popular at the time.
Clout-Chasing Is Discouraged
I've personally observed a number of feature requests from new users both on Cohost and on the support forum asking for following/followers, post "like" counts" and post share counts to all be revealed publicly. This information being obscured is a deliberate design choice. Instead of deciding a post's value by how many retweets it has, users are encouraged to read posts, process them, and determine their value using their brains. Similarly, the concept of a "Cohost power user" is so amorphous as to basically be a contradiction in terms. Sure, there might be some users you see more frequently than others, but it's impossible to know who has a lot of followers and who just happens to be making a lot of good posts right now.
Harassment Is Implicitly Discouraged
Obscuring following/follower lists has another important function, which is that it renders it impossible for users to assign a moral value to the people that other users are following and justify targeted harassment based on that. There's no such thing as quote-tweeting on Cohost - linking back to someone's post without using the Share functionality produces no notification. Neither does typing someone's @ in a post (sorry to everyone trying to ping @staff like that - send them an e-mail or use the bug-reporting feature). Blocking is easy and works extremely well. Nobody can snoop through your likes for thoughtcrime. You can filter out specific content warnings, and tag filtering is close behind. It is extremely easy to tailor your Cohost experience so you never have to see content or people that upset you.
Harassment Is Also Explicitly Discouraged
However, if you are the sort of person who actively seeks out content that upsets you as a justification for harassing the people who produce it, tough shit. This goes for transphobes, racists, fascists, Puritans, etc etc etc basically anyone who has gotten too comfortable on Twitter being able to whip up a few dozen pals (or bots) to mass-report people you hate to get them auto-banned. It doesn't work like that on Cohost - human beings process all the reports and it's very easy for the devs to spot targeted harassment, spam, and other bad behavior. Your shit will just get banned and nobody will ever know about it.
I need to get back to work, but hopefully this post has been helpful in setting some good expectations for behavior here on this new website. Just, you know, operate in good faith with each other and be normal towards @staff because they're working very hard and have done a very good job making Cohost into the cool spot it's turned into.
