There's been discussion in the comments of recent staff posts on Pillowfort about how the site needs to appeal to the users who left the site, and those who never signed up in the first place. Which I thought was an interesting topic!

Are there aspects of Cohost you like that Pillowfort doesn't have? Issues Pillowfort has had that have turned you away? Or do you perhaps use both Cohost and Pillowfort for your fannish needs, whether that be sharing content or browsing?

If you know of any discussions about this, whether here on Cohost or elsewhere, I would be really interested to see them!

I'm using both at the moment, on a see-what-happens sort of basis.

The interfaces and features each have positive and negative points for me. I prefer Pillowfort's colour-scheme. I like the way the left-hand menu bar stays on screen as you scroll and the fact that you can format multi-image posts more flexibly by just dragging images around without needing to code the formatting yourself. Other than those points the Cohost interface mostly looks and feels nicer and easier, especially the tagging interface, and I like the way content warnings work here.

I'm ambivalent about the role of HMTL and CSS here. In principle it's great that people have more control over their posts and can do more things with them, and I like some of the sutff people do with that. On the other hand I don't know CSS and my HTML is very basic and rusty so it sometimes feels like there are fairly simple things that on another site the user interface would help me do but here it's just a case of 'if you can't code it yourself then you can't do it'. I also find that, while the site itself displays nicely on my smallish laptop screen set to Everything Big Please resolution, people sometimes use CSS in a way that makes their posts too big to fit on my screen. Which I don't hold against the site or the users who do it, it's just a thing.

I've found it a lot easier and quicker to find people whose accounts I want to follow here than I have on Pillowfort. Possibly part of that is the nice simple mechanism Cohost has of inviting you to make an introduction post and give it a specific tag, so it's easy to browse the tag and see who's arriving. On Pillowfort there are various different ways and places for people to introduce themselves but finding them is a bit of a faff. But mainly there just seem to be more people here who are closer to being My Kind Of People. Pillowfort feels full of very young people and very fannish people. Here there seem to be more older folks (though still mostly not as old as me 😄), more people who seem to have broader interests, more people who seem to have good politics (but don't feel the need to constantly demonstrate it), more people who seem to have lives offline as well as online. One point where Pillowfort does better is that it seems to be slightly less dominated by people from North America, but that may just be because Cohost is newer and hasn't had a chance to spread as far from its point of origin.

The atmosphere here seems more casual and friendly. Maybe because the first 'wave' of users here were mostly people who already knew each other or moved in overlapping social circles that already existed outside the site, so it feels like a place of friends, where Pillowfort feels more like a place of strangers who are looking for friends. It also probably helped that I found a couple of people on here that I already knew from elsewhere (hi satah and Cat!). And maybe the greater emphasis on low-effort posting and short throw-away posts here makes it feel like the stakes are lower. Whatever the reason, I find myself slightly less shy about commenting on strangers' posts here than on Pillowfort.

A big thing Pillowfort has that Cohost hasn't got is 'communities', but for me that isn't a particularly important difference because communities are good for pursuing and sharing specific topics of interest and I don't really use social media for that – I tend to want to find people whose vibe I enjoy and then see whatever they happen to post or share, rather than seeking out posts about specific topics.

A final thought: I find it a bit amusing / bemusing how Cohost and Pillowfort are so similar to each other and yet most people on Cohost seem to think of Cohost as an alternative to Twitter (or to a lesser extent Mastodon) while most people on Pillowfort seem to think of Pillowfort as an alternative to Tumblr. I guess it's just for historical reasons to do with which platform people were mostly leaving at different times. I haven't used either Twitter or Tumblr for years (and I've never used Mastodon) so, for me, both Pillowfort and Cohost are mainly competing against Just Not Using Social Media At All. And potentially, in the longer term, against each other.

Oh I forgot to mention Eggbug! Eggbug is cool.