As happy as I am that the latest Twitter bed-shitting has drawn a lot of people to Cohost and generally raised the site's profile as Another Place You Can Go, I don't actually WANT Twitter to fail completely and shatter into a dozen different smaller platforms.
- My professional dev account is a not-insignificant promotion avenue for my games and other projects (to say nothing of using it to reach out to other creatives there), and my label's marketing strategy relies pretty heavy on leveraging Twitter buzz
- I've got another account that I use exclusively for porn-creator following and over the years I've amassed a basically-irreplaceable list of hundreds of artists, animators, and other creators who I'd be extremely sad to lose access to. A pretty significant percentage of them are non-English-speaking, too
- In addition to using my private Twitter to keep up with close friends, it's also where I follow local journalists and stuff like my local COVID wastewater numbers
And those are just my own personal selfish reasons! In a broader sense, I think it'd be pretty heartbreaking to lose such an important platform for sex workers, journalists, critics, scientists, etc etc etc. There's definitely a world outside Twitter, but as much as that's true there's also a whole hell of a lot of babies that'd be thrown out with that bathwater.
Now, all that being said, I do hope that as Twitter stabilizes (knock on wood) a decent amount of people who started accounts here keep using the site. Especially the porn artists (can you tell I have something of a vested interest), if only because nowadays when you're making porn it's just a good general policy to have yourself established on as many platforms as possible in case one goes belly-up (or has several days of spotty service). I think Cohost as a site is pretty "sticky" - people who like it REALLY like it (an almost 20% conversion rate from active users to paying users is INSANE) and the more people we have here contributing to the site's culture and making it feel like a worthwhile place to post, the better.
One last thought for people who might have large followings on Twitter and are wondering if Cohost is worth it: it might be a much smaller platform but I can personally attest to my smaller following on Cohost having had a MUCH larger impact on the sales of my goofy little porn game than Twitter almost ever has. Even if this doesn't become your primary place to post, I strongly encourage cultivating it at your own pace. Fuck around, make some posts, follow some tags, maybe even slither on over to the feature request forum if you've got a good idea for something that @staff can add. Other people have said this, but one of the nicest things about Cohost is that you don't need to attend to it with the same slavish devotion that Twitter demands in order to maintain an audience. You can hop on, mess around for a bit, forget about it for a few days or even weeks, and then find it much the same whenever you come back.
Oh and if you find yourself REALLY enjoying the site, you can always hop on over to your settings and sub to Cohost Plus! to toss the devs a few bucks for Eggbug Chow. Alright wow this ran long I'll catch you later