I know to some extent I'm shouting into the void here, but with cohost on the outs I would really encourage people to at least have another look at Mastodon.
It's the closest another social media has to being personally curated like cohost, and yes, I'm not actually the biggest fan, but it's the only one of the current generation of social media sites which isn't compromised from the start by corporate foundations/meddling.
Mastodon has a lot of flaws, of course (ask me about my attempts at contributing to it back in 2017), but I am not comfortable with using Threads or Bluesky given who runs them and tbqh I don't think anyone should be. Take the lessons you've learned from cohost and apply them to Mastodon and I do believe you'll have a better time there.
i backed out of mastodon/fedi because im not sure i really want to go back to short form social media again, but the one thing i took away from it on my time there is that if you want a curated social space where you're mostly interacting with the people you've chosen to interact with, you can:
- find the option to opt out of the local & global timelines and check it. i forget what it's called but im pretty sure it was there. maybe it was a glitchsoc thing? idk, sorry
- set your default post privacy to "unlisted" or whatever it's called - this means your posts are still publicly visible, but won't be visible on local & global timelines
neither of these will stop people from interacting with you, but will prevent your posts from being broadcast to a big feed of people you don't know
i think the local timeline is probably fine on its own, if the default was to only post to it when you opt in by setting your post privacy to public. in most other cases it seems like it's just mashing posts from people who have no connection, no common ground, and very likely different acceptable social conventions together in a way that's going to cause fights
i think the global timeline is almost always going to cause fights for all the same reasons, but lacking the tenuous connection of even being on the same instance, but nobody asked me anyway
anyway, that's my $0.02 - reducing "discoverability" to a horde of internet strangers looking for a fight and building groups of people you've chosen to share space with is much more my speed. maybe some of this will be useful to other people who feel the same way?
