Sad Wet Dog Story Author

I think that's fair. What bothers me about this person's thread and similar comments I've seen is that people are basically accusing the staff of being incompetent at best and scammers who are hostile to trans people at worst, and either don't realize or don't care that they're potentially setting a small group of individuals up to get harassed by their own peers, a thing that has had historically disastrous effects when it snowballs. I can understand "I'm wary of Cohost and I think other people should probably be careful using it for [reasons];" I start to think they're doing something pretty shitty and irresponsible when they're on their second or third capslock-engaged thread about how Cohost definitely wants to steal our art and deadname us.

Editing to add: I wish people would talk to each other? Like, I don't expect every random person with concerns to reach out to every social media site they have concerns about for a Dialogue, but the fact that Cohost is a small site trying to make exactly enough money to be sustainable has absolutely come up in these conversations, and I feel like once someone is invested enough to be doing this they at least owe it to themselves to ask the people running it what's up in good faith.

Yeah, like, I really like this website, but its entire charm is that it is a small, somewhat experimental platform for sharing cool stuff with a handful of people interested in what you might have to say or show. Its strengths and weaknesses are entirely different from Twitter, and it is not designed to build one's livelihood upon, at all, nor is it suited for a massive userbase. I have friends who have how they make a living tied very closely with their Twitter presences, and this situation had been dire for them.

This and your previous comments are largely how I view the situation myself. Admittedly, I have the luxury of being largely without enemies, although I know people who have them and see their point of view; but by the same token, I feel that we're going to have to make an active effort to cultivate the better environment which we seek going forward, and to some extent, that requires some leaps of faith, or leaps in the absence of faith as the case may be.

Yeah, this. I have seen a lot of people--both Cohost distrusters and Cohost likers--defaulting to viewing this as a battle royale where at the end a platform will emerge as The Only One based on where the largest population shift happens. It gives it way more of a sense of urgency than it needs. I don't blame people for doing this, because I think it's one of those things where you kind of have to actively be thinking about it not being that; there's a pattern or paradigm or whatever that has held steady for a long time, and it's involved everyone being more or less powerless to choose where we want to go if we actually want to interact with people and/or make a living from Online. But I think there's definitely a difference between doing it unconsciously and having people say, "Hey, it's not like this" and insisting that it is.

That powerlessness, or the expectation of it, leads to shit like this. I do think it's something people need to break themselves of real quick if they don't want to inadvertently hurt someone (again, because people have already been hurt this way). We as an Internet have gotten used to the idea that the only way to stop something bad from happening is to destroy it at the root, because the people running everything we depend on never heed warnings or take immediate action or value our lives above doing whatever they were going to do anyway. Getting us to turn that impulse on each other is a neat trick, because it wipes out whatever we were trying to build.

right yes that's what i meant too, the screenshotted person here is yet another. there are a whole handful of people crawling around spalling off fresh Takes about how horrible cohost is