Valentine

some folks brought up that the original wording of clause 5(b) of our terms --

You agree to not [...] (b) register under the name of another person or under a fictional name or alias

-- smacked of a "real name policy."

we 100% agree with those folks, and that wasn't our intent; real name policies are terrible. we got the go-ahead from our lawyer to remove that clause, and have updated our terms of use accordingly; the remainder of the text is unchanged.

our apologies for the concern, and thank you for reading the terms with a keen eye and pushing us on this!

corporations are fundamentally just a group of people sharing a liability shield, and the thing that stops them from responding to people's concerns is not some magic property of a corporation, but that their owners have a disinterest in responding to them or think it's better for their pocketbook that they don't

I've been spending the last day imagining a site like Twitter or Mastodon or Facebook or whatever where posts are allowed to make noise as long as they are visible on screen, so that scrolling down a social media feed sounds like being in a Pachinko parlor.

This couldn't work on Cohost or Tumblr. The typical posts there are too long. The important thing about this idea is it has to be a service where you normally have 3-4 posts visible on screen at once, so that you never hear the ambience from only a single post at a time always several at once. (A corollary is that if somebody wants to just post a song for people to listen to they will have to write so much text about it that it fills an entire screen.)

I agree with this but it also makes me think of the video of the Dominoes pizza electric scooter.

we're working on burning down the day 1 tickets you all sent in, and addressing any load-bearing bugs that affect security or performance. as usual, thank you for being patient with us as we roll out more invites, bugfixes, and features for the early access crowd.

one of the most common (and very reasonable!) questions we've gotten over the last 24-or-so-hours is "Why do I have to wait for an invite to post?"

the short answer: moderation bandwidth.

the long answer: our moderation is done by real humans, i.e., us. as such, we're granting Posting Privileges (invites) only as fast as we can reasonably and effectively keep up with. the ultimate goal of cohost is to be sustainable, so we're scaling up the number and frequency of activations/invites as we better understand and streamline our moderation throughput. cohost and assc are vehemently against machine moderation; among other things, AI moderation is incredibly prone to errors due to lack of context, and consequently punishes marginalized users in a disproportionate manner. ¹

we may in the future implement tools that help us detect violations of our guidelines and terms of service but detection is not enforcement, and no judgment will be passed without a pair of human eyes looking at any given report. i'm sure many of you have experienced false positives or negatives when it comes to ToS enforcement; just last month i was suspended from twitter for posting this little guy because it contained "private information": ²

ultimately, we plan to hire paid moderators since mod work is very, very often done unpaid or on a volunteer basis. for now (and until we have a better idea of specific needs) each report is reviewed personally by the three of us. by limiting the flow of New Posters to cohost with a peer-to-peer invite system and a waiting list, we can scale this work appropriately and with reduced risk to you and to us. ³

tl;dr: if you see a post that is in violation of our ToS or community guidelines, use the meatball menu in the top right corner to report it. we will review each report individually.

thank you so much for using cohost.

❤️aidan

1. if you're interested in a good overview on this subject, I recommend checking out the book Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff.

2. naturally, my appeal was denied unless i deleted the offending post. this makes it exceedingly clear to me that twitter's moderation/appeal system, at least in part, does not actually pass in front of a human.

3. i realize this isn't how most websites work, and waiting is frustrating. however, i appreciate your patience and hope that you're as excited to receive Posting Privileges as i was when I finally got my AO3 invite so many years ago.

oh goodness this feels much better on something with a screen bigger than my phone.