(This is a companion piece to my other essay, Cohost Is Not Meant To Be A Replacement For Twitter (or anything else, for that matter). You may want to read them both!)
If you've used Cohost for any length of time, chances are you've already assembled a laundry list of features you'd like to see added to the site. Some of these are features that have been in the pipeline for a while - tag filtering, Plus! subscription gifting, Patreon/Ko-fi-like user-to-user tipping and subscription functionality. Others are things that users have suggested - an organizable media tab! Muting notifications on a specific post! Webrings! All of these are things the devs are interested in to varying degrees, but the one thing that they all have in common is that the devs need time to implement them.
As you might be aware, the Cohost staff consists of three full-time employees and one part-time employee, all of whom have normal human bodies that require sleep, food, and leisure time. They take weekends and holidays. When they're on the job, their time must be split between maintaining the minute-to-minute performance of the site, moderating user behavior, and building new features. Sometimes, one of these is more demanding than the others - since the Twitter acquisition, the devs have had their hands full keeping Cohost running smoothly while accommodating a massive influx of pissed-off Tweeters. As things settle down, all these new users will almost certainly increase the moderation workload. The more moderation that @staff has to perform, the less time they have to build and launch new features. Thus, if you enjoy Cohost and want it to grow into a robust, fully-featured website, it behooves you to keep @staff's moderation workload as small as possible, and to encourage your immediate community to do the same.
However, the aim of this post is not exactly to encourage you to abide by the TOS and be nice and so on - chances are you were either planning on doing that anyway or you simply don't care and thus aren't reading this post to begin with. Rather, what I hope to do with this post is to reduce the number of superfluous reports that @staff must sift through by encouraging you to use the tools Cohost provides to tailor your experience before resorting to reporting other users.
Do I Need To Block Or Report?
Now, what I need to make clear is that I am NOT saying that you should never make reports. @staff are on-record as saying that they do not want people like TERFs, racists, QAnon types, etc polluting the site, and they have a similarly heavy-handed attitude towards all forms of targeted harassment. What YOU need to understand is that @staff will be able to respond more quickly to reports of genuinely harmful behavior if they aren't being inundated with requests to mediate petty interpersonal conflicts.
So, before you report someone, ask yourself - is this person making threats towards me or others? Are they promoting a hateful ideology? Are they singling another user or group of users out for harassment? Are they posting spammy or malicious links? In all these cases (and more! Familiarize yourself with the TOS!) reporting them would be both appropriate and encouraged.
However - if the user in question is simply someone you despise from another platform? Block them! If they post content you find upsetting but which doesn't represent a threat to the site at large? Block them! If they've been rude or unpleasant in your interactions but haven't actually harassed you? Block them! Blocking users means you never have to see or interact with them ever again. It's very thorough! (And if someone makes a new page in order to evade your block and continue interacting with you, guess what? NOW you get to report them!)
Precise Content Warnings & Tags: They Kick Ass
On the subject of upsetting content, I invite you to examine your settings page, which contains (among other things) a "filtered content warnings" section. Just add any content in here that you don't want to see, and content with those CWs will never appear in your feed at all! As I mentioned above, a similar system for filtering tags has been on the way for some time (and may even be implemented by the time you read this post).
If you're someone who posts potentially-upsetting content - such as art that features blood, gore, or viscera, for example - you can help everyone out by giving your work precise content warnings and tags for the potentially-upsetting elements. This helps keep everyone happy and will keep YOU from having to deal with scandalized randos.
Finally, if you think a post needs a content warning, rather than reporting the user that posted it, first try politely suggesting that they add an appropriate CW! Most people don't want to intentionally harm other people, and it costs you nothing to assume good faith.
Don't Go Looking For Upsetting Content Just To Report It, What Is Wrong With You
This point might seem redundant if you've made it this far in the essay, but I figured it was worth making explicit. As I say both in this post and the one that preceded it, it is extremely easy to tailor your Cohost experience so that you rarely, if ever, are exposed to content and users that upset you. Generally, the only way to REGULARLY see users and content that upsets you is to go looking for them. If you see your role on a social media platform as someone whose job it is to ferret out and report "freaks", "weirdoes", "perverts", or any other dog-whistle-y terms: please fuck off! You aren't wanted! There's enough cops in the world without you deputizing yourself! You're making more work for @staff and ruining the vibe! Go to Mastodon, or Dreamwidth, or Tumblr, or fucking, WHEREVER, but definitely don't bring that shit here! Fuck you!
Gossip & Vent Accounts
Part of existing within a community is accepting a certain amount of interpersonal friction. This section is less about directly reducing superfluous reporting and more about a tactic that can be employed to avoid large-scale interpersonal blowups that can potentially LEAD to a lot of superfluous reporting and harassment.
If you haven't read @shel's excellent essay on the Jewish concept of Lashon Hara, I've linked it for you there and strongly encourage you to give it a read (it should honestly be taught in schools, or at VERY least be made required reading for anyone who wants to post online). However, if you really don't have the time to read it, I'll give you a wholly-inadequate summary: "lashon hara", literally translating to "evil speech" and broadly understood to mean "malicious gossip" is particularly corrosive in small, tight-knit communities. Rather than indulging in the propagation of this kind of corrosive gossip, people are encouraged to either settle their differences directly or not engage in it at all.
What this means for you as a Cohost user is that while of COURSE there will be times when other people on here will upset, exasperate, or frustrate you. You might sometimes be tempted to write posts detailing the ways they've annoyed you! In those cases, you have a lot of other options - blocking and moving on! Hashing your difference out directly! Taking a deep breath and doing something else for a while! However, if you absolutely MUST get something off your chest about another user, might I suggest: a vent account!
A vent account is just a separate page you set up that's set to private. Anything you post in there can't be shared, so feel free to pour out whatever bile you've got inside you until you feel better. We all need to grumble and bitch about the dipshits in our life sometimes, so why not do it in a space where your grumbling and bitching won't travel outside your circle of trusted friends? Vent accounts: they make Online bearable!
EDIT 2, 1:52PM PST - just adding a bit of clarification following some feedback from @shel:
I mostly agree but I do want to clarify that shit talking someone on a locked vent account where your friends can see it does qualify as lashon hara under halakha according to the Chofetz Chaim. I am not liable if you take Bigg's advice and become cursed by malachim or consumed by sheydim.
With that in mind, I'll add the rider that vent accounts are an imperfect solution and mainly preferable to making your petty interpersonal grievances the property of the commons - a better ethic overall is re-examining your relationship towards malicious gossip (again, read @shel's essay, it is far better-considered than this post that I mostly blasted out on a lunch break).
Wrapping Up
This is the last preachy here's-how-we-do-things-here-on-Cohost essay I'm going to write for a long while, I think! They clog up my notifications and I don't want people mistaking me for some kind of site spokesman or Cohost Whisperer. I just want to post about my horny cum games, for God's sake. As ever, please be normal to @staff, they're working very hard.
(EDIT 12:38PM PST - added section I forgot in the first draft)
many words i love seeing
