Annie D

Thanks for making cohost my life has drastically changed because of it I started learning html and css when I joined because you could use it in posts here and that led to me deciding I’m going to go to school for computer engineering so yeah thank you

Hey, I just want to say thst, in spite of any minor complaints (I really want to emphasize that they're small, at least for me) I have, this is the best it's felt using a website in years

chronic fatigue is an extremely difficult thing to deal with; my dad's had CFS/ME for a long time, and i've watched him struggle and helped where i'm able. keeping going at whatever level you can while afflicted by that shit is the best you can do, even if it's a low level.

"I could be doing better" isn't really true, but even so it's a hard thought to shake with something that just makes you have no energy to do anything. if you've got a disability, you've got it. you're doing the best you're able.

for whatever it is worth: i fucking love cohost. thank you for your part in making it what it is!!

wishing you the best of luck with your health troubles and the work stress 😣🙏

Thank you for all of your hard work

it's a p good website imo

For what it's worth, I'm sorry if anything I post is a cognitive landmine for you. This truly is the website of all time, and I appreciate that I can get on my SVG shit here and make people smile.

Thank you for everything you do! You and all of you have been working very hard and you're doing a fantastic job ~

Glad to hear from you, and I think it's important for you and the rest of the staff to be able to talk as people and not be in Staff Mode 100% of the time. I love this little site and I'll stick with it whatever happens.

For what it's worth, I really want to thank you (all) for the work you're doing on this site and am sorry you're stuck with your work being weirdly under the spotlight for people who don't necessarily understand that of course you also want x thing done/fixed etc, but the world has conspired against that being done yet for capacity and/or other roadblocks. Heaven knows that's a familiar one at my work, although there are far fewer people spectating.

cohost is such a good website you're all doing amazingly!!! thank you for working so hard for us little guys we'll always be behind y'all when you need to step away from Staff Voice and just be people!

Thank you for the work you've been putting in. It takes as long as it takes; this place is already really damn good and I appreciate the work you and the rest of staff are doing to make it better.

can't speak for everyone else since people can and will have different excuses to their actions but when i complain (something really rare because i know how overwhelming it must be to manage a website with a small team) it's because i want it to do well; i really care about this place. i'm comfortable with this little corner of the web and i want to see it thrive as long as you guys are willing to keep it alive

it's difficult to not take things to heart when it's something you've made yourself, but like. please don't be too bummed out by complaints and take the time needed to fix what needs to be fixed. it's fine!

For what it’s worth, I really do enjoy this site, even with the bumps along the way.

I definitely understand how hard separating the site from the self can be, but in complete honesty any complaints I may have about Cohost is aimed at a vague, Eggbug-shaped cloud, and not any of the team.

The fact that you and Colin and the rest of the team are poking around, being people whose names we know and we occasionally get to casually interact with is great. You’re a person first here. <3

Take care, and hopefully the stress dies down a little.

also important to stress that even with usability issues this is still my favorite website to use

I love cohost and I love the effort that you (and all the ASSC folks) put in to make this website super rad. I want to effort post (such as with @VancouverTransit) because of cohost existing. You're super rad.

cohost is easily the best time i've had on the internet, basically ever. if cohost stayed as it is right now for the rest of it's lifetime, i would be happy. anything you add or fix is just making a great thing better. thank you for making cohost, sincerely.

cohost has been an absolutely fantastic site to use, and i'm glad to see it growing even though their are growing pains. you're all doing your best, and i'm sorry it's taking a toll on you

do please be well, you've been wise in taking time off sick and i and others can appreciate that you won't work yourself to the bone

as for finding places that aren't work to hang in, i haven't any strong suggestions what with twitter's collapse, but it was lovely meeting up with you in vrchat once and there's an open invitation for you to swing by any time you'd like, i'm around and online with a lovely group of folks basically every night

Thanks for the work you put in building cohost. I use this site as a way to ditch twitter and I find that it has become like an actual 'home' on the internet and a place where I actually feel like posting stuff, which I have been missing for a very long time. I am fine with the site being a bit rough around the edges and I sincerely hope you will be able to recover and carry on your great work without sacrificing your health.

This site has been an absolute pleasure to use and i am thankful everyday i get to come on here and make my little posts and interact with the community. i hope things with health improve and wish to whatever will listen that you can return to enjoying the site you've put so much love into.

As someone with post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome and intermittent arm RSIs, I hope you're able to take all the time you need to figure stuff out and rest! And I know it might not help in the moment when encountering folks complaining about slow development, but I still hope the words from those of us in the comments here balance those out a bit.

One of the 10 principles of disability justice is sustainability - I'm certain that most folks here on Cohost support slower development if it means Cohost sticks around, rather than fixing UI issues faster and burning folks out. 💜

please get some rest, cohost is the best site on the internet rn and all of your hard work is so appreciated but we want you to stay healthy! if you need to skip a few weeks of updates in order to recover, p l e a s e do so

i also have chronic fatigue and mysterious health problems and it is my considered opinion that any rando who demands work out of you is being entirely unreasonable and they can get fucked. thanks for all you do, kind stranger

even if you never added another feature to this site, cohost is a very, genuinely good contribution to the world. People will spend their time here, make friends, and meet people they'll happily spend the rest of their lives with. I empathize with all your sources of stress since i'm in a similar situation, but i can't give any good advice other than – always remember to step back and think about just how good you actually are, both as a person, and as a contributor to something amazing. Hang in there. ❤

Thanks for doing what you do and being you.

since i joined, every single time i've seen a change deployed on cohost, i've been "oh hell yeah this rules", the opposite to what i feel every time there's an update to an app made by companies that have 59281 trillion dollars of funding

i'd still use the site as-is if i knew no further updates would ever happen. it works and peeps are cool. any UI QOL improvement is just a bonus!

take it easy

Love the site lots, thank you for your hard work. Please look after yourself.

Honestly I'm genuinely amazed that cohost is this good. I remember what it was like to hang out on sites built by hand by small teams, back before websites were pretty much exclusively the domain of huge corporations and off-the-shelf solutions. They were never this good. Sometimes they were entirely knocked off the internet just months into their life, vulnerabilities were found that were just uneconomical to fix. I can think of at least three users on this site who have clearly demonstrated the skills to have done that to anything I used back in the old days haha, even if they were well-meaning about it. All of you are clearly really good at this. Cohost at its worst never chugged as bad as I'd expected an average site to back then. Heck I remember back when I'd get a fail whale on Twitter every few loads haha. And cohost chugged for only like a couple weeks! it's downright snappy now with loads that I'm sure dwarf that period!

I personally don't take for granted how fast you have to run just to stay still, I know that intangibles like Cloudflare problems and heavier waves of users are crashing on this site every day, and remaining resolute in the face of all of that is a tremendous amount of effort that probably 90% of users will never even notice. Even other commenters here are like "well this is good" hahaha it's not like you could stop now and have it stay that way! and yet here you are upset you're not doing more!? you're setting your own bar, and it's incredibly admirable it's that high, and that you keep almost reaching it even so. But let yourself be human too, please. health issues will come for us all, even the most aloof of us are sadly mortal. All things considered, I couldn't be prouder to be supporting this incredible effort in the few ways I can.

So sorry to hear about your health troubles. I hope you can get some good rest; the website is wonderful and extra work can wait until later

This site has helped me get back into writing for fun, and I sincerely appreciate that. I even learned a bit of CSS so that I could do some crimes too!

Thank you so so much for making cohost!

i hope you're able to get some rest and feel better soon jae 💕 for what its worth, if you guys never added another feature again, this would still be my favourite social media site

While it's true that cohost could be better (and I mean this in the sense of, pretty much every project has the capacity to be better), it would be much worse if it had never been at all. Even when you're not able to fix bugs or create new features it's still a place a lot of people have found comfy enough to inhabit and that has a lot of value.

What I'm trying to say is, when you're looking at all the stuff you still need to do, don't forget to look back at how much you've already done.

I also think that peoples' expectations for how social media sites should work has mostly been formed from sites run by corporations, not, you know, a handful of people. The fact that one person being sick can slow things down so much is the "cost" of having a social media platform that isn't a total capitalist hellscape.

I hope you feel better soon, and get lots of rest in the meantime!

this is why i backpedaled woth my concerns about posting unscaled pixel art here some weeks back, i realized midway through commenting that i was voicing, directly to another person, that the site wasn't meeting my niche needs the exact way i wanted it to while there was already a list of priorities and other issues on site staff's minds. i instantly felt the weight i was placing on a minor thing and fidn't want to be doing that.

imo jae, this post existing is a good thing because many of us need to be reminded that what you all do do is work, we can see the work you do, and that we should step back and not try to be hands-on with the site. cohost doesn't have to develop at a mile a minute. it's just a website

I think the team should feel really good about what’s been accomplished so far, with so little. The amount and magnitude of improvements has been frankly incredible. Y’all rock.

sounds like it's time to set up a subpage under a pseudonym to shitpost among the masses

thank you for all that you do to make this website as special as it is. some of that is the actual software we interact with, but a huge part of it is also the culture that you & the rest of staff have created where you can make a post like this that both 1. doesn't feel out of place here and 2. has a whole bunch of really nice supportive comments that are making me tear up a little bit. 💜

chronic fagtiguer and otherwise on-again off-again disabled person here, I feel your pain. It sucks that it takes going into detail about it to get people to even consider that someone might be struggling with it. It sucks how much effort it takes to make it "visible", especially online.

I hope you have the opportunity to take the time to recover from flareups, I know I always get punished when I try to ignore/push through mine.

With regards to the hands thing- I'm not gonna go on my normal spiel about voice-coding, and I know nothing about whether you've considered it/tried it as a way to reduce load on your hands. but if you'd ever like someone to walk you through the process of setting up a voice coding environment one-on-one I'm always happy to do that for folks, just send me an email about it (artemis@artemis.sh), and that goes for anyone reading this.

I wouldn't recommend trying to do that during peak fatigue tho, I will say.

mirroring all the other comments, cohost is great. something that came to mind is that people will complain about (website) even if it's perfectly designed and built, simply because of the people that use it. people will say "twitter sucks" and be referring only to the users of twitter and not the site/app itself. really all I'm trying to say is (along with all the other kinds of meaningless complaints,) people will complain about things completely out of your control, and if you can separate those from the productive feedback it'll probably help.

I totally understand where you're coming from. I have a severe chronic pain disorder which makes it very difficult to do the things I want to do, and it's easy to get disheartened by the pain, but at the same time I feel awful that I'm not able to work on the things that people enjoyed seeing from me.

I know I've been pretty critical of certain tech decisions made on Cohost and I don't intend them as anything personal, they're things I'd like to see done better, and I also am well aware of how difficult it is to balance the whole "perfect" vs "shipping" thing.

In an ideal world there could be a whole lot of people working together on making things better without having to worry about pesky things like "income" and "deadlines" and so on. But there's also that difficult obsessive tendency that many of us have, the impulse to do "one more thing" until before you know it the sun's rising and you're ready to collapse and everything feels so meaningless and futile and then you need a few days to recover from a single night's coding binge, and then the recovery times get longer and longer while the feelings of progress become smaller and smaller, and before you know it you're burned out.

Would it be possible to consider a business model similar to Gumroad's, where you basically get contractors who can pick up feature and maintenance work and get paid for it, without requiring specific hourly commitments and so on? Basically trying to strike a balance between the governance issues inherent to F/OSS and the capitalistic hellscape that is the tech industry.

Your staff is way too small for the kinds of stuff you're trying to do. You have a huge community of folks, many of whom would be capable of helping out.