Annie D

@ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔

she/her
www.redpanda.fun/

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
. . .

tumblr

annarcana.tumblr.com/

blog

blog.redpanda.fun/

Annie D @ann-arcana1/20/2023, 9:15 PM

walking mirage @atomicthumbs

Birdout: Paradise @SomeEgrets1/20/2023, 7:01 PM

So this isn't really intended to be a subchost or anything, I don't think. I hope?

But I think we've probably mostly seen a lot of the "X... but this is a small site with only a few staff" chosts, and @jkap's post about it, and I dunno

I'm an elder millennial and I've been around the internet a long-ass time. I remember before The Times Before Great Aggregation, when every site was taken over by exactly three colossal tech giants with billions in funding, and the internet became a lot smaller.

Sites were jank as fuck back then. A lot of stuff was inconvenient or didn't work or was running on some outdated version of something. By comparison, this site is infinitely better and can/has responded better to UX demands put on it by a growing user base with diverging needs.

I just kind of wonder if somewhere, we lost some context, and we've been living in a small, corporatized garden of sites for so long that it's easy to lose sight/patience with how a site develops itself outside of that context? Even if we probably intuitively know that in spite of limited resources and time, it's likely ultimately better able to respond to the needs of its users in the long run - otherwise we wouldn't seriously be making these kinds of requests.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @SomeEgrets's post:

Yaodema @yaodema1/20/2023, 7:19 PM

sites are jank as fuck now, we just put up with the jank because we believe that we can't do anything about it. looking at how reddit and twitter started, and comparing that to how this started, this site was in a better state from the get-go!

part of me wonders if people just don't realize, at some instinctual level, that the ability to change things doesn't mean they should change at light-speed, just that they will change.

@yumegaze1/20/2023, 7:24 PM

yeah, my thoughts exactly; i don't know how we web users got so impatient? like, even well-established social media sites are broken. the difference between those and cohost, i think, is that our staff here actually cares about their product. it's not supposed to be a cash grab so like, changes are slow but actually relevant

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy1/20/2023, 7:22 PM

It's also harder to make even a simple site nowadays - <html>hello world</html> doesn't cut it anymore. I'm working on a simple personal blog and the level of complication just to put words on a screen in the modern Internet is not trivial.

Michaela Sue @beige-alert1/20/2023, 7:49 PM

The last time I hands-on did web stuff was hand-edited simple HTML and every time I'm reminded that every "simple" web page these days has like eleven megabytes of stuff to show the couple paragraphs, in order to surround them with all the things we need them surrounded by these days, it still boggles me.

mint @mintexists1/20/2023, 8:03 PM

Cohosts raw frontend code is ~8.6 mb and is made up of ~278 files

ash @hierarchon1/20/2023, 9:24 PM

I'm curious what sort of complications you're running into; not to be all Works On My Machine but my own personal site is extremely small (maybe a couple kilobytes of hand-written HTML templates and CSS)

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy1/20/2023, 9:54 PM

It's a Wordpress blog, which is not like rocket science but I have just run into a lot of "and another thing" moments like needing to get an SSL certificate, and install plugins, and oops I did something that doesn't work with this theme template, and now it's cropping pictures funny, and... so forth. Just a lot of little things that will ultimately make my life easier because I don't have to edit the HTML every time I make a post, but currently are not making my life easier.

@secrets1/21/2023, 12:43 AM

Yeah WordPress is very much not made for efficiency. It's been built out into a do-everything machine that'll let you set up an online shop or a gallery or a submissions system for an online newspaper with barely enough technical expertise to edit a Word document, but the flipside of that is it won't just do those things in the most direct manner, just the one that leaves the most options open to also plug in a fuckin paint program or something

ash @hierarchon1/21/2023, 1:38 AM

ahh, yeah i do everything with a static site generator which is a bit more technical in terms of setup but extremely 'clean': write some text files, run a program, copy the output, done. though i also don't have comments sections or anything dynamic

rose @rosieposie1/20/2023, 7:22 PM

people treat all sites like apps made by a hundred faceless robots now. every time i see someone scream 'thats the last straw, cohost doesn't have x feature, i'm OUTTA HERE!!!' its like. hello. it only launched last year. calm down

kata 🌊 aqua!@kadybat1/20/2023, 7:54 PM

i mean if the expectation were "a hundred faceless robots" it'd likely be better. i think nowadays the expectation is "like 3,000 people who are all rich and privileged" when the reality could not be farther from the truth.

@garudina1/20/2023, 7:25 PM

I saw someone on the cohost logo thread rechosting angrily about "why were you doing this and not working on the feature I want" which is very. this is a good reason not to have a personal account on your own social media site, imo

ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre @rotsharp1/20/2023, 7:38 PM

tbh its a feature for me if the kind of people who expect staff to be machines get mad and yeet themselves off the site

@garudina1/20/2023, 7:49 PM

sadly this person's presence and demeanor strongly implied that they are unlikely to leave under their own power

ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre @rotsharp1/20/2023, 7:57 PM

rip for all of us if they keep behaving in this way and someone has to tell them to stop asking for the manager!

Michaela Sue @beige-alert1/20/2023, 7:50 PM

I've still got my timestamps set to "beats" because I appreciate this sort of thing!

ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre @rotsharp1/20/2023, 7:57 PM

❤️

Azure @AzureLazuline1/20/2023, 7:52 PM

as a small indie dev, the same thing happens in that space too. There's all sorts of people who get impatient and very angry when it takes 5 years for an indie to make a few hours of gameplay, when they're used to Nintendo putting out an endless stream of perfectly-polished content that gets released faster than you can play it. I grew up on forums that never changed their layout or added a new feature in the 10 years i spent there, and in some ways that's just a lot more comfy anyway!

kata 🌊 aqua!@kadybat1/20/2023, 7:53 PM

we could legit be using PHPbb forums right now. folks's expectations are absolutely too high.

~@modulusshift1/20/2023, 9:47 PM

And even those! so many communities were deliberately using old versions with known vulnerabilities and trying to plug the holes on the sinking ship because it was less work than basically throwing out the site and starting over hahaha

Kami @KamiBee1/21/2023, 12:13 AM

People were much more used to hacking together their own solutions as users years ago too. Like tagging a forum post with a 56K warning for people on dial-up if you were going to dump a lot of images, or the way retweets on Twitter started with everyone just agreeing on the convention 'RT @[username]'. When you aren't used to social media having lots of features you find ways to make do and for the most part it's just fine. I see a bit of that spirit on Cohost with using tags to simulate a site-wide feed. It's probably why I feel so at home here.

Shel @shel1/21/2023, 4:53 AM

I think honestly the big thing nobody is talking about is tone. It's one thing to make requests or suggestions for improvements but I think the "land mines" being referred to are the people who are really fucking aggro about it. Like I'm often seeing posts with a tone of "this piece of shit website won't let me paste an image into the post composer" like that's just so unnecessary and of course it would make someone feel bad. Everyone feels bad when someone is rude to them, and it's especially hard when they're right that it's an improvement that's needed and you can't just fix it right away.

Kit @kitkat1/21/2023, 7:31 PM

I spent an unreasonable amount of my life on a forum powered by a frankenstein version of vBulletin that had been maintained by one guy for years. co-host is still way more functional and fun

@secrets1/21/2023, 8:22 PM

this is why it's so important for any proper Poster to spend their formative years on a forum built on load-bearing slurs where the tech support is they call you a whiner

Pinned Tags