What I'm trying to say is, since Twitter is dying and people seem to be migrating more to Tumblr and Masto than here, it's starting to feel like Cohost will not come on top of the social media succession wars.
But this is still my favorite one, and so I will stay here. This site is safe and uncompromising, and my close friends are here. Despite popularity and all, this may become my true "main".
tldr I wuv eggbug
we had started the closed beta before elon even tendered an offer for twitter; a lot of the things we could do to "win" are things we consider morally unacceptable; and even if another platform wins for now, we think there's a pretty decent chance that their users are going to realize that they left in haste for somewhere that still suffers from the same fundamental problems (save for the one where it got acquired)
our goals are:
a) build a place people like spending time on -- one that feels more social than patreon and easier to make a living off of creative works on than twitter;
b) hopefully have enough revenue that we can afford to pay the bills
one of the things that really stuck out to me as funny in the peri-crisis period where people started talking about Twitter Alternatives is how many people said some variation of "forget about mastodon and cohost, what I want is just twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful"
a) I'm gonna be real with you, if you want twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful, what you want is proooooooooobably mastodon, or maybe like... plurk or something
b) even before elon y'all were calling twitter The Hellsite enough and in a despairing enough tone that I don't believe you actually want that
some people really do want another twitter because they love feeling bad, but many people probably want The Good Things They Found On Twitter, which are not necessarily a result of twitter's structure and design but are instead just a result of lots of people being in the same place and finding ways to thrive there
like, any social media site could theoretically provide a place for artists from various countries to gather and share original works or fanworks, but if a social media service is partitioned by nation/language and it's exclusionary due to debates over moderation and policy, that sort of community cannot form and those people will go somewhere else. it doesn't mean that twitter was the one right place for it
i certainly made a lot of friends (some of which i still have now) in god-forsaken places like The IRC Channel For A Christian Graal Online Guild and The Forums And IRC Channel For A WoW Guild but that doesn't mean that if I want to form more friendships of that caliber I should join a WoW guild. I definitely shouldn't
I am someone who liked twitter's structure and design (more or less) because I am someone who makes money off words, and Twitter's actual access to many different kinds of people mean being able to peer in on culture, conversations, getting your written work out there in front of people's faces, and existing on a mountain of words, words, words. It is not essential for writers, but most I know out there are dependent on Twitter more than anything else because it doesn't require your face, it thrives on writing and written communication, and there's large networks of peers.
