authorx

Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

@authorx

2x Award Winning Podcaster

Hi I'm Dana, I mostly just tool around with friends, play RPGs, and listen to podcasts, but I've also been known to make podcasts at SuperIdols! RPG and I've written a couple of short rpgs at my itch page and on twitter.

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balketh
@balketh

Listen, I don't even care if staff are saying it in tags. I don't care if the original creator (for what little that idea is worth in this concept) says it was a mistake.

someone else would have done it anyway.

Some of us wanted the Cohost Global Feed. (may the Global Cohost Feed rot in hell). It was a choice. We wanted to have a bit of a fully public dumping ground. Many of us knew it wouldn't be a truly great place, but it was optional discoverability. Plus, silencing and blocking worked fucking wonders, since Cohost never got big enough for spam accounts to be a huge problem.

The main thing is that it was OPTIONAL. That was the only reason it worked, alongside block and silence tools. I don't feel the same way about full mandatory global shit like on bluesky. Fuck that. That's not what the global feed was.

My global feed was like an extended reach into the good parts of Cohost. I didn't see the bullshit. I didn't go on fucking cohost-meta, which was, by far, worse for the site's health in general; I saw more people be hurt, have to take breaks, step away, or outright leave the damn site over the absolute shitfights in there. I get that it's also where important work was done, but that's not what the TCGF was.

TCGF was just a place for a broader shot of shitchosting and cool stuff, without having to know what the fuck people were going to incorrectly tag their shit with.

We wouldn't have needed it if there were any other kind of discoverability than optional tags. That's not a shot at staff - it's hopefully a prominent note for Cohost 2, but either way

I've been wanting to get it off my chest for ages.

Don't shit on the Cohost Global Feed. It was, in the end, only what you brought with you to it.

exerian
@exerian

this isn't even an argument for or against, just a statement of facts

if you don't believe this just ask anyone who was on an mmo in the 90's to early 00's. no matter what they did with the chat, the user base would figure out a way to create a global channel and it would, without fail, crash the servers. do you think that stopped us? not even a little bit.

you either create a sustainable global chat in your online community or your online community will create it for you. it's as certain as death and taxes.

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mathsbian
@mathsbian

Literally, when the majority of the userbase doesn’t use tags at all, the global feed was how I tried to find new people to follow that hadn’t found other tags to post in yet. Or were still figuring out tagging. The lack of actual use of the tagging feature when it’s so prominent and simple was a much bigger travesty than whatever issue people have with the TCGF

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balketh
@balketh

I'm not gonna spend the last days complaining about its problems; I know what they are, no one needs to tell me, or hear it from me.

But voluntary, optional tagging is not a viable discoverability solution. It's barely even a good content moderation solution. Tagging should either be mandatory, or have some kind of (hard to protect/police/guardrail/etc) public tagging by majority feature, a bit like community corrections on twitter, etc.

If public posts could have at LEAST been text-searched, that would have been enough! It would have been better still to bookmark a text search and put it in a feed (but as a separate option would be best).

All that needed to be done after that was to put a toggleable checkbox on posts and accounts that made it so 'this post will be ignored in text searches', same for accounts.

That would have been it. It would have been an optional way for people to find others, without forcing it into your main feed. And it would have likely wiped out the global feed's main usage - discoverability - never allowing it to gain traction in the first place.

Sadly, 4 queer disabled furries in a trenchcoat don't have a fast enough reaction time to get that kind of idea inside of 5 years. That's not a jest or jeer, either; as a queer person with ADHD, I have need-to-do projects with longer date-started origins than that. -_-;

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