just a note: whenever i post opinions about cohost, its features, how i act and how i feel is the best way to be on here, i am doing it from the perspective of someone who had 14,000-something followers on twitter and has a smaller but still very sizable number of followers on here.
this was accomplished on twitter through good posting and unhealthily heavy, near-constant use. a lot of those folks followed me here. i now try to use it less and set a better example because though i might have fewer followers, it’s a bigger fraction of the site’s users than on twitter, and anything i say will be given undue weight by virtue of the basic behavior of social networking websites based on a “users follow users and share posts” paradigm.
the advice I give (“don’t act like a weapon,” “be kind to others,” “think about whether making an impassioned post is actually doing anything or just raising the temperature,” etc) is coming from the standpoint of someone who has, by virtue of posting, had their influence multiplied. for a while i acted the same because i didn’t realize the extent of this. now i try to act different, training myself out of my old habits. (i said 2024 would be the year i become pathologically chill and i fucking mean it)
i’ve talked recently about how i don’t feel some of the features absent from cohost are a loss, when others have been deeply missing those features. this doesn’t mean you’re wrong for missing them! this shit is entirely subjective! what I view as a relieving lack of hooks in my brain (as a former heavy twitter user) might be someone else having to learn new ways to keep themselves comfortable.
but when i look at my own habits on here, and how I feel about the site, i find it’s nice, and perfectly usable as is, for me. but i’ve had a long time to get used to the temperature of this pool. when i was freshly on here, i kept reaching for things that weren’t there, asking for them to exist, and so on. some of them have since been implemented and they’ve all turned out nice; whenever the staff add a feature here i’ve found it’s useful and has obviously had thought put into it.
you can stick around and learn new ways to interact with others now that you’re on a different platform, or you can ask for change as the staff are able to change things and implement new functionality, or you might just always find that certain base parts of the website irk you. there’s no knowing unless you give it a shot, though.