n. lyn-marie charlene excelsia

sometimes all we need is to hear someone else's experience in order to understand how a new space can cater to the things we're looking for ourselves! i'm glad this post managed to help you, and i hope it manages to help others too!

it's definitely something that just recently (as in, Yesterday) clicked for me too, and it was like finally seeing The Truth. it felt like the spark i needed to truly understand "my personal place" on this website.

it's so easy to forget that this is how we USED to find the things on the internet that we wanted to see! modern social media is pretty much fundamentally designed to exacerbate (or give you) ADHD, which means the content you're browsing stops being relevant -- these things just blast you with everything and anything in hopes that you keep browsing. it's just so much more natural to simply just look up the things that interest you to find likeminded people, and cohost does a really good job at that with the simplest implementation.

it's a sign of the times, really. the internet has become so dominated by algorithms and corporations trying to guide your use of their platforms; and when those algorithms and corporate rule is gone, it only makes sense that we work to reclaim our curated online experience that we want, rather than move en masse to places that only aim to place you into their algorithm and don't care for anything else.

this might not ring relatable for you, but i very quickly ended up with a populated collection of bookmarked tags by taking the "wiki-hole" strategy;

start with one thing that interests you, read some posts and interact with them, observe the other tags on the posts in that tag, then bookmark any tag with a relevant interest of yours.

much like how people get lost on TvTropes, next thing you know you've got 30 tabs open. 😅

now THIS is forward thinking. we don't need an algorithmic search -- we need a zero-tags timeline

it's hard to get back into the swing of things! tags and hashtags have been so useless on pretty much every social media, whereas on cohost it's largely functional and thus has an impact when you use it. like, you know, using hashtags on twitter at a certain point became actively worse for your tweet visibility, like at the code level. which is absolutely Insane to think about! and honestly, just looking at more tags and finding legitimately interesting stuff has really made it a lot easier for me personally to start being more proactive in my use of them.