• he/him

Games are for everyone. Make the world a better place or GTFO. Conservatives are a death cult. Crypto = block. Surviving chronic illness.

If hate speech is your hill to die on, then by all means, die.


There's a fundamental thing I think people are missing about Twitter and why it works so well as a social network, and that is that every single thing you post on the site is a first-class citizen. This is a fundamental social equalizer which allows people to connect in a way that they otherwise couldn't. This also why cohost/mastodon are not a substitute, and likely never will be.

Take for example three types of poster:

  1. Long form. Only writes big posts/threads.
  2. Frequent poster. Posts any thought that pops into their mind.
  3. Follower. Rarely posts. Follows people and loves to reply.

On twitter, all three of these manifest equally. Any post you see has the same social weight. You can witness all of it, none of it is hidden, for good or ill. It allows you to interact and be seen, it allows tangential connections to become familiarity and then friendship. And all of this applies no matter how you use it.

On cohost, if you follow a lot of #1, you see significantly fewer posts, and this won't scale with following a lot of people, because if you are trying to read (or even skip) all of it, there's a lot more work to do. Twitter by necessity requires forming thoughts into bite-sized pieces, which allows users an easier time filtering manually. On mastodon, it kind of scales, but it gives your scroll finger a workout.

On cohost if you follow a lot of #2, the site itself simply doesn't support it yet. Having to click next page, in this attention economy? But because replies aren't first class citizens, it also means you don't see (and can't participate in) the spontaneous conversations that are spun off by frequent posters. Mastodon is similar enough to twitter here, assuming it's not cross-instance posting.

On cohost you will literally never see any content from #3, because comments are utterly buried and hidden. You cannot get to know someone who is a follower except as they directly interact with your own posts. But this doesn't give you a sense of who they are, because you can't pop over to their profile and see what they've been up to. On Mastodon connecting across instances makes this dicey.

Beyond all this is the fact that Twitter's first-class-citizen system means you can be exposed to things that aren't directly in your interests. You find stuff you didn't even know you liked. You encounter people you never would have met. Mastodon's failure is the idea that you would join an interest based or existing friend group based instance, but this is inherently insular. I can't see how it will work on Cohost because it's like following an RSS feed with too many sites.

And this is all before even getting into the usability issues of shares/reblogs/reposts whatever you want to call them on cohost. The first time a post goes viral on this website it's going to act like a DOS attack, since instead of seeing it bumped like on Twitter/Mastodon, you see it multiple times in a row.

I appreciate cohost for what it is, but it's not going to displace what I love(d) about Twitter. It will definitely suffer less overall social problems (context collapse is drastically reduced in long-form communications, as well as not treating every interaction equally), but is it going to people connect as directly as Twitter? Likely not.


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in reply to @charlesrandall's post:

Yeah, I think there's a lot to like about Cohost (and a lot that's less good), but it's fundamentally not a "Twitter-like" (if anything, it's more a tumblr-like).

Also, I think, partially, the fact that it can't scale with more people can be seen as a feature, not a bug. At least part of the reason Twitter was "good" between 2008 and 2011 or so is because an order of magnitude fewer people were using it. A lot of Twitter simply did not scale with a larger user base.

(And to be fair to Mastodon, which IS a Twitter-like, that seems to be something they're trying to tackle. Unfortunately, they seem to be trying to do that by replicating the UX of Git, which no humans should willingly do.)