hi there! welcome to cohost.
you have chosen, or have been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining social media platforms
when we embarked on this journey almost three years ago, we asked ourselves one question: what if every social media platform stepped on a thousand easily-avoided rakes and then we tried to make a nice little home for people among the ruins?
(actually, it wasn’t like that at all. we actually started out trying to build a not-for-profit subscription management site, but we got scooped by our friends over at comradery.)
but, step on a thousand rakes the platforms did, and we pivoted more in the direction of trying to build a better, fourth website for you to check, in between all of the other miserable ones.
getting started
one of the main things we believe about social media is that moderation is the most important feature. as a result, we don’t want to throw open the doors to cohost any wider than we have the staff to deal with — so cohost will be invite-only for the foreseeable future.
if you sign up without an invite, you’ll be unactivated, which means you can reserve your handle, follow, share, and like others’ posts, but you won’t be able to make any of your own yet. we’ll be activating users in batches over time, so the sooner you sign up, the sooner you’ll be able to post! you can read more about this on our support site.
now! on cohost
- no character limit.
- fuck “microblogging.” threads are just bad text posts. if you really want a character limit, you can try posting exclusively in the headline field. we don’t recommend it.
- nested comments, all below the original post.
- we know sometimes conversations are better had in a central location instead of a series of shares slowly spreading across a network, so we gave you both options.
- an edit button.
- we are well aware of the potential for abuse here and we are hoping not to have to rein use of the edit button in. it’s on the honor system for now.
- text formatting, so we can get rid of both rampant abuse of the Unicode Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, and complaints about rampant abuse of the Unicode Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block.
- multiple pages per user account, so you can run pages for your side projects with no special multi-account client required.
- multiple editors per page so you don’t have to share user accounts with your collaborators.
- per-post adult content flag, with per-page defaults.
- adult content is inaccessible to users under 18. no “minors DNI” needed.
- support for multiple content warnings per post.
- tag bookmarking for easy access to your favorite and/or least favorite tags.
- shares that maintain their history.
- eggbug!
soon! on cohost (loosely in order of priority)
- search for users and tags.
- alt text for images. (we’re legitimately really sorry this one didn’t make it day one. we know it’s important.)
- pinned posts and collections. promote other pages, highlight all your art in one place, or simply show off all the posts that live rent-free in your head.
- an option to collapse multiple shares of a post into one item on your feed.
- fine-grained settings for displaying notifications.
- fine-grained settings for displaying posts on your feed per-tag and per-content warning.
- subdomains (eggbug.cohost.org instead of cohost.org/eggbug).
- profile color themes.
- alternate profile layouts for pages that post a lot of multimedia content.
- post types for short-form audio and video.
- tipping and subscription management with competitive platform fees.
- if you sell subscriptions through cohost, we want to provide you the ability to post long-form audio and video as well. (the big concern here is hosting expenses, or we’d throw the doors open to everyone.)
- an actual API for people who aren’t us.
- syndication via RSS, with private RSS feeds for subscribers.
for a more complete list, we also have a public issue tracker where we open bugs, feature requests, and feedback tracking items after we find out about them.
never! on cohost
- a default view sorted by anything other than the inexorable march of time. we think society has moved past the need for “algorithms.”
- recommendations made by some opaque statistical model of what we think is relevant to you.
- metrics. no follow, share, or like counts “out in the wild” — but if you need posts to do numbers for a living, we’ll give you access to information about how they’re performing.
- cryptocurrency. (unless, god forbid, cryptocurrency becomes hegemonic and we really have to. maybe not even then.)
- edit, because we forgot this one in the original post: a public list of follows, followers, or likes. that stuff is between you and your oomfies.
our business model
cohost is developed and operated by anti software software club, a not-for-profit worker-owned software company. our funding didn’t came from venture capitalists or anyone we had to sell part of the company to — it came from a loan that we will eventually pay back, but that ensures we maintain full control over the company for as long as it exists.
we will never sell user data or ads. currently, all of our income comes from merch sales (store.antisoftware.club, thanks in advance) and cohost Plus! subscriptions. when we ship our subscription management product, we’ll take a small cut: at most 5%, scaling down to just cover operating expenses and a rainy-day fund. our tipping product will have a 0% cut, with the option to add a little extra to help fund the site.
we’re really excited you’re all here! as you can see, we’ve still got a lot of work to do for cohost to be where we envision it, but we believe cohost can be the best social media platform for some. (we expressly do not want it to be the best social media platform for everyone, as “everyone” includes a whole lot of people we don’t want here.) our goal with early access is to get a wider variety of posters on the site, so we can further understand what we need to get there.
thanks for using cohost! we can’t wait to see what you post.
