You're welcome to think Cohost's design is hostile to whatever you want to get out of social media but it's kind of dumb and, at the present juncture, fairly assholish to call the developers 'naive' by saying they should have built something more similar to some other social media platform that is also, at present, wildly unprofitable (they all are!)

Yeah the fact is that every social media platform is unprofitable right now. The only real exception is Meta, but they're not making money from social media per se

I think that even if you're not a right-winger there's a tendency to harbor some "get woke go broke" intuitions about Cohost, like they try too hard to be pure and they should have wallpapered the site with ads and they should have encouraged Skinner-box addiction dynamics and they should have promised not to moderate Free Speech and they should have sucked up to corporate sponsors and then they'd be as financially successful as...

Twitter or Tumblr?

well that's where that line of reasoning breaks down

I honestly believe there's no way to make a social media site profitable without either doing some kind of stock market scam or making the site horrible to use or both, and you can still do those things and lose money

and I don't mean "cohost is doomed" by this, I mean something more like "cohost will probably have to downsize their staff team or rely on volunteers down to whatever level that donations from users covers"

so probably not great advice