Months ago I lamented the state of this site's fake dark mode, and how it's an accessibility feature I depend on:
It felt good to get a bunch of attention on it! Thanks to the folks who saw the post and worked to get the devs to pay attention, it got a flood of new comments and rose to become the number one highest voted feature request on their tracker!
Most places that would mean something, but not here, I guess, where the developers can't even be bothered to acknowledge that their users are trying to get their attention. We still haven't heard a peep. They stuck a "planned" label on the feature request long before I ever found it to pacify anyone who cared, and then they left it to rot without saying a single damn word.
One year. How time flies when you're implementing joke timestamp formats, weird one-way DMs (copied from Tumblr!), an alternative post view, and whatever's coming next. (Likes are now florps? Timeline goes sideways?)
I've tried to be polite. I've tried to earnestly persuade people. I've even talked directly with someone on the team begging them to just reply to the feature request acknowledging it (a request which was immediately denied).
I'm tired. Being nice just makes you easier to ignore, after all. What's it going to take to make them care, a sustained campaign for people to cancel Cohost Plus? Ha, I wish that stood a chance of going anywhere. This site is full of True Believers loyal to an LLC that demonstrably does not give a shit.
I really hope @staff gets to work on implementing these features ASAP. I know they're working on tipping/subscriptions which is an integral part of their vision for the site and I get that but basically everything else should honestly be knocked down and Basic Accessibility Stuff should be put at the top of the list.
The most damning thing I can say about the site's basic accessibility is that Twitter, the husk of its former self killed to death by ironic bullshit from a millionaire trying to look cool on the internet, does basic accessibility better. And if anything they're continuing to improve them even under their "new management." This is not a matter of financials and budget, it's a matter of ethos and philosophy, and you do not want to be in the camp where Elon fucking Musk appears to care more about making his platform accessible to all users than you do.
Cohost has the potential to be a great place for communities that have been run off other platforms. It already has a strong and well established queer community, but you can't just stop there. "Infinite growth" is a silly capitalist fantasy but if this place is going to become sustainable it needs to grow bigger than it is right now, and so purely on a practical front change needs to happen soon, or it may very well die on the vine.
