• She/Her

Writing account and stray thoughts. Posts may be undertagged.

Experience Metamorphosis. Embrace Purpose.


(Posted this in a comment and I wanted to repost an edited version)

I like Cohost as a social media platfrom. I think its a fun experiment, and has a good niche in the social media landscape.

However, I feel like some people are drinking the koolaid way too hard. I don't see why people act like Cohost's minimalist design is de facto correct. I also don't care for the moralizing vibes in certain people's take. There's such a huge difference between "this sites lack of numbers works for me and is what I want from a social media site" and "Cohost's way of doing things are innately better, and people are too addicted to twitter/mastadon/whatever". The latter inadvertently turns Cohost into an ivory tower that's largely ignorant and out of touch with the rest of the internet- It ignores the many normal use cases for social media.

I liked when people sold Cohost as a "third website", not the main social media platform but a more quiet side-site. I'm unsure why that line of thinking has been dropped.


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in reply to @feyWrites's post:

Yeah I agree, there's a tendency in the alt-social space to demonize "virality" and all the things that enable it: algorithms, like counts, reposting, search and trending topics, etc. It's true that virality has a lot of problems, but the function it serves is to help people find things that they like and cohost feels very lonely at times without any good way to find new friends or new interests.

The idiom of drinking the koolaid became really creepy to me once I found out more about where it came from.

Anyway, this seems to crop up with userbases a lot, the whole nationalistic-like enthusiasm for a website. That's unsurprising I guess, but the whole dogmatic thing about numbers is pretty weird to me. I've yet to see anyone in that conversation acknowledge that some people rely on the internet for income (ex. artists, indie craft sellers, etc.), and that in light of that, it makes complete sense to want metrics for keeping track of which posts are more popular than others.

Oh, was there? I wasn't around much back then, so I wouldn't know. Do you get the impression that that's a matter of certain users speaking up less, or is it a matter of users changing their tune over time?

I think its a few things:

  • Originally, the numbers thing wasn't a huge angle of the site. I think leadership started repeating that more like 6 months ago, and others picked up that talking point.
  • With the constant influx of new users, the cohost started to get a bigger site identity around the numbers thing- either by the new users or as the selling point of the platform.