jax/tommy

@illudens

he/it/xe/pog

Illudens has connected to Local Play!
[Wiki Addict] <illudens> the fucker

read me

rentry.co/illudens

webbed site

illudens.neocities.org/

tumblr dot com

illudens.tumblr.com/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHAt7nIEOIw

jax/tommy @illudens4/22/2023, 11:40 AM

Ecter B.@ecter

Sciman101 @Sciman1014/22/2023, 1:42 AM

I saw two (2) posts about mastodon ppl or somethin complaining about cohosts architecture and it got me thinking like. Does it really matter. Make no mistake, the whole decentralized fediverse nonsense is cool, but what always appealed to cohost about me was it's vibes. I like the culture here, the community. Cohost itself is ultimately a react app running the same general web stack as every other web app out there - and while using some weird, niche tech would be cool - it wouldn't really change the reason I use this thing, y'know.

#rambles

Ecter B.@ecter4/22/2023, 6:51 AM

Cohost is the Nintendo console of social websites

Stable tech. Unique design choices.

When competition was trying to sell pricey handhelds with full-color screens, Nintendo made GameBoy and won through low price and high battery life. Cohost does not reinvent the wheel and does not go into newest&coolest tech, it does what works - they don't even wrap their site in electron to fool people they got a native app.

When competition raced to get the most frames per second and exclusive deals, Nintendo did crazy stuff like motion controls, 3D screen on a handheld or hybrid home/handheld console. Cohost is not chasing trends, it has unique approach to user interaction and content discovery - some may like it, some not, just like not everyone was into wiimote gameplay.

I don't have a need to go into "federated whatever" online just as much as i'm not interested in buying Xbox Series [some letter] or Play Station [current number]. It's good that i have a choice to use home-baked not-Tumblr that does not encourage me to chase popularity via numbers (except for a single april fools joke).

#cohost meta #of course it's not going to appear in that tag because of how cohost was designed #and i guess it's fine

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in reply to @Sciman101's post:

John Colagioia @jcolag4/22/2023, 12:13 PM

So, in most conventional sense, yes. However - and pardon the rambling - what Twitter has (or should have) exposed is that, for any system, it's worth asking "if this develops cultural authority, what would it cost for an unpleasant billionaire to take it over and destroy that authority (or drive all the interesting people away)?"

While I imagine that ASSC's price would, out of spite, be significantly higher than (using Spoutible as an example) Chris Bouzy's price to step down and hand over the infrastructure accounts, that price probably exists. With federated apps, you could lose a large chunk of users in an acquisition or takeover, not only would it be prohibitively expensive to gobble up every server, but if someone did, you could still spin up your own and make that untrue.

Yes, the people is more important than the technology, but the technology (and corporate structure, which is just technology with different components) matters in maintaining the relationships. Or to put it another way, I might prefer Cohost's culture, but I have far more confidence that I'll have a satisfying community on "the Fediverse" in five, ten, or even twenty years than Cohost, if that makes sense.