jcd

roguelike developer, poet

I write poetry and code in a cold place.


  • well, it's cozy
  • and the feel (LJ x tumblr x GeoCities?) is still distinctly better than anything else out there
  • and the feel is also still distinctly queer and I love it
  • but discovery is difficult
  • I'm torn as to whether this is a feature
  • some of the people I initially joined with have bounced off it after a few weeks
  • are these related?
  • if difficult discovery is a feature, sharing makes it easy to break the hide-i-ness?
  • it seems quiet, too
  • some interaction on posts, mostly likes, v few comments
  • that's fine: my experience elsewhere is that More Serious stuff gets less interaction vs dumb shitposts, but still
  • I've seen good longform writing/photography/commentary that has been notably absent from all the other big SM sites, and let me tell you, I'm here for it
  • my online presence used to be just Tw and is now fragmented between Tw, Masto, cohost, gemini capsule, and I feel like this is better
  • I'm paid and I hope others who can afford it go this route as well, because even with the imperfections, cohost is something distinctly different and non-shitty

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in reply to @jcd's post:

i really want to comment on things more often, but the vast majority of the time, i either feel that my contribution wouldn't add very much substance and context to the original post, or that i would just say something i'd later regret and find thoughtless or silly or out-of-tune, so if my feelings represent the community's in any way, it's more out of the sake of wanting high quality talk goin' on (and maybe some collective shyness, that's another thing) that keeps the comments quiet for the most part, outside of shitposting or meta things like this.

yeah, and that's totally fair! I think part of it might be my own expectations, coming from Tw, where replies are cheap and easy. one of the things I really appreciate about cohost is that you can't eg global text search every single comment made on this site. that's helped me with my own feelings on replies (which I'll often make on Tw and then quickly delete if there's no acknowledgement, assuming I'm a nuisance, or I'll be searchable later, etc).

Want to try to get myself interacting with more posts myself though fighting the anxiety of 'what if people don't want to hear from me' imposter syndrome-y feels is an uphill battle. I've been feeling like sites like twitter and such got me too used to quantity of easy minor interactions and cohost especially in its current state calls for an approach with more substance? And retraining brain to that, in my opinion healthier, sort of interaction takes some work.

Also wondering if over time as more people hang out and use different tags, watching bookmarked tags will become more rewarding?

Re tags, I hope so. Right now a lot of them are pretty barren, outside of the cohost global feed one. I expect that'll change over time, though I'm not sure how much uptake it'll get. Tagging is very intentional, takes time after the post, and a lot of what gets shared in my feed is untagged. I follow a heavy sharer, which is great, as that gets a lot of interesting posts I wouldn't see otherwise. I just wish it were a little easier to find interesting posts and chosters that fall outside my usual modes of discovery.

I love the chill vibe, but I agree that discoverability isn't the best, and unless bookmark a ton of tags, it's hard to find people. It's probably something that may improve a bit over time, but I definitely wouldn't expect it to have an algorithm like what Twitter and other media of this style have.