happy wednesday! this was a short week but we still somehow managed to land a lot of small changes while making big progress on larger ones.
a brief aside to complain about Notion and the AI hype wave
Notion, a piece of software we pay for and have all quite liked using for the past three years to draft every piece of written material on this site (including these patch notes!), decided to roll out a bunch of stupid new “AI” functionality today, in the most obnoxious possible way — activating an open language model query every time you hit the space bar on an empty paragraph, and suggesting that you use it instead whenever you start typing a slash command, which has traditionally been reserved for doing things like “creating section headings” or “embedding a file.”
we’re not going to post an overarching stance on AI today but in the past month or two there has been a wave of otherwise uninvolved companies deciding to just rub GPT on their product and call it a feature. this is both obviously unsustainable and actively harmful to any sort of human-centered design, and we fucking hate it and wish it would go away.
actual patch notes time
- Tomorrow morning (February 23rd), we’re making some internal changes to how we store the state of your login internally to prepare for 2fa and our public API release in the coming weeks. This shouldn’t affect you directly, but if you’re experiencing any weirdness, log out and back in and you should be fine.
- Made several improvements to the PWA experience
- PWA = progressive web app, the marketing buzzword for the thing you get when you add a shortcut to cohost to your phone’s home screen
- Added support docs. check them out if you want an app-like experience on your mobile device!
- Fixed a bug where the icon was always missing on Android
- Made the app properly “installable” on Android, which means links to cohost can open in the cohost “app” instead of your browser
- We’ve got more changes we’d like to make here to make cohost feel more app-like on mobile but those will be coming later.
- Fixed a bug where changing your e-mail address wouldn’t update your billing e-mail for Stripe
- Fixed a bug related to our mention-like linking change last week where mentions would sometimes not be processed if they were in the same paragraph as a link.
- Randomized post publish order
- this is a very Inside Baseball change related to how we store timelines and add posts to them. you can read more about it here!
- Made some changes attempting to fix the brief flash that sometimes happens when loading post attachments
- We’re still seeing it in some places so there’s clearly still work to do here.
- Started scaling down avatars and notification attachment preview images to save bandwidth (both for us and for people on cell phones)
- Fixed an issue where certain shares of posts would have empty link previews when shared in other apps (Discord, Mastodon, etc)
coming up on cohost
- jae: individual post silencing (still), assorted papercuts affecting users and moderation
- colin: taking a brief break from finishing up 2fa to work on automating sales and use tax compliance paperwork, which is as exciting as it sounds
- aidan: design support for 2fa, post silencing, and some other little UI papercuts!
- kara: steady progress on Operation Firehose while continuing to manage new support
see y’all next week! thanks for using cohost! 
