kamenridergoat

Casual Account for a Goat

  • She/Her, She/They if we're friends

I post about Kamen Rider, and also living in a failed democracy that distracts me from enjoying Kamen Rider.


erica
@erica

another exodus from twitter, another group of artists migrating to bluesky, another day of watching all of them be like damn this place is so nice but it's really missing [feature cohost has had since forever] and just screaming into the heavens

i'm almost positive that people come here and see no numbers on posts and think it means every post is a potential failure because it's not "doing numbers" and it makes me sad how much this shit has just broken people. i wish i could sit every person down and explain why that's such a meaningless way of measuring 'success' but also that it's like, actually a lot worse on BS because yeah you see numbers there but getting like 10 RTs on a site that has way more users than here is actually kind of abysmal! your posts relatively actually do a lot worse there because people are not there for that content. they never were, they never will be. the twitter micro-blogging experience is not condusive to art it is condusive to virality and low-quality posting.

sigh


HedgeMom
@HedgeMom

I made a comment on how BS n Threadz kept getting these no context hype trains for furries/literally any content, but then promptly lose 75% of their users in a week cause it's just more of the same. Hell I know one of the people making this claim and I know for a fact she's already off those sites

Meanwhile people genuinely detoxing over here while getting the actual meaningful interactions they crave, but because it's not got some arbitrary rpg stats below it, it isn't "viable"

I think these people in general REALLY need to explore what viable actually means

Is viable getting people to click your kofi? Is it getting actual people critically interacting with your work? Is it being able to be honest and yourself?

Or is it getting folks you don't know, don't like and certainly don't care about just bumping up some stats on your posts?

Either way the answer is cohost ¯\ _ (ツ) _/¯


TuxedoDragon
@TuxedoDragon

i made a whole thread on twitter to try and convince others to give cohost a shot! and i pointed out the stark difference in how much interaction i got on my art on both platforms

i've been on twitter for 5 - 6 years now. it took me 5 years to build up a following of about 500, and with that i'd get maybe 20 likes and a comment on an art piece, or a retweet if i was very lucky!

one tweet went viral, and those numbers jumped overnight. a chance event, and while i'm grateful for it, this should not be the only way to get your name out there. it just isn't sustainable

when i joined cohost, and started posting art to what i thought would at first be an audience of 0, i was instead pleasantly surprised to find that folks still managed to see my art and interact with it! what had essentially taken me 5 years to cultivate on twitter was just there on cohost! there's no pesky algorithm to fight, wahoo!

and here's the real deal-breaker for me: i get all of my first-time commissioners and kofi subscriptions from cohost

since i started freelancing full-time at the beginning of the year, i haven't gotten any new traffic out of twitter, as far as i can tell. that, to me, speaks volumes about the sort of platform i wanna be on. what's the point of being on a platform, even one where "everyone is going", if no one there is really seeing you??

i don't want another twitter, i want a better experience. cohost has been excellent in that department!


sarahzedig
@sarahzedig

i was skeptical of cohost at the start as a place for promotion or longform criticism, but i've gotten more (and better!) comments on my stuff here than anywhere else i've posted in a long time. my post about steven universe got a lot of traffic in a shockingly short amount of time, but the real shocker was just how much quality commentary people added. the comments are full of personal stories and interesting perspectives, and all the additional reposts (do we have a word for when someone reposts with added commentary?) i saw were people not just engaging with what i wrote but adding to it substantively.

as someone who's been on the internet for more than 20 years, i've always felt it's better to get a handful of people to really engage with your work than it is to get a couple thousand people to glance at it in passing. a platform that emphasizes the former over the latter encourages high-effort high-quality posting... but the real hat trick of cohost is that it seems to encourage equally high-effort high-quallity behavior from the audience, since superficial metrics such as likes and vanilla reposts carry so much less weight. needless to say, an audience that actively engages with your work is an audience that is very likely to come back-- and while they might not be able to pay you now, their belief that you deserve to be compensated for your work will stick with them until they can afford to pay you.

and to the money point: a day after it went up, i decided to repost my steven universe article with a link to my ko-fi. i very deliberately avoided making a call to action or pleading poverty, just "if you liked this post, maybe consider throwing a couple bucks my way," because i wanted to see what would happen. i didn't edit that link into the original post either, and unlike on tumblr you can't easily see additional reposts from the source post, so i expected the audience for that donation link to be substantially smaller. it was an experiment i didn't put much weight in.

to my TREMENDOUS surprise, i got $120 in donations that day!! now an important caveat here is that the post in question is personal and emotional in a way that (in my experience) tends to draw out people's generosity more than traditional criticism might do. BUT, again, this was a repost on day 2 after traffic peaked, without a call to action, with no way for users to find it from other reposts of the original. and i got $120 for it anyway! comparatively, me quote tweeting a viral post of mine with a donation link barely got traction before elon took over, and i had 30,000 followers!!

i don't want to make too big a deal out of this because there's a million variables at play here... but as far as experiments go, this one makes me optimistic. when they add tipping to this website, i dunno man, i think it could really cement this place as The Viable Alternative a lot of us have been looking for. and it's not a hellscape of venture capital or data mining or perpetual surveillance!!! it's owned and run by human people who actually use the internet and are just as fed up with this shit as everyone else!!! they're explicitly inclusive of adult content, they're transparent about their financials and development plans, I AM BANGING ON POTS AND PANS AND SHOUTING FROM THE ROOFTOPS COHOST IS THE FIRST REAL WEBSITE ANYONE HAS MADE IN 15 YEARS PLEASE SUPPORT EGGBUG WE NEED THIS THING TO LAST!!!!

sorry for shouting i just get excited when i say things that are true


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @erica's post:

like it's fine i'm not interested in building a new foundation on a place that will inevitably also crumble. it's just a "i wish i could see these people's artwork here" because yeah i see their posts when i log in there but overwhelmingly, despite only following friends, i see nothing but garbage and drama when looking at that site's feed

I'm starting to think Cohost should go back into invite-only because clearly seeing "invite-only" triggers something in people's brains that makes them think a place is better than it actually is. Bsky is lacking features that Cohost, Mastodon, Misskey, whatever already have and so much more, but nope. Bsky gets the attention for whatever reason.

They did that for April Fool's but it caused issues because it retriggered some people's twitter brain again, even knowing the numbers were BS (some went negative)

Edit: I think they put the code for it up on their GitHub for anyone to look at or use or whatever too.

The funny thing is someone ran the numbers awhile back and Bluesky isn't even that much bigger than cohost is right now? Like with all the hype I expected it to be 10x or 100x bigger, not... kinda comparable

honestly like cohost kinda helped me w that cause I too was infected by numbers but just looking at my notifs and counting myself, a lot of my art has done WAY better here than it ever has done before and it actually feels good to know that ppl are seeing and enjoying my stuff more than "succeeding", whatever that actually means in this day and age

on the one hand it really is nice to have people who are actually, legitimately interested in seeing the work I put out. like i don't get the same feeling i did on twitter where it feels like the work i'm putting out is just lost in the noise, and that's only gotten worse as twitter's user experience tanks.

but on the other i am still like a little stressed out about the fact that i am still trying to make art my livelihood. bsky doesn't look particularly great for building an audience and i don't really think i understand cohost well enough despite liking it more. if anything i sometimes feel like posting art is less predictable here.

at least it is for me since i didn't exactly have a huge following on twitter before moving; like just over 1200, and i was kind of relying on commissions up to that point to make cash as an artist.

(side note that really is fucked that 1200 isn't a huge amount. that's like an entire graduating class in some colleges. jesus.)

i don't have a pre-existing audience that i could draw here from and building something up that i can actually survive off of in a capitalist hellscape is a bit of an ordeal.

I personally would like to have some metrics visible at least behind a gate. follower count would be nice to be able to gauge what sort of follower-base I'm working with when I advertise things like commissions. but I love the largely metric-less UX on here, it's refreshing and alleviates a lot of pressure to appeal to trends

I think useful metrics to have would be things like active posting hours, things to better optimize something like posting comms link as you said. I don't think a follower count is really helpful for that because, like, if the count is 1000 higher than it was last month.... what does that meaningfully mean in that instance?

More people will see it but is that a meaningful motivator for you posting again next month? Wouldn't you do it regardless because you have slots open? Yes your reach extends with more followers but I don't think -knowing- the number affects posting behavior or provides any meaningful insight other than to vindicate a guesstimate you have of your current reach. Which can be nice! But it opens up the door the opposite--feeling doomed because you've had a bad metrics month or something--which is entirely why the site is designed as it is. That behavior is not normal, and those numbers were hidden to stop that behavior before it even begins.

well I mean more in a sample size sense really. More followers means a larger sample size where some of those people might be capable of paying higher rates. My commissions I necessarily have to massively undercut because charging my rate would be unachievable to basically all but rich people, and if I have like 200 people following me the odds of anyone seeing my posts being one of those wealthy people approaches zero - so knowing if I have a lot of followers vs only some helps me gauge what I can get away with charging.

just the facts of a capitalist dystyopia

It's less about feeling "doomed" when I have a bad metrics month and more like.... what's driving me crazy is that if I post slots here, twitter and say, insta simultaneously I can visibly see that all but one of those slots fill in seconds on twitter, and the one that doesn't fills on Insta. I love posting and sharing my work here, it feels great and I think it'll only get better as the site grows, but I don't want to have to do my business off-site - I would like to feel like my livelihood is decoupled from twitter et al permanently and invested into a site like Cohost. I don't even know whether metrics would help with this - I guess i'm just frustrated.

I have a guess to why people overlook cohost:

the Tech Journalists want to talk about "which social media apps are winning". They don't take into account communities or what value they offer. They do their research in exactly one way: looking at the number of downloads in the Apple App Store

and therefore Tech Journalists just don't even think about cohost as a thing that exists, and the general public doesn't hear about cohost

it's numbers all the way down

This sounds frustratingly on point. Because it all really does feel like a popularity contest at the end of the day. Whether Co-host wants to be a part of it or not.

I guess best we can do is shill for this site??? Idk what the answer is.

I have no idea why everyone is so excited to move to bsky or threads. Like, yeah, let's move from a platform run by one ultrawealthy nutjob to another one run by an ultrawealthy nutjob. People are addicted to engagements numbers I guess.

I think too many people are getting lured into stupid fediverse services too, but at least they're not run by an ultrawealthy nutjob I guess?

in reply to @HedgeMom's post:

It's been so frustrating as someone who never liked twitter that much, who only made it my main home after the major tumblr porn ban exodus, and wishing and waiting this whole time for something more like a better tumblr to come along. the musk effect has memory-holed every single bad there was to hate about twitter before his arrival, to the point that everyone's acting blind to all the nearly identical red flags of bluesky. does nobody remember the years and years of futile pleading to ban the twitter nazis? Isn't Dorsey also pro-crypto, pro-NFT, pro-AI?? there's literally no reason to believe your bluesky posts won't be scraped too.

in reply to @TuxedoDragon's post:

I technically commissioned you from Twitter, I think. But I agree completely! Twitter is a horrible platform for artists. After being on tumblr for just a month I found hundreds of artists that I like the art of. Still relatively new (and getting used to) cohost but finding artists/people you like the stuff of is really good on here too!

In comparison, in years of being on twitter, I have not followed that many accounts and my feed is constantly filled with hate (either from people hating or "dunking" on the haters). My online experience has been so much more positive since I stopped using twitter.

Bluesky seems like a horrible platform for artists overall. Invite only platform that, as far as I know, does not embed on other platforms? No thank you. Especially not for artists!

mhm! i was reluctant to start using twitter to begin with, and while there have been many positives to come out of it for me, it's also a platform that encourages reactivity and negativity, and a constant struggle for artists just trying to put themselves out there. i'm glad you found me on there, at least! ^^

We need to make it socially acceptable to dunk on bluesky users. Between being run by Jack Dorsey and a bunch of other crypto freaks, banning people for saying cracker, and letting people slip with whole slurs for usernames, I don't see the point in using that platform. People gotta escape that mindset.

in reply to @sarahzedig's post:

do we have a word for when someone reposts with added commentary?

The official term used in the notification filtering UI is “reply” but people don’t use that enough that it’s obvious to people what you mean.