Kit

@kitkat

look at my cat in the link below:

they/them
cohost.org/rc/tagged/It's%20Misty

im gay

Kit @kitkat7/4/2023, 11:25 PM

Natalie @nex3

jae @jkap7/4/2023, 7:28 PM

Anonymous User asked:

if I understand right, the only way to get your posts out there to folks who don't follow you is through tags? there's no search function that shows you posts with those words in the body itself? (I hope I worded that in an understandable way lmao)

yes, tags are the intended discovery mechanism. i know that, especially for people coming from twitter, this is a tricky mindset to get into.

we don't have full-text search for a few reasons:

it's hard
it removes control from posters about where their content is visible.

posting something and not tagging it makes it effectively follower-only. if you want people to see it, tag it. that's it

fred @fred7/4/2023, 7:34 PM

Please also consider muffles

I usually tag not to be discovered but to ensure people's tag muffles help them not see what they don't want to see.

I am pedantically making this distinction only bc I think there are still a number of ppl who don't tag bc they, like me, don't care about being discovered most of the time, but should shift into the mindset of "tagging is the responsible thing to do to make sure people don't see shit they don't want to see." Community-minded behavior, etc. etc.

Just my 2 cents!

#metachosting #tags #muffled tags

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in reply to @jkap's post:

Dumpling-chan @LovelyDumpling7/4/2023, 7:30 PM

I think its important people know about the secret sauce

that you can tag things with extremely broad tags that are likely to be followed/bookmarked by people

especially #The Cohost Global Feed

Remi Erin Autor the remeranAuthor @remeranAuthor7/4/2023, 7:37 PM

Frankly, I think that things like The Cohost Global Feed should be a damn checkbox that appears next to your posting window.

Dumpling-chan @LovelyDumpling7/4/2023, 7:39 PM

honestly yeah, I do wish I had a faster way of using it

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev7/4/2023, 7:50 PM

It could be a useful feature to suggest some global tags, but the best way to make it known is to post it on the support site. It helps staff track reported bugs and requests and you're more likely to get a definitive yes/no/"actually we were already working on this".

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24697/4/2023, 8:04 PM

If there was any single piece of "algorithmic" style nonsense I would like on this Website™ it would probably be tag suggestions just to remind me to tag my stuff and discover what tags might be meaningful.

Jama @Jama7/4/2023, 8:05 PM

Being able to go something like, "Yankees suck" in a post, leaving it untagged, and not being bothered by weird sports fans is Very Nice. Compared to Twitter when I got a bunch of random tweets when making fun of the Knicks or Heat.

Hewhoamareismyself @hewhoamareismyself7/4/2023, 8:16 PM

Alternatively, if you're like me and think informing folks that "Yankees suck" is part of your civic duty, it's easy to do that too!

Jama @Jama7/4/2023, 8:18 PM

Exactly! If you want to specifically get into it with fans, you can easily throw the New York Yankees tag on and boom. Good to go.

Rubi @MadRubicant7/4/2023, 8:15 PM

a reminder to tag my posts would be helpful because I am Extremely Forgetful and never remember to do it

FavoritoHJS @FavoritoHJS7/4/2023, 8:40 PM

...so why is it odd to actually apply those tags?
like, based on my post, what tag should I use? what order of words is correct? is this tag even used anymore?

www.coolstation.space @warc7/4/2023, 8:50 PM

there's a certain heat death of tags that's constantly approaching as people make more and more tiny variations of tags, to the point that if you search for any keyword, chances are the top 10 results haven't been used more than once. It's a short-sighted way to do things, and theres no protection against some asshole, like me, polluting those results further.

FavoritoHJS @FavoritoHJS7/4/2023, 11:54 PM

screw it, made a feature request to order the tags on popularity to prevent the heat death

TNG @TheNudeGamer7/4/2023, 9:10 PM

The problem is that most people coming over from twitter aren't using tags, as this is not common knowledge. I want to say 90% of the artists I've followed off twitter to here dont tag their stuff.

red lez @red-lez7/4/2023, 11:22 PM

Which is wild because Twitter is kind of the platform that popularized the usage of #hashtags in the first place, for the purpose of easily searching specific terms

Foxhack @Foxhack7/4/2023, 11:57 PM

And we all know how that turned out after people started using the hashtags to spam everything.

red lez @red-lez7/5/2023, 12:29 AM

The difference on Twitter being that there's actually an incentive to spam. Getting more eyes and reactions actually boosts things algorithmically. Here, there is no algorithm at play, just chronological timelines. If you spam those, it'll be pretty obvious and easy to moderate, and won't really result in any big payoff down the line.

Renpona @Renpona7/4/2023, 10:01 PM

tagging kinda has a lot of room to improve tho

Pokey @tercel-enby7/4/2023, 10:56 PM

If you really want to, site:cohost.org + (search term) works fine.

@lexi7/4/2023, 11:19 PM

i have thought about cohost full text search and i think client side search may actually be feasible:

implementing it should be easier than searching the whole post db by just caching the posts the client has already seen (so zero sql, thank god)
the control thing is basically ruled out with that as well because you can only see posts you saw before
you only see posts you saw before, which is a huge advantage if you're looking for a post you remember (but not for new posts tho but would still be hella useful)

also i have played with the thought of implementing that as a userscript (i really like userscript and i also really like forgetting things) but was too lazy to do it lol

jae @jkap7/4/2023, 11:21 PM

yeah ok this is an interesting way to think about it

@lexi7/4/2023, 11:24 PM

also, forget the thing about zero sql, this whole thing has another advantage: you could do client-side sql queries over the posts if you want to do that without having to worry about someone having access to the prod db lol

(inspired by twitters search being garbage. it would be 100x better if you could ~~inject~~ use sql)

ash @hierarchon7/5/2023, 12:05 AM

some pretty significant problems:

this falls apart pretty quickly if you have more than one machine you browse cohost on
you have to 'age out' or compact posts to avoid going over the localStorage limit (which is browser-specific)
anyone could easily recover deleted posts or see posts from someone that blocked them if they were in the cache
similarly, any edits wouldn't be reflected unless you happened to see the edited post

@lexi7/5/2023, 12:07 AM

tbf on 1 and 2 i think itd still be better than no search at all. 3 and 4 could be fixed by just fetching the results of a search again to check that theyre not edited/deleted (and technically anyone can easily recover deleted posts already) but i think even with those limitations it'd still be pretty useful

ash @hierarchon7/5/2023, 12:11 AM

if you're doing the check again then you might as well just implement it on the server, though, which is already authoritative for this. and that doesn't deal with the case where a post that doesn't match the queries is edited to contain the query text, because you don't know to fetch it in the first place