I like cohost and I've been meaning to make a little rundown of the whole cohost thing to get my miserable friends on twitter over here to have more fun. So here is a post about the stuff I like, some tips and tricks, and general chosting vibes.
First and foremost, the thing I like most about cohost is that by design, it can and will detoxify your brain from the worst shit that social media has done to it since, like, 2008 or whenever you made your twitter. I have explained these things passionately to my therapist, who was kind of blown away and almost couldn't comprehend it.
The brain cleansers of cohost
- there is no way to see the number of likes on your post
- there is no way to see the number of shares on your post
- there is no way to see the number of people who follow you
- there is no way to see the number of people who follow anyone else
- you can disable seeing the number of notifications you have, setting it instead to just noting that you have notifications at all
- you can also just turn off all your notifications
- the only Number that remains is the number of comments on a post, which is a good number, as it represents actual human interactions
I understand that this freedom from Numbies may be repellant or frightening. It was certainly a struggle for me at first, too. My brain craved the engagement. Detox is never easy. But here like a half a year or so into heavy cohost usage I feel cleansed. When I'm on twitter now, I no longer look at the numbers of likes and retweets I have, and I no longer look at any notifications other than replies. The numbers no longer give me pleasure, and also, they can't hurt me anymore.
There are other brain-cleansing features that I greatly appreciate, such as:
- there is no easy way to see if someone follows you or not, or if you follow them or not
- there is no way to see who other people follow, or for other people to see who you follow
I will admit, this does mean some loss of discovery, where you go, hey, this person is cool, let me see who they follow and if anyone there is cool; or seeing a new person and knowing if they're cool or not by automatically being informed if your friends follow them.
However! The benefit of this system is that following and unfollowing is drama-free. You've got to really go to some effort to figure out if someone follows you or not (basically by manually looking through the list of accounts that follow you) and equally as much to find out if they later unfollowed you (hope you remember everyone who was in that list!)
So, the method that has lead to me having fun on cohost is the just follow people method. You see some cool post? Follow that person! If it turns out you actually aren't into their stuff? Unfollow! No problem! It's something I haven't done since, like, 2013 twitter and it's been great. And a great feature of cohost is that if you go to someone's profile, you can toggle options to only see the posts they themselves make, with no shares or replies. God I wish other sites had this.
If you're a follower of mine from twitter, obviously I'll recommend just following the people that I repost from to start with and then katamari yourself up some good experiences from there. This post also has some tips on how to find folks on here. I've been talking to new people! Making new friends! It's social media feeling fun and social again, and I love it.
Other stuff I like
There is a lot of flexibility in filtering out posts you don't want to see. Right on the settings page you'll see these options and some others as well.
There are also ways to silence posts you don't want to see at all, or are just seeing too often, available in by clicking what I recently learned is called the "meatball menu" on every post.
Also, of course, blocking and muting are readily available, as they should be on any sensible platform.
And another thing
You can edit your posts! Noticed a typo? Forgot to put image alt text? Just edited that fucker! I'll probably edit this post a few times when I remember stuff I meant to add! [Edited to add: I have in fact just done this.]
Additionally, if you want to have control over the sharing and commenting on your own posts, you can lock those down on the individual post level.
I believe some additional features regarding these kinds of things are coming down the pipeline, because one of the things Cohost is about is seeing what you actually want to see, not weird bullshit.
Now, to address a few complaints I've seen regarding adopting Cohost:
It doesn't have an app!
Correct! And it's extremely unlikely to have one, because porn is explicitely allowed on here, and the app stores HATE that. However, you can do what I do and pin the site to your home screen and it's basically indistinguishable from an app. Several months ago I put that shortcut in the place where I used to have the Twitter icon and it's been great to help get me off there on my phone at least.
I gotta know HTML or something to use it?
Nah, but there are various easy ways to do text formatting on your posts and there's a shortcut to a cheat sheet available whenever you post. Also you can do CSS crimes on here but I simply enjoy those crimes and do not know how to create them myself. \
You have to pay to use it?
No, but you can pay $5 for Cohost Plus, which lets you upload larger images, and also more importantly, supports a social media site that is not run by billionaire VC assholes, but instead, four people who hate computers and are doing their best.
It's ugly.
I can't help you with this one. Personally I like burgundy, but idk, maybe you'll like it better in dark mode.
In conclusion
Cohost has eggbug and I love him. Look at him. He's just a little guy.
