36, trans, massive nerd, Decker Zine Queen, old anime and games and such. also physical media and shelves. avatar by @bachelorsoft



Bigg
@Bigg

Given all of the Everything that's been going on with Twitter and other websites recently, I'm planning on doing another boosting push for Cohost soon - extolling its virtues, encouraging people to give it a try, etc. Obviously given my audience I'll be highlighting the friendliness towards porn creators/sex workers, but I thought it might be nice to have a little thread of testimonials from people who like the site! I think it's pretty easy for someone to find people saying positive things about Cohost since people who like it seem to REALLY like it, but it'd be a very useful resource for my purposes to have a lot of those nice things all in one place.

So: what're some of the things YOU like about the website? Blast me in the comments! EDIT: Also it'd be nice if you could share this so that I can get testies (cool shortened form of "testimonials") from folks not in my immediate following


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Bigg's post:

Ironically, it could be due to the lesser number of people on here, but I've never felt more visible and less hidden by some weird algorithm. There's always a honeymoon period with an app (that I hope this keeps forever) where things are in chronological order and don't force you to doom scroll until you make sure you've seen everything. Since getting on cohost, I've never gotten more of what I want to see, less of what I don't, or spent any unnecessary time that would cut at my mental wellness.

My art and submissions are more visible than they've ever been. I'm getting greater level of response and even gaining commissions, which I never got out of Twitter. This place just feels a lot more like a kink-friendly, furry celebrating, inclusive and queer populated place that I love very very much. I do not even remotely miss being buried by an algorithm whose entire purpose is to send the most aggravating hashtag into mainstream discussion.

Sure there are tiny things that could be edited over time like the ability to hide reposts on the main scroll, tiny things like that that don't really matter to me, but this is exactly what social media 'should' be!!!

There are a bunch of tiny little things that aren't all that common in the internet anymore that I really enjoy
Being able to have an animated avatar is for some reason a lot to ask in social media
The ability to put images in the profile description as well
And how freeing being able to do CSS is, it's a bit overwhelming but it can do so much

I can take breaks and come back and I get the same amount of engagement because the algorithm isn't burying me. The people that follow me still see my stuff.

On that note: "engagement" here is usually thoughtful comments or interesting additions in rebugs, not people piling on or taking things out of context.

I have found more interesting, offbeat, fun art and creative projects here than I ever did on twitter

have to agree, everybody's creativity on this site never ceases to amaze me! while discoverability can, admittedly, be an obstacle, once an account gains a few followers there seems to be genuine, valuable interaction

We're a plural system and the ability to have any number of pages under an account, and have the pages be completely independent to the point that they can even interact with and follow each other, is such a godsend that we're not sure how we lived without this on other sites. Being able to switch between pages so easily and create as many as we like, not being restricted to the account level, is so nice and something we never knew we needed.

i like being on a social media site run by people who have a demonstrable and long history of trying to do good, rather than just make a bunch of money and pave the way forward with unpaid labor only to drop the laborers at the first sign of money *glares at mastodon *

This place is full of freaks (affectionate) who go feral over their own interests and projects and things they're enjoying, so it's a legitimate joy to see all that happen in real time without an algorithm showing me things out of context. Also, being able to tag things again, then hiding and muting tags I don't care for? How did we even live.

TLDR: I go on the internet for about thirty-ish minutes a day in total. When it's on cohost, I just feel good and hopeful about the future, as oppose to the blue hellsite or just about anywhere else on the net

The less "Just Vibes" answer is the people, and how you can interact with them.

Plural folk really like the multiple pages, and being able to flip between them at will makes it possible to have your outward system really recognized in a space with people you respect and care about!

Not having to worry about numbers a big one, but the very way in which we trade info is slower, more thoughtful, and just more interesting to get genuinely lost in. I love the threads and info holes people have unleashed on me here, and that isn't just relegated to essay length posts either!

We have CSS CRIMES put bluntly, most sites are yamcha at best cohost is Super Saiyan Blue and our shitchosts rival that of the gods

Our admins and founders are all trans furries and they don't take VC money, that in itself is a unicorn, and one I intend to enjoy as it grows at a NON CANCEROUS rate and attracts the best people

fuck sake we got jeff gerstmann and neil cicierega ! !

I've never had anything truly classifiable as a social media account for a while, No R#ddit, Tw*tter, F&cebook, or anything for that matter. It was all discord for me, and that's hardly meant to be social media of any kind.

I've always wanted my own site that has the same virtues AS cohost, a place that's meant to give you full community curation and control, something that's open with policymaking and moderation and development, something that's symbiotic to the human condition without turning engagement into a zero-sum game.

I still stand by the fact that cohost is a revenant of the internet that all the frutiger aero and y2k aesthetics wanted to promise; one that's genuinely friendly to use and is meant to be an immensely helpful extension to the self, come back from the grave to steal the future from the rotting jaws of overcorporatization.

There are a lot of stray/untouched cohost accounts that are tied to artists and people I know who are on twitter/elsewhere, especially ones that make good kinky art, I want to see them more active! Albeit because I also want to commission some, but because that's also just FUN art! I think porn artists have more fun and have more freedom which leads to them just making GOOD art, pornographic or otherwise, and an environment that just encourages that is something that's desperately needed.

Because there is no way to send a private message to any user, the chance to receive a death threat is lower than on other website. And chost are less likely to be taken out of context.

I've made myself a nice little feed of people who just post cool things. Sometimes I post my own cool things. Sometimes we comment on each others' cool things and other times we don't. I don't feel like I'm chasing numbers, I don't have people who expect me to be an account that exists to post x thing or else they will unfollow me, I just get to blog about what I care about and see what other people care about. That's what keeps me here.

it's a social media site that feels like an ideal version of tumblr, i would say? because the only outward-facing metric is the amount of actual conversation your posts generate, long-form content and expressing complicated and nuanced thoughts is something that can survive and even thrive, but all of that is mixed in with shorter silly posts and images and videos and games in a way that feels like actually following a bunch of different personal websites that are all compiled together, and because discoverability is based on content tags and following people, it feels less like a random slurry of content and more like a webring

A lot of people bring up "no numbers", but I think having pages is just as important—you can reach the bottom of a page, and consciously make a choice whether you really want to keep scrolling or not, instead of being fed an indefinitely long stream of Content

in addition, the website will wait. you can't leave twitter scrolled back three screenfuls and then go "well, i'll finish the rest later" because later it will evaporate. if you're on page 3 of your feed, you can come back six hours later and finish reading the posts you missed that day, and then move forward and read newer ones if you like. it's so polite.

There's plenty of stuff already stated in other replies that I agree with, so here's my bottom line--it's allowed me to break out of my shell more, feeling less shame in talking about/sharing things outside of what people may already know me for elsewhere.

aside from just meeting a ton of cool nerds on here, this site has been a great place to be open about our identity and just talking growth. the lax atmosphere and lower risk of post taken out of context compared to somewhere like the bird site means we get to simply be open about ourselves. the way that posts of any length, be they a sentence of meme or an essay, are all appreciated too? there's no pressure to thin down your work or overwrite it, it's all just posting what you want and it feels good. also, the terfs get instayeeted, which automatically puts this in top 5% of web pages

Cohost feels like it's designed and run thoughtfully - like the sense I get is that it's trying to avoid the things that make social media bad and harmful. This seems to be working, people have a much better attitude in the things they post than on other sites.

Cohost fixed my brain and cured my mental illness. I have newly opened eyes to a world where everything remains in perspective. I am healthy happy and whole. I don't miss Twitter even 10% as much as I thought I was going to. Longform + no numbers = freedom from constant rage and anxiety over the opinions of nobody. I am now far better engaged with the fight against all that is wrong in the world than I was before because I have more energy to just focus on doing real tangible things in my community instead of fixating on whatever awful petty discourse someone drummed up for numbers.

The best thing about cohost, ultimately? Is that I can put it down

I love it here mostly because it's a place where you don't have to have like a brand, or a thing. You can be really into some things but there's really no pressure to always talk about it or even always post at all. There's no 'thing' or political discourse to miss out on. No blink and you miss it.

You can be horny, you can be artistic. You can ramble aimlessly with long essay posts or make movie reviews or post about characters you'll never write a story about.

And it's all cool and nobody's here to yell at anyone to score points.

Oh and on other sites I'm afraid of an edit button being used for evil? Here it's cool and easy to add more or clarify.

And damn, maybe I'm actually really happy to not have to have an opinion on everything. If it's worth an opinion I would make a long post rather than a throw away comment. I've seen so much genuine discussion and interaction here. Not once have I seen what I'd call an actual argument yet.

Your "sensitive content" system works. Your content warnings work. It WORKS. And, as I am trans and Jewish, I don't have to constantly see people saying weird offensive shit about me because you all actually ban fascists. It's a breath of fresh air after getting out of a poison swamp.

I'm going to block you in a few minutes because this isn't the first time you've been a weird, quasi-confrontational dweeb on one of my posts and I'm not actually a member of @staff who is being paid to be civil to you, but before I do I'd love to know the thought process behind coming into a thread where I explicitly asked people to tell me things they like about the website, where people have been posting things they like about the website, in which I specifically mention that when I do boost the site I'll be doing so with an eye towards the positives for porn creators, and posting this sneering dogshit? Like, what level of room-reading blindness are you operating on here? Nobody made you post this, here, in this context - you can post your peevish grumbling literally anywhere else, what kind of response did you think you'd receive? Christ you're exhausting

every other social media i've used has had absolutely nothing interesting on it, i couldn't even find drama or whatever, i don't know how people do that. i found this place after going on a chain of increasingly furry blogs (furry programmer pipeline)

this probably isn't going to convince anyone on social medias since they're probably relying on it for friends or enjoy the stuff (wherever that is)

this is something kinda weird and vibe-based but i really feel like i can just be myself and post shit that i want to post, where 1: i have the option of who to share to, and 2: people are free to appreciate it if they want to. i have the freedom to make a small shitpost, a big post with a lot of stuff, a big post with clever or neat formatting, or to just experiment with how i want to express myself and the things i'm interested in at any given moment. it's liberating. it's fun and nice, it reminds me of how the Internet was promised in the past, and i don't really have to worry about everything being assigned an arbitrary live-updating Objective Value that's displayed to everyone. everything is taken at face value, for what it is, and anyone else is also free to contribute to it or converse about it if they want to. there's something about it that's unique for a "social media platform", where typically everything, people and their creations, are given a number of judgement and worth to feed into these complex systems where what you want to make is deemed unimportant in comparison to what The Machine wants you to do. it makes me feel good, i feel free to do shit. i love it so much

Not much love for staff here, so I just wanna say it.

Staff are not above anyone and do genuinely post on this website. They care about cohost and I love that about em. Plus they are genuinely funnt.

really minor thing but the fact that I can go back and edit a post w/o worrying that no one will see it now bc of an algorithm deprioritizing it/taking it out of tags etc. very relieving

I like that the biggest, most useful upgrades to the site since its launch have been made available to everyone. The cohost plus stuff feels like a nice Thank You for helping to fund the site, not a Cool Kid badge to lord over the other jerks. I guess part of that is knowing that the site isn't aiming for infinite growth, either in the number of users, or the size of its owners' egos.

The major thing for me is that the feed is exactly what I have decided it will be.

  1. Hides selected tags (and 18+ content), but does so in a way that if I want to access it, I can easily.
  2. Nothing is recommended by an algorithm that attempts to decode exactly what I want; Having to manually tailor things is a relatively minor downside that I can personally take.
  3. No. Ads. (Seriously, the one Tik Tok ad of the dog is seared into my brain.)

I don't think anything really compares to Cohost in how user-friendly it is. It just works ™️:eggbug-relieved:

I love that this site is run by queer people who are explicitly trying to avoid implementing deliberately toxic, addicting features that are standard to other social media sites. I actually feel pretty chill and relaxed when using it, compared to others where I get this vague sense of anxiety/unease as I scroll because I anticipate seeing something that'll make me mad or depressed. The culture and vibes here are excellent and I also don't feel obligated to log in and post, whereas running a formal tumblr/Twitter feels like a job, almost!

  • Chronological feed
  • No Ads
  • Image embeds in Bio + the freeing nature of markdown + CSS in posts
  • lack of Numbers(tm)
  • I find myself checking cohost less than I would other sites as I dont experience a co-dependency
  • I feel like I can post without receiving transphobic comments and DMs
  • The Worlds Eyes arent here and as such, politicians and other very public facing figures dont share space with, people who just wanna post abt thier hobbies
  • The way discoverability works (following people who seem cool / post abt what youre interested in)

Cohost is a classic example of "addition by subtraction": make a better "social" site by taking away the things that make other sites worse: the obsession with follower counts and views, the visibility of "followers" and "following" lists, the algorithm-goosed virality, the toleration of bad actors, the unending quest for monetization and exponential growth, and so on. It's clearly been built by people who have studied how other sites failed and where they succeeded, and have incorporated those lessons into cohost.

there are a multitude of things, a lot of which boil down to the fact that it feels like a lot of the interaction requires me being intentional.

like i have to choose to go to the next page, i have to choose to look at my notifications, i get to choose when i open the app.

when i write a post i get to think about how far i want to go with my styling. it feels like active participation. also no numbers is very nice.

Pinned Tags