One phenomenon I've seen with regards to getting other people interested in cohost is the difficulty in finding stuff to begin with. Like, early on, I tried to get some friends involved here and they all kinda bounced off due to going "oh, is there even anything here?" since without going looking in tags you don't see much of anything going on.
I managed to make it work for me - largely by doing a bunch of posting about stuff that interested me in various tags, and browsing tags for other likeminded people and engaging with them and following them and stuff. Early on I also had a sort of "if someone follows me, I'll follow them back" attitude, and end result is I've ended up making some friends here.
So inherently what's necessary for making connections and making this site work is being able to find people and being able to be found by people, unless you're just essentially following friends you already know from other sites and branching out from there.
And like, that's the purpose of tags. Like the "welcome to cohost" one that the site promotes was really useful when we were all young and new, just for finding people who seemed cool. And like if you're following a tag related to an interest and see someone posting cool stuff in that tag regularly, then that's maybe a cool person. Or at least it's a way to find cool stuff.
This is kind of where the Cohost Global Feed seems to come from. Like it's a less targeted and more general way to either find people or go "hey look, it's me, look at the thing I posted". Mostly when I've posted there from memory it's either been joke type posts or like self-promotion stuff on the rare occasion I actually have something to promote.
Is this inherently bad? IDK. Like, I get that the idea was a joke, and I get that having a single high-visibility tag has caused moderation issues (which I think is related to the technical issues @jkap mentioned? like around tagging in replies? If I am misunderstanding, sorry). But people want to put themselves out and find other people - and if each tag kinda functions as a specific space then it's the "general chat" flavoured space, without expectations of a specific topic.
So, is a general chat type space bad? Should spaces on an online community be divided only into topic-specific stuff, and the idea of a "just some random shit" place is a problem? If I'm just posting general whatever stuff, should that be limited to only being seen by the people who go to my profile? None of these questions are ones that I have an answer for.
In the past, I've been critical of like self-promotion or like clout-seeking behaviour on social media, like the idea of seeking popularity is, tbh, distasteful to me. So like, maybe that means I do think it's bad for people to post just to get attention? But then how do people find each other. I feel like there's a distinction but it's too much 567 .beats at night for me to articulate this shit right now.
The more clear issue with the tagging system is the whole duplicate tags things, like I post stuff about blu-rays, and maybe I'll tag it #physical media, but do I also tag #blu-ray or #blu-rays or #4K Ultra HD Blu-ray or whatever? This is kind of where the "The Cohost Global Feed (topic here)" thing falls in, it's kind of been conflated with the arguments about the regular global feed but really I think it was a joke that was misunderstood and just becomes yet another weird tag. Unless there's some way of manually moderating and pruning tags, this is probably not an easily soluble problem except for in time people will gravitate to certain tags I guess? (Maybe an indicator of popular tags? That may be something that staff are deliberately avoiding as a design feature, which, if so, fair enough - it is a bit algorithm-flavoured)
But yeah. Things feel a bit weird and sparky in a bad way, like there's people who clearly have strong emotions about the existence or nonexistence of the global feed tag, and there's people who are goofing on it but they're goofing like in the meanspirited way. And I wanna try and figure out what all this shit is really about instead of just grumping or sniping? More nuanced thoughts may follow in the future?
(Against my better judgment I am posting this on a tag that people may actually see and then I'm going to bed. If it turns out overnight the comments are full of an argument or someone's rechosted this with an angry rebuttal leading their severals of followers to get mad at me, I will be displeased and I am cranky in the mornings so be nice.)