I think the hardest thing about moderating a social media platform, and why you really have to have your goals and rules on completely lockdown asap and stick to it, is that ultimately a place like this can be seen two very different ways. And I feel like I need to preface this with saying that none of this is like...vagueposting about anything specific here, this is the most broad general "me thinking about how communities are run online" sort of post ever and I've been mulling it over for months but hadn't quite fully formed the idea in my head. Just wanted to throw that out there so that nobody reads my examples and tries to tie them into specific things people have done or haven't done recently, I'm mentally digging into my entire history of being a person on the internet here. And this goes for a lot more sites than just Cohost.
One is that you can see this as a community. Frankly i have a hard time seeing websites made up of tens of thousands of strangers as any kind of real cohesive community, I don't think there's a "Cohost community", I think there can be various smaller communities within Cohost but I don't think there's a unified community here any more than there is a "Tumblr" or "Twitter" community. But, I'm sure some people see it as a community, and I'm sure to some degree the staff see it as a community. When you're moderating a community, then you are moderating an overall group of people interacting with each other. If you have one person who is making a lot of other people mad, making the community less enjoyable for people to be with, you might decide they need to leave. If you have someone who keeps posting angry vent posts about someone else they don't get along with, maybe they need to leave. Because in a community you are all interacting together and you are all having a mutual experience. And to some degree that's the case on a site like this no matter what, even if you don't call it a community you're all sharing the same space.
But the second one is that you can see this as a blog platform. A journal. If I'm mad at someone, or if I think something I read on the site is stupid, or whatever other negative emotions, I might want to write about it in a journal. I might want to blog about the feelings I'm having. In this case, I'm not posting to the community, I'm not engaging with the community, I'm posting my own feelings for myself. In the context of a journal...is there anything wrong with getting your angry feelings out? Is there anything wrong with writing "this person pissed me off so bad with this post" in a journal? That's a lot different than doing so in a community. For example, a lot of communities don't allow people to make long vent or depression posts, because, say, a woodworking discord is not the place to dump your personal emotions into, even if it's about how Jeffrey said your table was built badly and likely to fall apart. Sometimes a community like that can end up becoming one person's personal mental health dumping ground if you don't cut people off from doing that, which makes everyone else not want to be there. But then, what is the appropriate place for you to write your long vent post about what Jeffrey said about your table? Wouldn't a personal blog, a journal, be the right place for that? And if someone doesn't want to read your angry posts on your journal, shouldn't they just block you? I can't imagine something like Wordpress or Blogger or whatever has replaced those these days, blogging platforms without a larger community feel to them, banning someone just for saying mean things about another person who might also have a blog, even though that might make sense to do in a community. I wouldn't want Gmail banning me because I sent a friend an email about how much I hated some other Gmail user. In this case you're seeing the website purely as a utility, it's a platform for me to host my blog, not a community for me to engage in.
I'm not ending this post with any answers because I don't think there is an easy answer. I think I'm just describing the crux of the problem that has to be solved. Cohost, like any other social media site, is simultaneously trying to serve as a community and as a personal platform. And I think too many sites like this try to moderate the site as if it's one or the other, when you have to moderate it like it's both simultaneously. And it's a hard thing to do successfully, which is why so many of these sites live or die by their moderation. If you purely moderate it like a community, then you alienate people who just want a place to make personal posts without it having to necessarily tie into the wider userbase. But if you just moderate it like personal blogs, then you ignore that yes, all of these people ARE on the same website, and their behavior affects each other. You have to find the balance there, and I don't think you can do that easily. You can't just make a rule that says "no posting about other users at all ever", because why shouldn't I be allowed to post that so and so made me mad on my personal blog? But you also can't just allow people to dogpile either, or make harassing posts at each other, or whatever else. Ultimately the answer is "you have to figure out what you want to happen and figure out what rules will get you there", which sounds like dogshit advice on its own, but my point is that there isn't a one size fits all solution here. You have to see what your community is doing, see what is happening to people as a result, see what you do want them doing and don't want them doing, and make rules accordingly. But you can't do that on a site like this without acknowledging that it is simultaneously a public community space and a personal blogging platform, and some users will be posting here to engage with the community and others are posting for themselves.
And I think it's not a bad idea for users to remember too, that people are coming at this from these two angles. I think the difficulty as a user is that I don't know which of these visions the staff here lean towards. Sometimes I will see a post where I myself think "if this is a community, I think this post should be removed. But if this is a blog platform, then really it's totally within their rights to have posted this." If staff see this place as a community then I should report it, if they see it as a blog platform then I shouldn't. Obviously no matter what it's a little of both, but knowing how staff sees it and how they are steering the ship informs how you as a user approach application of the rules as written too.