• they/them

Hi i'm Pink!! (they/them, bi, 18+)
I draw art so if you think my icon is cute then check out my art page! @pinkpuppydog

I will be sharing lots of furry art here but my interests also include:
Mega Man (Classic, Zero, ZX, BN), Homestuck, OMORI and other RPGmaker games, JJBA (esp. p4 & p7), Paper Mario/Bug Fables, and lots of other games, mostly Nintendo-related.

There will be 18+ content here, if you have that setting enabled.

♥️@plutocat♥️
♥️@Silvy♥️


staff
@staff

hi there! like we mentioned last week, colin and aidan are working on a feature we’re all really excited about right now; we were hoping it would ship in time for this patch notes but there’s still some stuff to finish up, so we’re going to provide you some more details on it at the end of the post instead of leaving you in the dark.

alongside spending most of our week on that, we’ve shipped a couple small changes:

  • fixed a bug where users could very rarely get stuck in a half-signed up state, unable to use the site
    • this happened at most about once every 10,000 registrations
    • after we got two reports of it in a short span of time, we fixed what we think is the underlying issue so it shouldn’t happen any more, fixed the small number of users whose account was in this broken state, and built new tooling for @kaara to help fix people’s accounts with minimal effort if it ever recurs.
  • removed a bunch of old unused notification code, in preparation for doing some more work to improve notifications.

on the business front, we’ve finalized our most recent round of funding! we’ll have a full financial update out next week for the start of October and we’ll go into more detail about everything then.


before we get too deep into the New Feature, we wanted to share a brief update on tipping since we’ve gotten questions about it. the good news is jae is still making progress on it! the bad news is that progress has been slower than we’d hope. the moderate news is that jae recently returned home after a trip to realize that they’d been suffering from allergy symptoms for months, and that the likely causative agent was black mold (yay florida!) that they’re now getting taken care of. hopefully that helps things moving forward.

anyway!

the new feature

a lot of folks over the past year have alluded to a couple of different themes:

  • cohost being built around a chronological timeline clashes with encouraging Big Effort Posts; we want people to invest time into making stuff they want to share, but if someone works hard on something that happens to not get seen by one of their followers before it rolls off the front page of their timeline, it might just disappear entirely.
  • the “following” page sucks and nobody uses it. (it gets about 1 page view out of every 2,500, behind, for example, the user settings page. it feels like we mention the user settings page a lot in these posts. is that weird? I think it might be weird.)

earlier this year, jae had the idea of creating a new view organized something more like an e-mail client or newsreader, where we list the pages you follow ordered by how recently they’ve posted, and you can click through them and see what specific people have been up to. as we tossed ideas around the office, we liked this idea more and more as a way of helping address those problems, and it made sense to implement as a revamp of the following view, so we’re working on it.

(note: this is an internal redline that we use for spacing and arranging elements on the page. obviously, this is all placeholder copy and none of the fine details of this image are final.)

the following page is going to gain a few things:

  • a sort order — you’ll be able to choose between “most recently posted”, “most recently followed” (the current sort order), and “alphabetical by handle”.
  • pins, so you can ensure that certain people and projects that are important to you stay at the top of the list even as everything else moves around. (obviously, your pins are private to you.)
  • in “large” browser windows — i.e., wide enough that you get the navigation menu on the side — a second column where you can click on someone in the list to view their feed inline without leaving the page.

we’re hoping to start rolling this out sometime next week; since it’s hard to test and there’s a lot of room for bugs and performance problems, we’re going to test it ourselves on the site before gradually opening it up to everyone else. don’t worry, though, the timeline isn’t going anywhere — and we also see this new view as a jumping-off point and not a finished design; we’re starting off with the minimum feature set we think is necessary to make it hold together as A Thing, and plan to add to it over time if people see value in it.

that’s all for this week! thanks, as always, for using cohost! :eggbug:


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in reply to @staff's post:

i appreciate the use of Pepsi Gravitational Pull Document as lorem ipsum copy

also i can deeply relate to the mold thing, it happened to moo too when i moved into this house. i was havin' to take allegra daily and then after roommate passed, dad took a look at the window AC while they were in town for the summer and... that thing was fulla mold, so we pulled it apart to clean it

God I have the same situation I think. I recently took a trip to Portland where I felt great and full of energy physically and certain symptoms went away. I'm sure a lot of that was mental but some of the symptoms came back within hours of me coming home.

There's some walls in the building that's more mold than drywall and the slumlord won't do anything about it so I'm pretty sure if I am sensitive to black mold then we have it.

HEY THIS IS A COOL AS FUCK FEATURE

It's miles ahead of other socials which just kinda got stuck on "timeline" as prime way to view the site. Great work!

edit: this would be especially cool if it also is combined with a Lists-like feature or "tag a user (private visibility only) to create custom feeds or something. but that's a lot more work ofc :)

Very interested to see this new feature, and it's very similar to the type of thing that I wish platforms like Twitter had as an option.

The whole problem with timeline-driven stuff is that I feel like everything gets buried! I think this could be a cool fix.

Related to the "following page sucks" point, I agree. If I wanted to get to the profile page of someone I follow, it was almost always easier to go to the search page instead. However, this is mostly due to the incremental loading, and lack of a "filter this list" feature in both the following and followers page.

I'm especially interested in this new feature for the sake of Cohost's identity.
A lot of people I've talked to have brushed off Cohost as "it's pretty similar to Tumblr." Having this RSS-feed-style tab might help it stand out as a particularly good place for people to post art and project updates.

This looks really cool, and as someone else mentioned, feels like the first thing that makes cohost feel really distinct. I'm looking forwards to it! I can imagine this being really useful for artists, since now people can just check their feed to see their work and not worry about like, optimal posting hours.

Oooh, that looks awesome! that'll make keeping up with cool people and projects much easier than having a tab open with their profile. I think that's basically the only downside for a chronological timeline. thanks for making cohost!

The new Following page is really cool! It's nice to see new ideas in the content organization space. The last thing I've seen that went against the default timeline view is Fraidycat, and I think I like this better! It certainly works better for the kind of site that Cohost is.

huh! how interesting! i really appreciate experimenting with the concept of "social media" to find the kinder version of twitter-style scrolling to stay updated. faster, still no emphasis on "infinite feed"

really curious how this will turn out, what a novel idea :0

oh this is really really cool - it reminds me of my erstwhile project to basically follow each account I'm following's RSS feeds in a reader so I could do this process (with tags of accounts to group them/go through them). obviously that overwhelming but I love the idea of being able to do it from within Cohost - and as everyone else is saying, it's a very cool and specifically cohost feature

oh this sounds like an absolutely lovely feature; the only thing i might suggest is that it would probably be good to group follows as well if possible? something like twitter's lists or rss categories, so i could say, sort out only all the art profiles or all the 18+ profiles without having to make multiple accounts to follow multiple sets of people; honestly though i would absolutely use this even with just the features listed cuz this is such a cool way to do social media

I was actually planning to build almost precisely this (I call it “Peach style” based on the social app that somehow still exists) when the API was available so uhhhh thanks for saving me the effort! I found this way of organizing things super good for connecting with people more closely.

I'm a bit confused on how the new style would help not miss things? If things already disappear on your timeline because there's too much activity, wouldn't they also disappear in an email like client? Or would that view be separate from the regular timeline? I guess I'm just confused on how this'll help?

Here's an example: you follow three users A, B, and C. User A posts 100x a day, but User B posts once a day. User C posts once a week. If you're scrolling through the chronological timeline, you'd see somewhere between 1 and 100 of User A's posts before User B's post, and you might even miss User C's post completely.

In this view, you'd sort by most recently posted; User A, the Posting Machine, would show up on top because they posted 10 minutes ago. The very next entry down would be user B who posted today, then User C who posted a few days ago, and so on. Every followed page only gets one entry in the following list regardless of how many posts they make in a given time period.

I realize the screenshot might be confusing because i use the same placeholder in every slot; I just don't feel like making up more unique placeholder users for largely internal wireframes

Warning in advance that I will be moderately annoying abt filing email tickets if the new version doesn't play nice with me folding and unfolding my big dumb phone, I will not be offened if it's not prioritized and considered a fringe issue tho lol at least cohost generally works better than youtube in this regard

Heck yeah, this actually seems like a great way to balance ensuring you see updates without jamming them in your face or using an algorithm. I'm kinda surprised I haven't really seen it before, tho I guess it's less practical with large following counts.

I reckon having a blip graph to show the reader that their following has recently made a post that has made a "big effort" post would encourage them to check it out faster.

A la Fraidycat style :)

YES.

YES. A big dumb feed is agony to try and keep track of things when you follow more than a handful of people, this is what I waaaaaant.

Can we also have a 'mark as read' functionality so we can say 'yes I have caught up with this person's things, I can clear them out for now' and have them pop up again when they post something?

This is really cool. That feature reminds me of RSS, which is already 90% of how I interact with Tumblr (and webcomics, and other blogs, and...).

Actually, are there any plans on implementing RSS or Atom feeds for cohost blogs?

A note for a dream (contingent on technical feasibility, of course): it would be good to provide a similar view to this for tags, or to even outright repurpose this one or even combine the two, and to allow the creation of your own lists of users/tags to follow together instead of (or in addition to) your aggregate list of all followed users/all bookmarked tags. This could then generalize everything into a view similar to this, allowing you to see your followed users/bookmarked tags/lists and to drill down into the lists and see the users/tags within them as well as an aggregate feed of posts from all users/tags in that list. This allows the construction of your own The Cohost Global Feed without requiring a great deal of navigation to follow multiple topics or having only one aggregate feed when you need A Scrollable Page To Vibe To. Being able to have lists filter with their own silenced tags/content would also be kinda neat (so you could e.g. have an art list that filters NSFW without having to globally silence/muffle NSFW content) but I don't know that it's worth the development resources to go that far

love the sound of the new feature, reminds me of how twitch used to sort people you were following by their latest vod date which is something i desperately miss, made it so easy to keep up with people. happy to see something similar here!

This is AMAZING.

It has probably been suggested already, but we'd like a category system for the following page, as an extension of pinning. So we can keep track of what friends are up to, keep up with folks that make cool projects, have a category for folks who we follow for art or writing. Fluffies follow beings very quickly, but there are some we want to keep track of more closely than others, or when we want different things. As always, cohost is incredible. Thank you <3 So much. For all the energy you put into this.

I like the idea of getting our timeline like an newsreader/email client, would it be feasible to be able to sort in any way we could want ? Like give us some default sort ( like the one mentioned ) + some kind of "order your timeline yourself" ?

This is super cool and I'm really excited for it to roll out !!

I had a read through of the comments and I saw a few people mentioning things like twitter's lists feature, as well as being able to group things on your own end for organisation purposes. I think being able to group pages together into lists for your own browsing is a great idea, and I also think being able to have collectives of pages to help people discover other pages and for pages to get more traction on their posts is a great idea... but I dont think twitter lists style is the right way to do it for the latter.

There's one really big issue with twitter's lists and it's the way that it's used as a tool for harassment. Anyone can make a public list and add users to it, and now that list exists, which means people can make a list of people to target and suddenly you have a new harassment campaign.

I think a better alternative to look to would be deviantart's groups feature! Someone can make a page collective, they can invite people to join their collective, and/or people can request to join the collective, and the collective can either be set to be manually approved by the collective's owner (and mods perhaps), or it can have automatic approval allowing anyone to join the collective immediately. This way nobody is ever nonconsensually grouped together onto a list.

It also opens up the possibility of taking further inspiration from groups, such as being able to have moderators to help manage it, and also being able to make posts to the collective itself like group journals on deviantart, which could be used to run events! I think that'd be neat for community building stuff :)