First patch notes of the public cohost era! As we keep saying, we’ve been blown away by the response to cohost so far. We shipped a Lot of fixes in the last week and are in progress on new Features and other exciting things!
new things
- if you’re not activated, you can see your place in line! check your settings page!
- if you’re activated, this card won’t appear, because you’re already activated so there’s nothing to show there.
- USER AND TAG SEARCH
- we’re going to be adding full-text search for posts Soon, but there’s more complexity there so it’s not time yet.
- changed our Terms of Use to remove an unnecessary rule against “using a fictional name or alias” after user feedback.
- added a persistent link to the bug tracker in the right sidebar.
- reading this in the cohost corner? look up!
post-launch fixes
- fixed an issue where only a hundred or so people knew about eggbug.
- fixed a bug where if a private page changed anything on their profile, it would accept all pending follow requests. this was a serious oversight on our part; we want to apologize again to everyone impacted, and note that we’ve taken measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- fixed a bug that caused posts from unfollowed private accounts to appear on tag pages (displayed as empty post boxes, but with the user’s username visible and the first few words of the post body leaked in the single-post link.)
this is extremely welcome to see and i'm excited for it:
- allowing for gifs to be paused by default
- this is another heavily requested accessibility feature that’s complex to implement but we think we have a way to do it.
but something that still worries me a lot is the heavy use of CSS animations in posts that can easily cause motion sickness, e.g. 1, 2, 3 (not trying to call out specific posters, but just referencing posts that wouldn't see help from this in-progress development).
what makes this harder is that not all animations are a problem, e.g. 4. so it's not as easy as saying "computer, remove all the animation properties"; it requires human judgment.
i don't know if this is a good suggestion, but what i would pitch is a flag like the "adult content?" checkbox. perhaps named "motion?". users could choose whether they want to see content with motion by default or have it be hidden behind a warning, and similar to how i assume reports and moderation for things not marked adult content would go, users could tell moderators that a post should be marked as containing motion, and moderators could enable the flag.
i think this is better than attempting to create a culture where motion is put behind content warnings. content warnings are always displayed, and users who need reduced motion like me are honestly in the minority of users. meanwhile the use of CSS animations has made cohost a really exciting place and i appreciate that.
