• bit/byte/bytes

Wish it had worked out lol


my one big lament about the actual design of cohost itself is that your post timeline cuts off. like. ????????????????????? I would like to see the posts. Of all the ways cohost claims to be all about fostering a healthy relationship with online, the fact that, if I have a tab open to my timeline, at some point it'll just stop having posts on it is utterly vexxing. That. That does FOMO to people, and it is actually a major reason why I fell away from cohost for long enough to completely forget how CSS works. If a website makes me feel like I HAVE to be online regularly, reading All The Posts otherwise they're Just Fucking Gone, then I actually just leave, because that sucks dogwater and I prefer for my life to not have weird arbitrary pressures to be tuned into bullshit that I might not actually feel like being tuned into at a given moment.

I know the posts still exist and are easily found, the issue is I am not going to fucking. individually trawl the page of everyone I follow one by fucking one to do it. There's a feature for that, and it is called the timeline/dashboard/feed/what-have-you and cohost already has one!!! I would like for it to not put me in a fucking baby cage.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @problemnyatic's post:

ohh, gotcha- I'm just not in the habit of doing that so I was unaware. Yeah that sucks, especially compared to Tumblr where it was able to load stuff from any time period on the dashboard. I honestly wonder if that's intentional or the way it's set up is just kinda stinky

I only saw that "you're free" message when I was only following like 3 people who had just joined cohost recently and barely posted

yeah. I worry it's deliberate, in cohost's vehement mission to make like, callout culture and twitter/tumblr toxicity transmissible to here. But like..... old posts still exist, it'd be nice to just have them. It doesn't protect anyone bc if they're being targeted then, well, they'll already be having their page scrolled. but it;s just conjecture so... h

I don't know exactly how it works but some testing just now revealed it's not that simple:

tl;dr: The feed doesn't appear to end if you keep clicking the back button but reloading an old tab with an old date in the URL may hit some case where it doesn't pull up posts. In any case it seems to reliably fetch posts several thousand back from the current time.

The URL has a time reference in it, which presumably is needed because otherwise if you went back a page and 4 new posts appeared in the meantime, 4 of the posts on page 2 would be ones you already read. So it freezes you relative to whenever you went one page back.

Then it has the number of posts to go backwards. I tested changing this number and it capped out at 7200 posts back initially...

...but if I went to 7100 and then hit back a few times it went to 7210 without hitting the end no problem. My uninformed guess would be the server has some sort of logic that only fetches posts incrementally and returns nothing if you jump too big a gap or it takes too long to fetch the posts from cold storage or something.

Personally I feel like part of embracing to anti-metrics vibe of Cohost is to accept that you might miss posts and going more than a few hundred posts backwards isnt really desirable, but of course that's my feeling and not what staff intends / designed necessarily.