sirocyl

I largely think you're right but I think there's a third category outside of post and scroll and that's talk. I feel like blog post formats don't encourage chitchat as much as microblog style platforms do, but also the comment nesting on cohost actively discourages it. But ultimately what I've seen from the social media sites I bounce from and the ones I stay on, the ones where it's easy to just start a conversation and talk to people for a few are the ones I stay on, and I see very very little back and forth on cohost.

Edit: and to add to this, I think we saw the same thing with Twitter and Tumblr. Way, way more people had conversations on Twitter, because having a conversation on Tumblr was just...not really feasible with the design of the site. It wasn't made for back and forth chitchat. Cohost is very much modeled after Tumblr so it makes sense.

Insightful post about this, largely agree with all of this as someone who doesn't feel she belongs in these tech-savvy spaces all that much ahah

I run in fringe trans circles that don't entirely fit into any of this. I have a lot of different tastes and if I see something unfamiliar, there's a good chance I'll at least give it a try, which leads to boosting stuff I otherwise wouldn't. it may not happen as often as boosting cute furry art, but it seems to help.

meanwhile... yeah I figured rupaul stuff would get boosted a bunch outside of here. I'm glad to've not seen it come up. rupaul burned trans folks pretty badly in the past and to my knowledge hasn't bothered to apologize. if there were a tag for the show popping up in my feed, I would have to mute it pretty fast. there would be a lot of yelling. there's bound to be other things that do get posted here that'd lead to exactly that though, so... I guess I'm here or there about it, but I'm also wondering how much of a "teaching moment" we can even get with this example.

unfortunately this is who the mission statement of this website appeals to. people who have specific opinions about social media infrastructure. people who have been thinking and having conversations about this sort of thing for like... a really long time. i don't think you could transplant the Drag Race community onto Cohost because they would see the absence of follower counts, visible likes, infinite scrolling etc. and think "not a lot of features, are there?"

i can't think of a better example of this than bluesky, where the dominant userbase is more diverse (at least ideologically), but they are also clearly convinced that twitter can be fixed with a sign on the door that says "good vibes only". i don't know how to convince my friends in the streamer community, who use twitter primarily for branding and promotion, that a social media site with fewer visible metrics is what we need right now. the only people i know i could really sell the concept of cohost to are old internet burnouts with a half-decade old axe to grind against mastodon. everyone else just wants to have their cake and eat it too with twitter. they want twitter, with all the features of twitter, but without all the consequences of the features of Twitter. that includes the scrollers. they want to see the ratios. they want to see the quote dunks.

I dunno -- I think it could very well be sustainable, you just need people to actually toss that cohost plus cash -- Some of the biggest wildest stuff in the world can be done with like... 2 or 3000 people being committal about it.

BUT onto the juicy big part of the post -- TRUEEE, but also, I am by and large not any of those above categories. what I AM though, is someone who just gets excitedly bemused when other people enjoy things. Do I understand Linux, or lots of programming, or a LOT of the more in depth philosophical meme posts that'll turn up on my dash -- either because I followed that person directly, or through osmosis of rechosting. I do think this is a group that will absolutely slowly trickle in, and grow the numbers, simply because they'll be interested in trying something new, and seeing whats in it, and engaging with content they may not know, understand, but are simply excited to see because, different.

Ultimately, the one thing that worried/almost-disenfranchised me from this site, and might do the same to them, is the lack of any sort of onboarding or default-dash. There isn't a good place to start so to speak, and that leads to what you wrote about above -- checking tags for things and just finding nada there. I think that's why people latched onto the idea of 'global' tag so much, because it was that sort of base level of discoverability and "everyone here like a community am shud be" is just important.

A feature like that wouldn't have to be super in depth, or invasive, or honestly, anything more than just letting posts slap up as they slap up, if blogs/users allow it. but that base level of discoverability, I feel, is at some scale a make-or-break, for keeping users like i described myself as, or, hell, even who you described above. Cuz all it takes is one good post to rabbit hole down deeper

I hate that I'm suggesting this, but: I think that, to attract more people who don't spend time thinking about Linux or userscripts, or even people outside the "I am 30 or 40 years old and I do not need this" demographic, cohost will need a mobile app.

"but it's not supposed to be an app, it's a website, and app store guidelines would ruin everything, and bookmarking the site on your phone's home screen does everything an app would need to do"

I know all these things. I am on board with all these things. Meanwhile, people who are not me are assuming cohost doesn't exist in any way that's relevant to them, because when you search for it on the app store you don't get anything.

This doesn't just include completely technologically unsavvy people! There are tech journalists who believe cohost doesn't exist because they are looking at app store rankings

My take: A "typical" user interested in non-niche content will not themselves pay for a social media site (they have plenty of alternative sites they can use "for free"), so they would have to be "monetized" some other way, the usual mechanism being ads.

A social media site populated by users interested in niche topics could be financially sustainable if it keeps expenses as low as possible and has a set of core users committed enough to the site (because they can't get the same experience somewhere else) to pay serious money to keep it running.

I think Cohost better fits the second model. Per the last financial update it has about 200K registered users, about 20K active users, and expenses on the order of $50K a month. If 2,000 of those users (10% of the active users, 1% of the registered users) each produced an average of $25 of revenue to Cohost per month (e.g., through Cohost Plus subscriptions or some other mechanism) that would match revenue to expenses.

Does Cohost have enough of such users? Not yet, to be sure, and maybe (perhaps, probably) never. But I think it's more likely to get such users if it caters to a niche audience interested in topics of great interest to them and no one else, than if it tries to appeal to a more general audience interested in less niche topics.

My cynical answer for how to fix this is probably not possible with the limited resources cohost has, which is literally paying people to post deliberately to increase diversity.

On the one hand, I'm skeptical about this approach, but on the other hand I have to wonder if that's what happened with Bluesky.

Anyway -- in addition to the factor of who got here first, I figure another factor would have to be the way that Cohost (as a business) has marketed itself + the way that the Cohost users have pitched it to others. The big unique selling point here has been that you can do weird stuff with CSS. This appeals to people who like to write CSS. It is not as compelling to people who do not know how to write CSS, don't know how to do anything weird with it, or who aren't interested in that type of post.

Apart from CSS posting, Cohost's selling points have been what it doesn't have. It doesn't have a recommendation algorithm. It doesn't have visible metrics. It doesn't have ads (for now). As good as some of that stuff may be, those are still selling points based on what it isn't, not what it is. This is naturally going to attract users who care an unusual amount about those things, and it's not as strong of a pitch for anyone who has different priorities.

You have a point there!

Also:

My cynical answer for how to fix this is probably not possible with the limited resources cohost has, which is literally paying people to post deliberately to increase diversity.

That's probably why tipping is one of top priority big features being worked on.

Question: can you clarify which posts this was written in response to? I ask because I linked this post on a different post to confirm what that one was responding to, and then it occurred to me to wonder which post this one was about, too. The posts in this conversation that I'm aware of prior to this addition here are this reblog chain and this post. Am I missing others?

i feel like i'm missing a few steps here — this is framed in terms of practical impact to cohost's bottom line, but what exactly is the practical benefit of attracting people who don't post anything themselves? they won't help attract anyone else, and they won't have any incentive to pay for cohost plus either

i like the positioning of the text to guide your eyes to the reblog button