another exodus from twitter, another group of artists migrating to bluesky, another day of watching all of them be like damn this place is so nice but it's really missing [feature cohost has had since forever] and just screaming into the heavens
i'm almost positive that people come here and see no numbers on posts and think it means every post is a potential failure because it's not "doing numbers" and it makes me sad how much this shit has just broken people. i wish i could sit every person down and explain why that's such a meaningless way of measuring 'success' but also that it's like, actually a lot worse on BS because yeah you see numbers there but getting like 10 RTs on a site that has way more users than here is actually kind of abysmal! your posts relatively actually do a lot worse there because people are not there for that content. they never were, they never will be. the twitter micro-blogging experience is not condusive to art it is condusive to virality and low-quality posting.
sigh
I made a comment on how BS n Threadz kept getting these no context hype trains for furries/literally any content, but then promptly lose 75% of their users in a week cause it's just more of the same. Hell I know one of the people making this claim and I know for a fact she's already off those sites
Meanwhile people genuinely detoxing over here while getting the actual meaningful interactions they crave, but because it's not got some arbitrary rpg stats below it, it isn't "viable"
I think these people in general REALLY need to explore what viable actually means
Is viable getting people to click your kofi? Is it getting actual people critically interacting with your work? Is it being able to be honest and yourself?
Or is it getting folks you don't know, don't like and certainly don't care about just bumping up some stats on your posts?
Either way the answer is cohost ¯\ _ (ツ) _/¯
i made a whole thread on twitter to try and convince others to give cohost a shot! and i pointed out the stark difference in how much interaction i got on my art on both platforms
i've been on twitter for 5 - 6 years now. it took me 5 years to build up a following of about 500, and with that i'd get maybe 20 likes and a comment on an art piece, or a retweet if i was very lucky!
one tweet went viral, and those numbers jumped overnight. a chance event, and while i'm grateful for it, this should not be the only way to get your name out there. it just isn't sustainable
when i joined cohost, and started posting art to what i thought would at first be an audience of 0, i was instead pleasantly surprised to find that folks still managed to see my art and interact with it! what had essentially taken me 5 years to cultivate on twitter was just there on cohost! there's no pesky algorithm to fight, wahoo!
and here's the real deal-breaker for me: i get all of my first-time commissioners and kofi subscriptions from cohost
since i started freelancing full-time at the beginning of the year, i haven't gotten any new traffic out of twitter, as far as i can tell. that, to me, speaks volumes about the sort of platform i wanna be on. what's the point of being on a platform, even one where "everyone is going", if no one there is really seeing you??
i don't want another twitter, i want a better experience. cohost has been excellent in that department!