one thing ive noticed about cohost is that a lot of users see cohost as a “leftist” site or as a rejection of a parallel posting culture (the anti-twitter, trans tumblr, anarchist livejournal, tech-skeptic mastodon, woke 4chan, etc [whichever you were a part of]). whether a blog hosting service can be leftist or not seems like an odd consideration. i get that some of it comes downhill from the assc manifesto but, idk, being critical of how the tech industry operates and trying to do it different doesn’t automatically make the website “leftist”. it’s an llc. i guess its “leftist” in the sense that it appeals to left leaning people by the content that it encourages and forbids, in the way twitter appeals to fascists because of what it allows and forbids. maybe its leftist in the sense that there are many incompatible utopian ideals of what the site is meant to be and debating those ideas is a kind of uniting sport.
the second thing, the idea that cohost is meant to be all the good parts about social media and none of the bad parts is a little harder to source. i think some of it is a little bit of narrativizing how you ended up on cohost (if you left twitter because it got real transphobic then it makes sense to envision cohost as a trans-positive, less vitriolic twitter) and some of it has to do with interpreting the design choices. once you notice that the site has consciously not implemented some of the dark patterns that big tech social media relies on, it invites you to consider why. but i think this is primarily a product of its novelty. i think a good analogy is when a new tool or framework gets released in the javascript ecosystem. for a couple of years you’re seeing it exclusively in terms of how it fixed the awkward parts of a previous tool. but then once you’ve stopped using the old stuff for a while, when its sort of faded from your memory, that’s when the real shape of the new tool becomes visible.
personally the lack of visible metrics is really great for me. i have to mod my games to edit out that kind of information because otherwise “number go up” eats my brain. also the no terfs allowed policy is nice. i kind of think of it like a more ephemeral livejournal.
