thefifthnote

Trying out different platforms atm

  • They/them

21+ | PH
Weeb, book enthusiast, amateur artist. Dabbles in a lot of things.


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

an important thing to remember about cohost: it doesn't get the benefits of having been around forever, or having (or having had) a significant number of employees working on it, like tumblr. it's barely been around for a couple of years, the software is still in extremely active development, and site staff is a total of four overworked (despite their efforts to avoid overwork) queers who are clambering around on it and building and running and maintaining it while it's actively in motion. @jkap in particular is currently finishing a move out of florida on a timetable they had to accelerate by several months for safety reasons, with only a few weeks' notice thanks to florida's Fucking Government.

it's got problems sometimes. they're workin' to fix 'em as they crop up and to make the site better. bugfixes and good new features and improvements on existing functionality show up with regularity. it's nice but you gotta be patient.

edit: you gotta trust their intentions, too. their goal is building the only social media site that is actively nice to use. compare it to the legacy ones (twitter, tumblr) and the newer-generation ones (bluesky, mastodon) and you can notice a major difference: this is the only site that's designed specifically to foster good community and fight negative tendencies they've seen on other sites. hence no numbers, no ads, no federation, and a variety of other important design decisions. the others (cough bluesky) are designed from the bottom up, technical-first, starting with their ~elegant federation protocol~ and with only afterthoughts given to "oh shit people are building a community on here" after it had been around for a while.

the people behind cohost are trying to do something different, even with stuff as basic as the corporate structure (a cooperative, which can't be meaningfully sold to a third party). it's nice, but it takes some getting used to. and unlearning assumptions from other social media sites like "when they add a feature it's gonna be useless and we're all gonna hate it."

sometimes something like the "pinned tags/recently used tags" dropdown below the post composer will just appear and be useful. it's nice.


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

it's more than patience, it's trust that even with fuckups theyre trying to do the right things

i hope they succeed and find a way to fill in all the gaps of the valid criticisms i know for a fact our lovely eggbug comrades care about

from what I've seen- not having tried or looked deeply into neocities or dreamwidth, only using Twitter a lot and bouncing off Tumblr and Bluesky and Mastodon, this is the only one that started with a solidly thorough base of "these are specific negative behaviors and tendencies we've observed on these other major platforms, this is why we think they occur, and these are the design principles we're using to attempt to change that."

having had a low to moderate level of fame on Twitter and having had that have some serious negative effects on me, I appreciate those changes. I don't feel actively addicted to this website like I did to Twitter. It doesn't have hooks in me.

I think there's other platforms that could reasonably be described that way. Even Bluesky could qualify, although their ideas about what constitutes a problem and how to fix it are particularly rank. You mentioned Dreamwidth, and I would suggest looking into that one more as another example. They may not have a manifesto linked in the site footer, but they do have a Guiding Principles page that's clearly responding to what's been done wrong on other sites.

signing up here and exploring the site for the first time was genuinely a breath of fresh air. my fiance and I were straight up going hog wild over some of the features ( specifically tag silencing and muffling ). these are things I have yet to find on any other social media site-- good fucking tagging systems that actually let me remove posts so my ocd doesn't get the better of me. the vibe I get from cohost is of a forum in the internet's wild west years; a tight-knit community of people who come together with similar interests to share ideas and foster new relationships. you just can't get that kind of community in the wild anymore unless you know where to go ( that being niche old ass forums from the early 2000s ).

unrelated but this site would also be very useful for roleplayers migrating off of tumblr. rip to those 2x4 box themes though.