re: other social media, ultimately what you make of a platform is what it will be for you. twitter and bsky can be just as fun as any other place, the only thing is that it may just require a little bit more intention on any given user's side (vs cohost being relatively unintrusive): curating your timeline, muting annoying words and content, blocking and moving on... these are your tools to make your experience better, and as someone who has been using twitter and cohost simultaneously, i use these tools on both platforms, because both platforms have things i like and things i dislike. c'est la fucking vie.
i actually dont believe that cohost has 'no clout' or whatever. i mean, you can believe that if you want, but i can literally see whose posts get consistently reblogged onto my tl, and who gets asks sent to them every week. those are less obvious signs than the numbers and the metrics, but still, to pretend that any given social media--even your favourite one--is not some sort of popularity contest is just being incorrect. the thing is, imo cohost's type of online clout is/was more akin to the clout you'd get on tumblr around 2012: it does not usually translate to real-life clout, which means you get fewer real-life grifters and opportunists in the mix. which is nice.
but just because you happen to be at a venue where there's a beauty pageant doesn't mean you have to participate in it. a space is a space, and a space is what you make of it. twitter was fun in 2014 because it was fun to post esoteric jokes that felt they didnt belong on a platform like twitter. the smartest--and funniest--people still on twitter have this worked out, and are generally unaffected by this talk of 'clout' and 'algorithm' and whatever else. this is something i have generally been also cultivating wrt my own relationship with social media. conversely, i never thought cohost was that much better in terms of social media because i already dont give a shit about 'clout' and 'algorithms' and whatevers elses on other social media. i constantly delete posts that get too popular. you should try that too. youre more in control than you think. you can have fun in the unlikeliest of places.
except linkedin, maybe.
anyway, the good part of making a new account somewhere new is that you can establish what your relationship with that platform will be. and if it sucks, you can always hit the bricks.
i said this at the start and i'll say it at the end: the numbers never went away. it was good to not be able to see them, but that's not quite the same thing.
