What I'm trying to say is, since Twitter is dying and people seem to be migrating more to Tumblr and Masto than here, it's starting to feel like Cohost will not come on top of the social media succession wars.
But this is still my favorite one, and so I will stay here. This site is safe and uncompromising, and my close friends are here. Despite popularity and all, this may become my true "main".
tldr I wuv eggbug
we had started the closed beta before elon even tendered an offer for twitter; a lot of the things we could do to "win" are things we consider morally unacceptable; and even if another platform wins for now, we think there's a pretty decent chance that their users are going to realize that they left in haste for somewhere that still suffers from the same fundamental problems (save for the one where it got acquired)
our goals are:
a) build a place people like spending time on -- one that feels more social than patreon and easier to make a living off of creative works on than twitter;
b) hopefully have enough revenue that we can afford to pay the bills
one of the things that really stuck out to me as funny in the peri-crisis period where people started talking about Twitter Alternatives is how many people said some variation of "forget about mastodon and cohost, what I want is just twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful"
a) I'm gonna be real with you, if you want twitter again but owned by people who aren't awful, what you want is proooooooooobably mastodon, or maybe like... plurk or something
b) even before elon y'all were calling twitter The Hellsite enough and in a despairing enough tone that I don't believe you actually want that
It's not Twitter the website we'll miss, it's the people and communities we've (willingly) met. It wasn't the "international town square" that Musk touts it is, but it provided the least friction for interactions with others, for better or for worse: Facebook shows way too much personal information and Instagram is
A) linked to FB to begin with
B) doesn't really allow for proper conversations outside of DMs by design
I think enough of us are familiar enough with the great tumblr LGBTQ+ purge and why most of us here are loathe to return to it, and TikTok is video-based so the barrier to entry is that much higher (also not a great place for conversation like Instagram). Reddit can be pretty vile or simply indifferent depending on which sub you're in. As for Discord, you need to hunt down servers to join. Nothing's going to quite replace Twitter, at least for a while. Whether that's a net positive or negative for the average person who doesn't need it for work/their living, I can't say.
Personal anecdote: I actually asked someone I work with to help me translate a message to a JP artist I've been too afraid to interact with much beyond RTs and Likes since my Japanese is still extremely rudimentary; I wanted to tell them that my friends and I enjoy seeing their art and that I'm following them on Instagram so I can continue supporting them. I cried when they said that they remembered me from the time I imported some of their fanmerch. Hopefully I can talk to them myself without the use of translators one day.
I really relate to this point about missing communities, not platforms. I've never been on Twitter, but the uni I went to is a hellscape administratively, and is also where I met a bunch of really awesome friends I wouldn't trade for anything. we lived and grew and bonded together in a state of opposition to the hostile entity that brought us all together in the first place, and we've carried those connections forward with us and remained together in this vague community adjacent to a space that keeps getting worse and worse. our connections with each other have their own definition and gravity and momentum now, and would easily outlive the university if it collapsed tomorrow, but it's still a weird sort of dissonance sometimes.
the thing about social media platforms is that whenever I'm posting to the public internet as a whole, I'm too cagey to open up enough to really make friends most of the time. I just end up with a lot of acquaintances. so those aren't connections that would persist if the platform vanished, unless I just happen to run into the same people again elsewhere, like the slice of cool people from the fediverse who i've run into again on cohost.
it does also mean that when I do leave these kinds of spaces, I tend to miss the community in a more hazy and abstract way? connections have been lost, but it can be hard to articulate more than a couple of specific ones I'd want to keep. I like the people, but it just isn't the type of environment where I can comfortably get close to most of them.
