xkeeper

welcome to my personal hell

dragon warrior iii for the game boy color describes me as "stubborn", and i'm tempted to agree with that assessment


co-owner tcrf.net. i run an old forum, jul.
i've been around the internet since '01.
i generally feel like the internet
peaked somewhere around '07.


private: @xkeeper-PLUS
18+: @xkeeper-TI


plural / some kind of digital therian thing.
still discovering myself.
all of this is new to me.


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Keeble
@Keeble

social media in this sense (including its antecedents of twitter, tumblr, reddit, etc) are more MEDIA than they are social, and a lot of the analysis of why people do or dont stick with a site completely ignore that facet. your site has to essentially replace local news in peoples mind. hell, its not like learning what omelas is is more or less important than knowing every murder that happened in a 30 square mile radius


Keeble
@Keeble

Taking this further, this is why sites like this have a hard time retaining people that aren’t exactly like its test/beta audience (tech-oriented furries/queer tech people/the sorts of people who incorrectly assume all trans girls are programmers because they always end up in places where they meet programmers). Now don’t get me wrong, I like this group and hence that has appeal to me, so I’m here. As a furry these people are always gonna somewhat be my community so that’s not stuff i don’t wanna read necessarily

But imagine you’re like. I dunno. A non furry waiter who mostly knows how to use an iPhone but has no interest in tech or whatever. Imagine cohost (or mastodon, or any upstart social media platform—the specific site doesn’t really matter) as more like a local news station or paper, with all the posts as stories. Why the hell would any story by someone who assumes everyone knows what a user script is be relevant to them? You use the limited discovery tools there and you see the sorts of people who haven’t given up on the site, who are disproportionally the sort of people who don’t just know what Linux is (already a massive minority) but actually use it. The fact that fan art of Xenia the fox (who I can guarantee you not a single one of my queer coworkers knows about) does well here is a massive tell. It’s the social media equivalent of wired magazine in 1993.

If you’re a queer person who doesn’t care about python or “css crimes” and barely knows what homestuck is (again this is most people, including most queer people)—what are you supposed to do to get a feed you wanna read? There’s a season of rupauls drag race on rn. The drag race subreddit is the number one reality show related subreddit. It’s like the defining queer monoculture thing, like it or not that. Do you see people posting about it here? (I checked common tags and I didn’t). You see some stuff here about baseball because one of the sites founders likes baseball, occasionally, but rarely anything about other sports popular around the world (football of any sort, for example).

I go through every single one of my coworkers’ interests to think if i see posts about that stuff here. The coworker who loves the sims…nope. The non furry non binary museum art and classics major who loves witchcraft and plays the bass…nope. Any of the college students…god no. The title fight loving (non furry) puppygirl in NA…nope. Hell I think of my own metamours and meta metamours, literal furries in tech, who have accounts here they don’t use, who occasionally say stuff like “oh yeah I gotta use cohost more”. But they don’t, because on some level they too realize that there isn’t much for them here. They don’t wanna read about their job all day. It’s like forcing yourself to read a magazine that doesn’t have articles that interest you bc you think its cause is noble.

And the thing is? ALL of the above people have enjoyed some posts on cohost I’ve showed them! All of them thought love honk was hilarious. I’ve sent coworkers some of @shel ‘s in depth posts and they’ve gotten a ton out of them. Even a magazine you don’t read might have some good articles. But a good comic, a good letters to the editor section, and one or two recurring features you like does not fill 80 pages does it now?

My cynical answer for how to fix this is probably not possible with the limited resources cohost has, which is literally paying people to post deliberately to increase diversity. The intitial test user base of this site seeded a culture that fundamentally is not sustainable with its financial model. It needs people that don’t know what Linux is, it needs people who wanna post about survivor. It needs more political writers and sports writers and people who don’t know what user scripts are and never will


invis
@invis
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xkeeper
@xkeeper
the above thread is good
and i agree w/ it
fluffy tails.
you like it.
you agree.
reblog.

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in reply to @Keeble's post:

I largely think you're right but I think there's a third category outside of post and scroll and that's talk. I feel like blog post formats don't encourage chitchat as much as microblog style platforms do, but also the comment nesting on cohost actively discourages it. But ultimately what I've seen from the social media sites I bounce from and the ones I stay on, the ones where it's easy to just start a conversation and talk to people for a few are the ones I stay on, and I see very very little back and forth on cohost.

Edit: and to add to this, I think we saw the same thing with Twitter and Tumblr. Way, way more people had conversations on Twitter, because having a conversation on Tumblr was just...not really feasible with the design of the site. It wasn't made for back and forth chitchat. Cohost is very much modeled after Tumblr so it makes sense.

I run in fringe trans circles that don't entirely fit into any of this. I have a lot of different tastes and if I see something unfamiliar, there's a good chance I'll at least give it a try, which leads to boosting stuff I otherwise wouldn't. it may not happen as often as boosting cute furry art, but it seems to help.

meanwhile... yeah I figured rupaul stuff would get boosted a bunch outside of here. I'm glad to've not seen it come up. rupaul burned trans folks pretty badly in the past and to my knowledge hasn't bothered to apologize. if there were a tag for the show popping up in my feed, I would have to mute it pretty fast. there would be a lot of yelling. there's bound to be other things that do get posted here that'd lead to exactly that though, so... I guess I'm here or there about it, but I'm also wondering how much of a "teaching moment" we can even get with this example.

very familiar with the trans rupaul backlash but: rupaul apologized for that in like 2016. The show was undeniably shitty to trans people before 2016 (look up peppermint) BUT: in the intervening years we’ve seen like 4 trans winners in a row, people publically coming out on the show, people who don’t give a shit about fitting into gender and are celebrated etc. and like, compared with the stuff coming out during Obama? Dear god the trans representation is night and day. The transphobia is completely gone. It’s the only show that gets ratings like that where you even see two people with they/them pronouns even having a conversation. Among the people I see, I know FAR MORE trans people who like how the show depicts trans people than people who don’t, which shows how much the show has changed in like 10 years. Rupaul as a cultural figure is whatever. Most people watch drag race despite rupaul not because of him.

That’s kind of besides the point of: good god this site isn’t diverse in content and that actively drives people away that aren’t in said fringe trans circles

well, thank goodness for that at least. honestly if that got talked about more often, I'd have reacted to the ads that popped up on switch's youtube about this with less "ugh". I hadn't heard anything since the initial blow-up and double down; guess that says something about my source of news info at the time (mostly twitter).

also yes, it is besides that point. that's why I posted the top section before the bottom one, I considered that more important. I posted about the show because, from my (limited) information, you seemed to be giving a bad example of "how to tell we have a problem". now that's been cleared up.

I'll still keep doing the best I can here. boosting working class solidarity stuff, unionization in every profession. creative works of every type I run into (been trying to boost more music, since that tends not to get as much time to shine; I also like boosting odd stuff like knitwork or sculptures when I can find them). funny antique finds, weird stuff found on old film negatives. I'm fairly sure most of the people I boost on this don't much care what a Linux is, and if we want to have a fair few people on here, we need to show them where the neat stuff is.

pity is that I have a rule of not boosting anything on this page that is clearly 18+. the few things I boost with that tag on them, it's clear the person didn't mean to put that on there, but just don't bother to / don't know how to turn it off. but for the others, well... there's a lot of good stuff from good people on here if you're looking for spicy art, but you need to know where to look. and "knowing where to look" is always going to be a bit of a barrier here, unless friends help with some kinda on-boarding. same as it was for twitter, frankly.

unfortunately this is who the mission statement of this website appeals to. people who have specific opinions about social media infrastructure. people who have been thinking and having conversations about this sort of thing for like... a really long time. i don't think you could transplant the Drag Race community onto Cohost because they would see the absence of follower counts, visible likes, infinite scrolling etc. and think "not a lot of features, are there?"

i can't think of a better example of this than bluesky, where the dominant userbase is more diverse (at least ideologically), but they are also clearly convinced that twitter can be fixed with a sign on the door that says "good vibes only". i don't know how to convince my friends in the streamer community, who use twitter primarily for branding and promotion, that a social media site with fewer visible metrics is what we need right now. the only people i know i could really sell the concept of cohost to are old internet burnouts with a half-decade old axe to grind against mastodon. everyone else just wants to have their cake and eat it too with twitter. they want twitter, with all the features of twitter, but without all the consequences of the features of Twitter. that includes the scrollers. they want to see the ratios. they want to see the quote dunks.

Then this website will continue to write itself into a corner, frankly. I love it from an infrastructural standpoint and like the lack of metrics but I do truly think that without broadly appealing things to read it’s gonna be for late 30s trans tech workers forever and, thus, have a LOT of the same problems as masto

Like I don’t think this user base is remotely financially sustainable

It’s media. We’re media creators. People go to where they like people who post and what they post there. I don’t have much faith that a shouting into the void style posting style can lead to meaningful community in the way that like a bowling league or choir can for people other than those like us, no matter how perfect the infrastructure is

yeah but media creators with broad appeal don't want the infrastructure of cohost. like... did cohost develop into a monoculture, or were people who care enough to fix the problems with social media to join cohost already a monoculture?

even if everyone on cohost aligned in the goal of astroturfing the platform by posting about Drag Race a lot, would Drag Race fans actually show up, or would they simply notice that this website is less addictive than twitter and shrug?

I simply think that people go to where good stuff is and don’t care about the metrics if the good stuff is there but will only stay if they keep finding good stuff (this is why I think paying for a more diverse user base in the way that magazines pay writers would be the solution in my opinion)

adding to this, about half of the people i see using this site semi-regularly also use something like twitter or bluesky, bc they accomplish different things. i think this is a good place for longform (better than, say, substack, which is why some people whove been active on here used to have substacks) and enough people want that/want to do that to make a non-monocultural space. people off cohost i talk to share most of these concerns!

I dunno -- I think it could very well be sustainable, you just need people to actually toss that cohost plus cash -- Some of the biggest wildest stuff in the world can be done with like... 2 or 3000 people being committal about it.

BUT onto the juicy big part of the post -- TRUEEE, but also, I am by and large not any of those above categories. what I AM though, is someone who just gets excitedly bemused when other people enjoy things. Do I understand Linux, or lots of programming, or a LOT of the more in depth philosophical meme posts that'll turn up on my dash -- either because I followed that person directly, or through osmosis of rechosting. I do think this is a group that will absolutely slowly trickle in, and grow the numbers, simply because they'll be interested in trying something new, and seeing whats in it, and engaging with content they may not know, understand, but are simply excited to see because, different.

Ultimately, the one thing that worried/almost-disenfranchised me from this site, and might do the same to them, is the lack of any sort of onboarding or default-dash. There isn't a good place to start so to speak, and that leads to what you wrote about above -- checking tags for things and just finding nada there. I think that's why people latched onto the idea of 'global' tag so much, because it was that sort of base level of discoverability and "everyone here like a community am shud be" is just important.

A feature like that wouldn't have to be super in depth, or invasive, or honestly, anything more than just letting posts slap up as they slap up, if blogs/users allow it. but that base level of discoverability, I feel, is at some scale a make-or-break, for keeping users like i described myself as, or, hell, even who you described above. Cuz all it takes is one good post to rabbit hole down deeper

is the lack of any sort of onboarding or default-dash

While the solution you provide would definitely work, though simply linking new users to one of the global tags would do the trick, i feel the need to point out the fact that this is the social media equivalent of "proofing" your game for bored players who just need to be told "you should explore more".
inb4 completionist nightmare

I hate that I'm suggesting this, but: I think that, to attract more people who don't spend time thinking about Linux or userscripts, or even people outside the "I am 30 or 40 years old and I do not need this" demographic, cohost will need a mobile app.

"but it's not supposed to be an app, it's a website, and app store guidelines would ruin everything, and bookmarking the site on your phone's home screen does everything an app would need to do"

I know all these things. I am on board with all these things. Meanwhile, people who are not me are assuming cohost doesn't exist in any way that's relevant to them, because when you search for it on the app store you don't get anything.

This doesn't just include completely technologically unsavvy people! There are tech journalists who believe cohost doesn't exist because they are looking at app store rankings

see, while i think that would help, i think the bigger issue is thinking of the people who DID join cohost and then slowly stopped using it. those are the people who already got past that hump, and still dont find reason to come here. to me, that's on just having things people want to read about, which is not much if you dont have very specific interests.

in re the tech journalists: this is where the "paying people" thing comes in. i seriously think you wouldnt need that big of a seed, like 100 people, and that in it of itself would slowly get people on board. social media is media, and you need magazine writers

My take: A "typical" user interested in non-niche content will not themselves pay for a social media site (they have plenty of alternative sites they can use "for free"), so they would have to be "monetized" some other way, the usual mechanism being ads.

A social media site populated by users interested in niche topics could be financially sustainable if it keeps expenses as low as possible and has a set of core users committed enough to the site (because they can't get the same experience somewhere else) to pay serious money to keep it running.

I think Cohost better fits the second model. Per the last financial update it has about 200K registered users, about 20K active users, and expenses on the order of $50K a month. If 2,000 of those users (10% of the active users, 1% of the registered users) each produced an average of $25 of revenue to Cohost per month (e.g., through Cohost Plus subscriptions or some other mechanism) that would match revenue to expenses.

Does Cohost have enough of such users? Not yet, to be sure, and maybe (perhaps, probably) never. But I think it's more likely to get such users if it caters to a niche audience interested in topics of great interest to them and no one else, than if it tries to appeal to a more general audience interested in less niche topics.

My cynical answer for how to fix this is probably not possible with the limited resources cohost has, which is literally paying people to post deliberately to increase diversity.

On the one hand, I'm skeptical about this approach, but on the other hand I have to wonder if that's what happened with Bluesky.

Anyway -- in addition to the factor of who got here first, I figure another factor would have to be the way that Cohost (as a business) has marketed itself + the way that the Cohost users have pitched it to others. The big unique selling point here has been that you can do weird stuff with CSS. This appeals to people who like to write CSS. It is not as compelling to people who do not know how to write CSS, don't know how to do anything weird with it, or who aren't interested in that type of post.

Apart from CSS posting, Cohost's selling points have been what it doesn't have. It doesn't have a recommendation algorithm. It doesn't have visible metrics. It doesn't have ads (for now). As good as some of that stuff may be, those are still selling points based on what it isn't, not what it is. This is naturally going to attract users who care an unusual amount about those things, and it's not as strong of a pitch for anyone who has different priorities.

You have a point there!

Also:

My cynical answer for how to fix this is probably not possible with the limited resources cohost has, which is literally paying people to post deliberately to increase diversity.

That's probably why tipping is one of top priority big features being worked on.

Question: can you clarify which posts this was written in response to? I ask because I linked this post on a different post to confirm what that one was responding to, and then it occurred to me to wonder which post this one was about, too. The posts in this conversation that I'm aware of prior to this addition here are this reblog chain and this post. Am I missing others?

This was written apart from those and these thoughts have been kicking around my head for a while, I hadn’t seen those chains. Tbh I think what they’re saying in those threads is more important than my point and better argued than what I’m saying here. This post was more something I wrote right after waking up one day and was surprised it got the traction it did. Definitely something kicking around while I was writing it was quite literally someone saying to me a while back that they were surprised anyone on cohost didn’t know what a user script was

i feel like i'm missing a few steps here — this is framed in terms of practical impact to cohost's bottom line, but what exactly is the practical benefit of attracting people who don't post anything themselves? they won't help attract anyone else, and they won't have any incentive to pay for cohost plus either

Most people I know who post on other sites didn’t join the site or start looking at it to post originally they joined to read, and many of those people ended up paying for some part of it after posting or to improve site experience (Reddit gold for example). I think there’s absolutely a market for people mostly observing/scrolling to pay for cohost plus if it had stuff they wanna look at. What attracts those people is, broadly, diversity in content that comes from diversity of creators. Why would (say) a Black person who doesn’t like algorithmic feeds and agrees with the general cohost mission statement stay past the first day if there’s like nothing that’s interesting to them post wise? Bc what’s happened is these people who would have been amenable drop off rn bc the site culture.

i mean, the first black person on here who comes to mind is an outspoken editor of the c specification. (the next few are furry artists)

i don't know there's a whole tangle of disquieting sentiments here. like you're asking for diversity but also specifically call out "people aren't posting about football or an incredibly popular tv show". that seems like the opposite of diverse

i might have to abort this comment actually because i'm getting kind of upset at the idea that the things i like to write about are not sufficiently marketable to some target demographics and this is a problem that needs solving

in reply to @xkeeper's post: