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