anybody got a paragraph or three about what made cohost great, that you didn't experience with, say, fedi, aimed at those of us who never got into cohost?
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anybody got a paragraph or three about what made cohost great, that you didn't experience with, say, fedi, aimed at those of us who never got into cohost?
was it a preference for the particulars of the ui, the length of posts? was it network effect, the people that happened to be on there? moderation policies? problems that fedi (or certain popular clients) have that cohost didn't?
i don't ask to bait argument. just daydreaming about what future social networks should look like
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Sumana Harihareswarareplied to pho4cexa :ms_bisexual_flag: last edited by
@pho4cexa As I gather:
it is *playful*: the CSS "crimes", a culture welcoming hyperbole and absurdism, and openness to experimentation with post styles and lengths
the people: my perception is that a majority of Cohost posters are queer, and a *significant* proportion are trans, so there is some feeling of home/sanctuary because of that
the size/slow growth: never had an influx of users whose values clashed super-badly with existing site culture
(I could be wrong re: all of this!)
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Sumana Harihareswarareplied to Sumana Harihareswara last edited by
@pho4cexa I suspect that some of that home/safety/sanctuary feeling depended on the antifeatures (how hard it was to discover users' accounts and posts), and that we may benefit from considering the tension between the desire for sanctuary and the desire for discovery/publicity/serendipity (and some platforms' need to grow # of users)
Another approach to that tradeoff is Hometown https://runyourown.social/ and I've never been a member of a Hometown instance, but it sounds nice
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Great points @[email protected] - and thanks @[email protected] for kicking off the thread. Expanding on these a bit ... of course fedi has a lot of queer posters as well -- but, a noticeably smaller percentage than there used to be. The pattern of "fedi's less queer than it used to be" has been in place since April 2017 if not earlier. And, even though a lot of posters here are queer, trans, and non-binary, and so are a lot of fedi developers, there are a lot of inequities in fedi's power structure. @[email protected]'s Mourning Mastodon from April 2017 and hoodieaidakitten's Mastodon’s Complicated Relationship with Queer Activism from 2018 have the backstory here. I'm sure there are power inequities in cohost as well, but at least from an LGBTQIA2S+ perspective the dynamics were very different.
In terms of the tradeoff, Glitch and Hometown and other platforms with local-only post offer some of it, but there's still exposure to other instances. Allow-list federation is another point on the curve, pawoo has been doing it for years. As you say though both of those are in tension with other things that people want, and with assumptions like "openness is good" and "bigger is better". -
@jdp23 @brainwane @pho4cexa I do want to push back a little bit on the idea of Cohost being a queer sanctum and that being 100% a good thing. A little bit of Mastodon history is important here. A lot of the original members of Cohost were originally Mastodon users, from an instance called snouts.online, which was a furry trans leftist instance in the way that used to be common here. Like Cohost, snouts.online had a bit of a reputation among the wider fediverse of being an insular space with a somewhat clique‐y culture that didn’t necessarily participate in the broader community much.
Here is the story of how snouts.online stopped existing, as I remember it (see next post):
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• A user on monads.online made a post, the exact contents of which I forget, but which I believe was intended to be critical of Zionist Jews.
• A user on snouts.online reported the post, feeling that the post made blanket statements about Jews.
• The moderator for monads.online screenshotted the post, with the comment “this user is Jewish”. (The user who was reported was, indeed, Jewish.) Let it be known that monads.online has long had a highly‐confrontational approach to moderation and its own community problems.
• The reporter took this to be “screenshot‐dunking” and posted a long, confrontational response. This led to an instance feud between snouts.online and monads.online which spread across the wider fediverse.
[continued]
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• In the course of this feud, many members of snouts.online made posts which were widely considered to be racist, and the ability of snouts.online to moderate its own users was questioned.
• The moderators of snouts.online stepped down. A new moderator replaced them, with the intention of cleaning up the moderation and holding the instance to a higher standard.
• Users of snouts.online were upset with this new moderator and rejected them.
• The instance was shut down and many snouts.online users went back to Twitter. (I do not believe Cohost was an option yet.)
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@jdp23 @brainwane @pho4cexa From statements of some ex‐snouts.online people on Twitter, the impression that people got was that they were disillusioned with federation, tired of fediverse drama, and thought a single, insular culture with paid moderators was a better social approach. All of these opinions would form the bedrock of Cohost.
What I want to emphasize here is that these were often literally the same queer users, and certainly descendants of the same queer culture, which got Mastodon rightly criticized for being unwelcoming to people of colour in 2017 when Mastodon was first making it big. The special, magical vibes that Cohost had were in many ways a recreation of the special, magical vibes that Mastodon had back in December of 2016 when it was only one instance and everybody knew everybody else. From being present on the Mastodon side of that, I know that that culture, while very nice for a certain kind of weird white trans person, was built on exclusion.