@mrencyclopedia and so essentially a site like Cohost feels like the same sort of thing...you dragged everyone out into the desert to start a farm then realized you had no plan to get running water out there and they all thought when they went there you knew what you were doing and would take care of them
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I've been reading a lot of responses people have had to Cohost shutting down. -
I've been reading a lot of responses people have had to Cohost shutting down.@mrencyclopedia I've said this before but like...it reminds me of people who have tried to start Queer Communes. The buy a shitty parcel of land that they could afford only because it's unusable, far away from anything, then they get online and start advertising for other queer people, usually mentally ill, homeless, poor, etc. queer people desperate for somewhere to go to come join them. Now they're all out in the desert or swamp with no shelter, nowhere near a doctor, barely anything to eat, and no support network except each other which tends to go pretty poorly. Then of course it's hard for those people to leave because they've not been working jobs that bring in money this whole time so they're more broke than they started.
I don't really find that to be much of a kindness to those folks!
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If any of these discord servers popping up for people who were on Cohost devolve into some kind of unbelievably obtuse drama you are legally required to tell me about it.If any of these discord servers popping up for people who were on Cohost devolve into some kind of unbelievably obtuse drama you are legally required to tell me about it.
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Here's a quick note about the "Stripe changed their policies and ruined tipping and that's why Cohost died" idea.Here's a quick note about the "Stripe changed their policies and ruined tipping and that's why Cohost died" idea.
The Stripe update Cohost said changed the rules in...either May or June I'd have to double check.
This is me looking up their Artist Alley policies (because the wording was weird and I wondered if it was copy and pasted from Stripe's TOS) in April, at least a month prior to that "sudden change".
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This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:I don't know if there IS a solid business model for social media to be profitable or at least break even AND pay a staff that kind of money.
But that doesn't mean that that's the only option and that doesn't mean that we can't have nice things. You just can't have nice things without a solid business plan. But the problem was never the users not doing enough, they went above and beyond on their end towards trying to keep the site afloat. The demand is there and people are willing to pay.
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This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:When Cohost says they needed more users to survive, it's not because there weren't enough people paying. It's because their salaries were too much. This was never going to be a well paying business because social media never has been for anyone (grifting VC with social media sure but not social media itself).
And more users wouldn't have saved them because the amount of new users they would have needed signing up AND subscribing would have been so many that they would have HAD to have hired another moderator, at the same salary as everyone else, and been fucked.
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This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:
Don't let Cohost make you think that better things aren't possible online. Cohost actually had a better conversion rate than most websites by FAR. People WERE in fact willing to pay for a site that doesn't try to trick them into watching ads or engaging for clicks. They just had a poor business plan. But I've seen posts like "guess nobody's willing to pay to not be the product..." and that's not what happened here at all, people were in fact willing to pay, heck some people were buying extra subscriptions (which functionally did nothing) just to pay MORE.
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If you want to read the Cohost Is Closing post but it won't load because their servers are struggling, I took a screenshot as soon as it hit expecting this very thing:If you want to read the Cohost Is Closing post but it won't load because their servers are struggling, I took a screenshot as soon as it hit expecting this very thing:
Was going to upload but honestly just leech off Discord's hosting and cost them some money why not
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The #1 thing I have to say about the Cohost announcement is:The #1 thing I have to say about the Cohost announcement is:
This isn't the end, this is the beginning. Not of Cohost itself, it's the end of Cohost itself, but it's the beginning of seeing them put their money where their mouth is. All the things they've been saying about what they would do if they closed, all the things their friends were saying about how they totally wouldn't close and weren't at any risk of doing so but if they did they'd handle it all right...this is the part where we see what they do, and that's the part I'm most interested in.
Do we get export tools? The ones people begged them to work on months and months ago and they said it wasn't that bad yet?
Do we get the static tombstone version of the site that they said they'd do if they were forced to close?
Do they keep their promises to not sell the site and its data? What if someone offers?
These questions have stopped being hypotheticals. They're about to happen.
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I'm not always clear on what fedi stuff is client side vs server side soWho Do I Need To Complain To
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I'm not always clear on what fedi stuff is client side vs server side soI'm not always clear on what fedi stuff is client side vs server side so
If I am seeing posts in my timeline from someone I blocked boosted by someone I follow, is it my client not filtering that out or is it my server not doing it
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Fedi please help me answer a question that just came up in a conversation.@riley Now I'd like to hear from someone who knows sign language if this is part of ASL with the same meaning, like does this denote sarcasm in ASL?
(I'm assuming ASL otherwise I'm getting into a rabbit hole of "does this gesture exist in every other form of sign language too" and at some point I need to quit digging into this rabbithole lol)
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Fedi please help me answer a question that just came up in a conversation.I am enjoying the responses to this a lot. I was thinking about it because when I was studying overseas I had a classmate (and I forget who it was now but I think it was one of my classmates from an Asian country) who asked me "why do Americans do that what does that mean" because they had seen it in American TV shows. So I was really curious how widespread this was. I did at least know it wasn't just America, but since it's mimicking the use of quotes in written English to denote sarcasm/skepticism it's definitely tied to language to some degree.
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Fedi please help me answer a question that just came up in a conversation.Fedi please help me answer a question that just came up in a conversation. I'm specifically looking for input from people from countries where English isn't the primary language. Boost welcome so I can find some more examples.
Does your language/culture use finger quotes?
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@Maverynthia @kestral (and worth noting that even with these big spikes of once a year money they STILL manage to be in the red)
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@Maverynthia @kestral yes Twitter did too, they actually always look better off than they are financially in the summers because they have the spike of yearly renewals when the site launched (very end of June so most of these are in July) and then I think October was when Twitter drove a bunch of people off, so they had yearly renewals from that period too...and since they're yearly renewals and not monthly it makes the net income look really big. But they don't see those peoples money again for a year and the people renewing is a dwindling number.
Their spike for Tumblr exodus is November I think, we'll see if they make it that far.
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@kestral @Maverynthia seeded its beta period with friends and family, they spread the good word and stick to it, and dominate the site culture because they were already a built in social circle with some notable names and discoverability isn't as big of a problem for them as it is for new unrelated users.
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@Maverynthia although cohost has at different times claimed to be either one of these lol. They have talked about registering as a non profit before but it's just talk, they can't afford the overhead and don't meet the requirements anyway. They don't meet the requirements of a not for profit in most states either as far as I can tell.
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@Maverynthia I THINK churches tend to be non profits and not not for profits (extremely confusing sentences) but I'm not 100% sure
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Honestly a lot of the defenses of Cohost's decisions are from people comparing Cohost to Twitter or Tumblr. "They're just three (and/or four) people!" is in contrast to these major corporations.@Maverynthia they're all co-owners, they're a for profit LLC masquerading as a not for profit co-op (their company site still lists them as not for profit even though they've never had this designation and can't even register as one in the state they're registered in apparently, not all states have not-for-profits)