#cohost

[neovid]

Damn, I meant to check out Dreamwidth after we lost Cohost, but never got around to it. The Dreamwidth pitch being "Livejournal 2" was enough to sell me on it, but then it just went *pft* out of my brain, like a lot of things do these days.

So it seems like some of you might be interested in learning more about Dreamwidth.

Listen, here's the thing: Dreamwidth is not slick. It is not fancy. Its base code was originally put together some two decades ago or more, and it looks like it. It can't do much with images and definitely not with video—like, I think there's some way to embed video, but I have no idea how to do it, and hosting it on Dreamwidth is, uh...

The point is! Dreamwidth is a lot different from Tumblr. It's closer to Tumblr than it is to Facebook or Instagram, but it's a lot more old-school internet than Tumblr is. And that means that, for anyone who wasn't on the internet some ten, fifteen years ago, there's probably going to be a steep learning curve. It can take more effort to post things there, and more effort to find your people, its image hosting capacity can charitably be described as both "limited" and "poorly organized", and overall it may still never be the kind of website where you, personally, will want to spend a lot of time or do a lot of things. Dreamwidth does not and will never have an app, for pretty much the same reasons as AO3.

But there is one thing I can guarantee, and that is that Dreamwidth is willing to fight for us and our rights. They're already doing so.

[balketh]

[insertdisc5]

i saw you use cohost. would you recommend is as a good/active twitter alternative? im getting tired of the hell hole that this bird website is

i really love cohost and the community there but it is absolutely NOT a twitter alternative. if anything it's a tumblr alternative.

here's my small speech about cohost and why i like it

it's a mix between tumblr and livejournal which is fun

the community is very fun and active! when i made my intro post i had a dozen people leaving a comment welcoming me to cohost which is a very nice feeling

it is very much NOT about likes and follower counts. in fact, there is no way for anyone to know how many likes a post has, or how many followers someone has. YOU dont even know how many followers you have

the only visible number is the number of comments on a post, which is where the community comes from: if you want people to know a post is great, you gotta leave a comment saying so!!!

you can have as many links as you want on your profile, AND you can have links be only visible to logged in users, only to people following you, or only visible to pages you follow... so it's a great way to have your discord only be visible to certain people for example

if you DO want a more twitter-like experience, there is a tag that's The Global Cohost Feed, so you have a bunch of posts from a lot of people

when you first join you will have a few days where you can't post anything, but you can still look at posts and share them. a lot of it must be so cohost can prepare code to bring you in or whatever, BUT it also means you get those couple of days to get to know the culture of the website a bit more! it's lovely

chronological feed my beloved

no algorithm my beloved

cohost does have some issues (adding images is a PAIN), but the staff is working really hard to fix them and is always listening to people's feedback! i like cohost a lot. join me

[prokopetz]

Really, the big reason I have no real interest in posting on Cohost as things stand is that there's no mechanism for viewing interactions with a specific post. I guess I don't need to be able to creep the notifications on other people's posts, but not being able to get a digest of interactions with one of my own posts? Hard deal-breaker – like, I understand the "no metrics" philosophy, but being so committed to not exposing metrics that I can't see what people are doing with my own shit is a big problem for two reasons:

It takes some fairly basic due diligence tools for online safety off the table. The widely circulating version of one of my posts could have defamatory remarks or literal Nazi propaganda tacked onto it via a reblog, and I'd never know about it unless that specific version of the post happened to cross my dashboard.

Not being able to readily tell when a non-mutual has commented on one of my posts means I can't respond to that comment, which basically torpedoes the conversational function of the reblog-with-comments model. The platform's efforts to avoid furnishing actionable engagement metrics are actively hindering engagement itself, and that's a problem when one of the types of engagement that's being hindered is "having conversations with other users".

[incognitopolls]

If you still use Twitter but ALSO are active on another of these sites (as a replacement/supplement to specifically Twitter), select the newer site that you're active on.

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[reachartwork]

if theres one thing you should take from the life and death of cohost it's "don't give your investor a perverse incentive to let your website fail by asking them to loan you money with your website as collateral".

if there's two things you should take from it it's "don't host images or your server costs will balloon out of control until you go bankrupt".

[euniexenoblade]

Cohost shutting down.

[clocknumberonefan]

chickens. so many chickens. Burn them all alive

[aqueousablution]

He is only archives now TT__TT 7

It may not have been a perfect website, but dammit, it was home <3

[snarp]

Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

-- cohost to shut down at end of 2024 (2024-09-09)

Being very careful never to mention this person's name. What multimillionaire is out there debt-trapping devs to get hold of social media site code?

[pillowfort-social]

We are very saddened to hear the news regarding cohost. It means there is one less independent, alternate social media platform. This easily could have been our fate this year. We're so grateful that our community has helped us with enough funding until January 2025. If you enjoy indie social media free of corporate shenanigans now more than every it's important to support your favorite social media platform. Even if it's not us. In the upcoming weeks we will release a welcome guide for new and prospective cohost community members who decide to make Pillowfort their home. If you are a cohost user: what topics would you like us to address in the guide?

[cabl-art]

goodbye cohost

its really over.

[jinglebellrockstars]

[prokopetz]

Shout-out to artists on Cohost who give every single piece they post the exact same filename, thereby forcing me to actually curate my image library for once in order to avoid overwriting shit.

[chirasul]

[godkillerbrigade]

HEY I HAVE A NEWSLETTER NOW

Social media is dying and the new internet struggles to be born; now is the time of emails. If you wanna keep abreast of my future projects, like THE LAST DAYS OF FRIENDSHIP VALLEY:

or FISH FEAR ME:

This is the new best way to do that!! Consider giving it a follow!