Cohost Is Now Read-Only

[ysabetwordsmith]

As of October 1, 2024, Cohost has gone to read-only mode.

"in read-only mode, cohost will look and function about the same as it does now. the dashboard, profiles, tag feeds, bookmarked tag feed, search, comments, and pretty much everything else will still function. you will not be able to make new posts, edit or delete existing posts, like posts, follow, unfollow, block, or silence users, edit your profile, or do any other action that would involve changing cohost. due to a bug, account deletions may not be available until after we have processed all data exports."
-- Cohost Staff

You still have time to copy your content to other platforms and/or archive your old Cohost pages via sites like Wayback or Ghost. The site is supposed to remain visible up to the end of 2024. It will be deleted on December 31. On January 1, 2025, the redirect will be set to Wayback to prevent linkrot.


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Comments

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Ohhh, if only. <<

It's worth a try. If nothing else, having more people who make better use of tags may inspire others to expand their use.

>> I was part of the tiny squad of Cohosters who asked the yinglet community if they could please, just for accessibility reasons, tag their shareable posts with “yingletspeak” or “typing quirk” or something internally consistent so we could silence the tag and avoid the typing quirk that yinglets latched on to. <<

I can see that it would be useful to have that tagged, and very useful to be able to silence a tag. I'm not sure DW does tag silencing. You can block people from commenting, but it doesn't make their posts invisible to you or vice versa (which it should: there needs to be a way for people to cease existing to each other).

>> The response was, at first, just annoyed.<<

People often get annoyed when somebody asks them to do a thing in their own space that they don't want to do. It's their space after all. But in a tag-based venue, the lines between "private blog" and "public conversation" get pretty blurred.

Tagging can get fraught, especially if someone has a hard time remembering to tag things or is not good at tagging. I've seen major fights break out over it in fanfic hubs and fests, to the point of people threatening to ban someone for using or forgetting to use a given tag or category of tags. :/ Touchy stuff. People have feelings. And they're not always careful of each other's feelings, which isn't a problem that software can solve.

>> Then ableist. Then racist. <<

That's no excuse for being mean.

>> All because they refused to accept that it was an actual accessibility issue, rather than a “conflicting access need” between their happiness versus our safety and ability to even use the site at all.<<

Yeah, that sucks.

>> Some people just seem… allergic? to using tags on sites like this.<<

That matches my observations.

>> I don’t understand why these people even want to be places like this that rely on tags.<<

Things I have observed:

* Some people use the platform in ways that don't really require tags. If they don't need the feature, they may not bother with it.

* Some people's brains just do not naturally pick out keywords that tell them "Good tags for this post are X, Y, Z." It can be really hard for them.

* Platforms close, people move, and they may be using this because it's the least-worst option not what they would really prefer. This leads to a lot of people not using some features, or handling them clumsily.

There's a ton of stuff I don't use, like filters. I've had people ask me to use them, but I can't. I'd never remember them. And if someone else locks some of their posts, but gives me access, I often overlook that little lock dingbat and try to link to locked posts, which annoys everyone. So I don't subscribe to blogs that are mostly locked. It's fine for people to use filters and locks, it's just not my thing. And that can apply to almost any feature -- it just doesn't work for everyone.

Still no reason to be mean to each other though.