https://cohost.org

anyone use this site? it's a social media platform that takes ideas from both twitter and tumblr, created by a few people who wanted to make a platform where people can more easily get paid for their work/art/whatever as i understand it? it seems like the target demographic has a lot of overlap with tumblr mostly from what i can tell.

i also think there's been some controversy lately around the fact that they're basically hemorrhaging money and not turning a profit, despite taking a big loan from a friend? they also call themselves a non-for-profit business, which is even stranger?????

anyway, i made an account for basement community, and gonna see what it's all about. the color palette really hooked me in.

I still have an account there, despite asking that it be deleted almost a year ago after learning that they were allowing lolicon art at the time. They might since have changed their minds, but I'm still ambivalent about anything that even looks like social media or promises "community" online. Most such platforms more often deliver cacophony instead.

Besides, any platform that doesn't let you delete your account is a joke, IMO. That's the first bit of functionality you need to get right, otherwise I'm liable to think you're fuckin' shady.

it seems like they might have gone back on allowing that content. but regardless, i think going back and forth on moderation decisions based on what's popular is dumb. i'd rather see people who run a site like that be decisive, regardless of what the rule is. I feel like it would lose you more users by just flip-flopping between rules

i'll....i'll get to work this weekend on finally getting the button to do this added to the site 😥

So, you didn't already have that in place? Luckily this place is sufficiently chill that I hadn't been annoyed enough to look for it yet.

The fact that it wasn't there on Cohost when the loli question first came up so that people could leave if they weren't on-board with management's decision (or indecision in this case) was a big red flag for me,.

yeah so far 1 person has asked and i experimented with the idea of "deleting" a user would wipe their personal information from their profile, and their posts would be blanked with a shell account, which can be seen here: https://basementcommunity.com/threads/126?postID=872#872

the issue is, users' posts contain plain text quotes which have the quoted username at the time of post creation, which means you still see their old username and post content, which can be seen in this quote: https://basementcommunity.com/threads/126?postID=940#940

getting rid of the post entirely would severely fuck with other peoples "unread post count," which is why there technically still needs to be a post in place there. i might just end up pulling the trigger on this approach and try to figure out the quoting issue some time later.

happy to chat more about it in the technical sub-forum too

but on topic, cohost not figuring this out in the span on multiple years is insane. i'm one person, and the the thought of having 2 other people working on this site with me makes me feel like i could be banging out features way more quickly, especially ones that users need, rather than want. i think it's funny that in the update they released today, someone was asking about a financials update and an update on a revenue-generating feature, and the response is super snarky.

bruh i had no idea there was even a lolicon/cub debate that was going on there - you would think that like,, the normal person stance of "cp of any kind is fucked up and shouldn't have a platform" would be the one to go with immediately. like even if it is a "cope", it's not a healthy one and therapy should be sought out i think.

i have one and i've enjoyed it so far, the people who have interacted with my posts have been chill with it and i do like that follower counts and likes and reblog amounts aren't shown (my brain is silly and latches onto the numbers). though what was mentioned in the mastodon post is definitely concerning to me. i hope that the people in charge learn some common sense and decency cus i'd like to continue using it actually.

content has been deleted

Yeah, that's another thing. Way too many sites hiding everything behind a login so that you can't even lurk and get a feel for a site without creating an account. That's not just bullshit, it's arrant bullshit.

content has been deleted

I'm not sure where I had picked up that word, but I think it was some blog using it in the phrase "arrant nonsense". Either that, or perhaps I had encountered that phrase while reading Michael Moorcock -- or perhaps in C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine novels; it sounds like something they'd use. Either way, it's hard to resist using uncommon words merely for novelty's sake, especially if they more accurately convey my intended meaning than common, basic words.

But I tend to steer clear of "niggard" and "niggardly"; they are too easily misheard or misread as racial slurs when they are synonyms for "miser" and "miserly", and I don't need that kind of hassle.

This is one reason I've made a point of doing everything I can to keep my marriage going strong. Online dating was tolerable enough when it meant meeting somebody in a forum, agreeing to email or IM outside the forum, finding out that you were each the other's preferred sex/gender/orientation, and agreeing to see where it went and possibly meeting somewhere public for a first date. But these apps? If not wanting to use them makes me an old man yelling at clouds, then I'll yell myself hoarse.

content has been deleted

I found the dating apps to be a miserable experience. After a while life got in my way, and by the time I was starting to think about getting back onto them it was late 2019, and COVID quashed any desire I had to even get back into dating at all.

I had the best luck with Yahoo chat rooms somehow. Not sure why it was always Yahoo, but I could usually find someone to at least meet up for a drink after a while. They were certainly fun times, but it's gone now.

Craigslist of all places was another one I had fun with. Sadly it's dead as hell now that they banned everything.

Better not use words like "niggardly" around them, either.

Not sure they had a choice. Between the passage of laws like FOSTA and SESTA and the US government's persecution of the operators of backpage.com (one of them, James Larkin, recently killed himself), it's a bad time to operate a site like Craigslist and provide personal ads.

Too much censorship, and the justifications are always the same. "We've got to protect women and children."

Oh I know, but damn, it really took the fun out of meeting other weirdos at sketchy bars

content has been deleted

i feel like it's perhaps worth noting here that cohost is dead as hell. though i suppose to anyone keeping track of their financial situation this was fully anticipated and unsurprising.

their updates always made me want to smash my head against the wall. it was excuse after excuse on why they couldn't work on anything that would actually make them money, and instead focused on making existing features (which already worked fine) better.

if i was the investor, i'd be so pissed. those people seemed like they had no idea what they were doing

https://blog.basementcommunity.com/negative-post-about-cohost/

I wrote a post about cohost. i know they get a lot of hate, but I think the stuff I highlighted here is well-deserved. I'm not a "well they should have just paid themselves less" type, but there was absolutely some stupid shit going on in that place