I absolutely agree. I did some quick edits to show how much space there is wasted on the left hand side of the current UI and how much more cohesive the site looks with wider posts and less wasted space:
As you can see, the site looks so much BETTER with wider posts. All the elements fit together in unity.
Also, and this is minor, but I did move the Post button to be over above the left hand menu. I think it just makes more SENSE over there and I keep looking for it over there every time I go to post.
If post-width is altered at all, it's important that post-width is unified across the entire site: Home feed, profiles, and the post editor. It can make the difference between whether a paragraph feels awkwardly tight or too dense to read.
It will affect editing and formatting for visual flow as well. If you've ever edited a sentence so that it falls onto the next line gracefully, or tried to avoid having a single word orphaned on a new line, you know this pain.
I guess I'm sort of thinking about like, in print publishing, you've got the .docx format where shit might move around depending on your display size or what program you're using; but then you've got that sweet .pdf format where everything will always display exactly the same, which is what you want for printing a book to ensure it comes up the same as how you laid it out.
So what I want isn't even necessarily for all posts to be wider, but for me to be able to put my posts, metaphorically, in "PDF mode" where someone can click on "expand" or something and see it exactly how I formatted it intentionally.
Created a support account for this same reason. It's just a little _off_.
Zooming out to 80% or zooming in to 120% each do things which makes things nicer. So I suspect that the site could just use a bit of responsive optimization to make more people happy.
100%:
80%
Notice how the sidenav and sidebar aren't squishing in the posts as much anymore. The Cohost corner reads better with the smaller font too.
120%
With this zoom level the post section just got wider and the sidebars stayed the same size as 100%. This is nice I think but because the font got bigger too, the relative amount of text per line in the posts is the same, which isn't ideal.
shel
As a poet, controlling when line breaks happen is very important. Obviously, on a phone, your screen is going to be very narrow and it might force line-breaks that are not ideal; but on Cohost Desktop/Tablet Mode all the posts are still very very narrow all the time even when viewed on their own. Like they're phone screen width whether or not you're on a phone. This makes it very hard to post poetry on cohost unless it's very staccato with very frequent linebreaks; or prose-poems.
Some poems use very specific formatting like indentation to convey meaning. Cohost allows you to do things like this, but then the narrowness makes it non-functional for poetry anyway.
It would be nice to have a way to collapse the sidebars and have a "full-view" for a post where I can have wider line breaks. then for phones I could just tell people "Please rotate your phone to landscape for the best experience" idk.
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