cohost support

Finding friends and mutuals is hard.  

Users should be able to show who they follow / who follows them if they wish.  Make it a couple of profile options.

Right now finding your friends who were on other... bird-like social media platforms... is hard.

I think users should have the ability to follow who they like without being concerned that other users will see it, for a variety of reasons. Likewise, they should not feel they need to monitor and purge their follower list. For this reason, follower/following lists should not become publicly visible by default, though I don't see a problem with making it visible as an opt-in. I think it's a good thing that Cohost's design prevents users from asking each other why they follow a particular user, or why they allow that user to follow them, both of which I have seen on other sites. Making it opt-in also avoids the implication that someone with it hidden is deliberately choosing to hide something. 

The root of the issue is discovery. It can be a little tricky to discover cool new people to follow, or recover people that you followed elsewhere. Keep an eye on specific tags, places where you know someone would be more likely to show up.

Opening up the "Following" list can help with discovery too, but a decade and a half of social media has brought bigger and weirder issues that come with that. The "Followers" list on the other hand is just a metric.

Personally, I feel both aren't really anyone else's business. Making their visibility opt-in is fine enough, but I do feel it's important that people have the option to appear absent on Follower/Following lists too - especially if someone's page is meant to be more private/personal and close-knit.

That's a really good point, Lollie. Hiding who you follow doesn't do you much good if you're still showing up on other people's follower lists. 

STRONG no-vote on this. It only leads to bad things. If people want discoverability tools they should be handled separately.

I have found several of my friends on here by talking to them and asking if they're on here.

This is a fundamental requirement for cohost to be functional as a network. If there was any easy way to explore content from people I don't follow directly (like e.g. everything2, newgrounds or any forum solved 20+ years ago) it would make some kind of sense. There isn't.

Assuming everyone wants to be an ascetic who is here out of some kind of desire to make things difficult for themselves and limit their horizons is the Not Invented Here dogma lots of abandoned alternative online communities subscribed to.

I feel like it's kind of weird to me to suggest this is somehow a requirement for any social network other than "abandoned alternative communities" when tiktok, tumblr and facebook don't have a feature like this at all. Follow lists are not standard and relying on them as a primary discoverability tool is something people do when sites don't have useful alternatives.

All those sites have both algorithmic curation and user search though. Cohost doesn't have those nor any other options. Follow lists have been the standard for a long time now because they're low friction. Not everybody wants to commit a lot of time to bootstrapping their account before they can evaluate whether a social network is for them.

Cohost has user search, and moreover, it has a robust tagging system that lets you find posts by people who  share your interests.

Beyond all that, cohost literally says on the signup front page that human-curated discoverability is an important feature to them that they want to prioritize. Just because discoverability is tricky now doesn't mean things will always be the same, and doesn't mean it's worth adding potentially undesirable features to stopgap it.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realise search found users as it prompts "search for pages and tags" but calls user pages "profiles" elsewhere. Some users do seem to be using the tagging system as an awkward workaround for not being able to find anyone, which I guess will work up to a point.

I can't edit my post, so: a quick addendum that I am retracting the last part (#3) of my reply. Thank you jgs, Lollie, and atomicthumbs (you'd be surprised but I hadn't thought of that avenue)

I want to state for the record here that whilst I defer to those who have lived through snowballing harassment issues to how being able to see if someone follows you when interacting is useful and a safeguarding issue, I categorically dislike the idea of being able to see lists of other people's follows/followers and don't really understand why you'd say tags are 'workarounds' to discoverability rather than a feature. It is great being able to find tags that either I use or people I follow use and see who else is using them - particularly for wider discussion topics (whatcha reading / world music wednesday) or particular activities (photography / artistsofcohost / games) / mediums. Yes - the naming convention across the site could be tweaked to be more consistent/clearer (i.e. making it more obvious that 'pages' mean accounts, give or take), but with the followed bookmark feed coming, that function is going to get stronger and stronger as ways of finding people who share similar interests. There's also a lot of people who are posting on the global cohost feed now as well, for full unadulterated accounts. Also, I've followed so many people from posts shared by people I follow - this is so refreshing!

 I'm having a zero discovery situation here.

To my surprise people get harrassed because of who they follow or don't follow.
I propose to let people chose for each follow if to show it publicly, so that no one would ever know.

This should remove the possibility of people attacking the fact that one has not the following list public.

(they could also use a double account to secretively folllow accounts, but hey, maybe this would be better for them)