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.

Hard agree. A lot of us are hoping to use this to gauge the reach of our creative work, which is our livelihood, and it is incredibly difficult to do that without knowing how many people are following us and who is following us.  In spite of the good intentions behind hiding it, it's a very basic and necessary function of social media.

> knowing how many people are following us and who is following us. 

Here's the thing, you can already see who is following you, and gauge the number of people who do, but you can't see how big of an audience they have. 

The topic isn't "know my own audience", its "everyone's audience and subscriptions are public knowledge and counted on a profile"

Sure! Strayed a little but that would be nice to be able to toggle on/off if you wanted.

 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)

Not that we seem to have a problem with fash on the site now, but being able to see who people are following on twitter was absolutely essential for sniffing out whether some guy who was interacting in my local smash scene was fash or just ignorant. The latter was worth being patient with, the former was not.

Of course, for people who have to deal with cliquey friend groups, this feature would be a nightmare, but also... it's a nightmare of their own choosing. If you have two friends fighting and they both tell you to pick a side and block the other person, you have zero friends fighting, because both of them are petty people who will not be kind to you if you ever have an honest disagreement with them. If you attend social gatherings where associating with some pariah is enough to get you turned away at the door, then either that pariah is someone you legitimately should not be socializing with (e.g., they're legitimately fash and you're just ignorant of it) or the social gathering is run by a clique, which means it is not worth attending, because cliques are, writ large, bad.

I understand that sometimes you just cannot avoid having to deal with cliques and drama; sometimes, you have a dearly beloved family member or something who is a member of a clique, and you don't want to cut off your ties with that family member so you have to deal with their problems. Protecting people who are in situations like that is important, but if we ever get a chud problem on here that goes beyond what the staff can/will handle, then we will need following lists to be public as they are the number one method of protecting yourself against bad actors, IME. Hopefully we never get that far!

The webrings idea is good btw. That would help with the discoverability issue for sure, and is in-line with the human-curated discoverability principle of cohost.

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.

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.

That's why it should be an option to show or hide. If you'd prefer not to see it, then you don't have to, but for those of us that do, we can.

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 have a couple opinions here.

Firstly, I wholeheartedly agree with mossflwer's post regarding mutual connections.

Secondly, as I interpret the home page, a visible follower count would break "metrics are ruining our lives." As much as I've missed it, it being hidden is consistent with that ethos, and I personally would say that it should only be visible to yourself. 

Thirdly, by contrast, following lists should be visible. Probably optionally so (on by default please,) perhaps only visible to mutuals, but as of right now, it's not just tough to find your friends on the website; it's impossible. It feels worryingly like a walled garden in that sense. There's not a specific metric tied to that, as I see it, so I don't see immediately see why it'd be an issue, though I could be dead wrong haha

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.

The original introduction post to Cohost says this:

> information about engagement will be available for people doing this for a living, but it won’t be in your face all the time constantly

Try emailing staff if you need it?