Choice to publicly display Followers / Following : cohost support

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Gordon Little

started a topic over 1 year ago

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.

B

Ben Taylor

said 8 months ago

Why not just show the list without the number? Sure, you can technically still scroll through the whole list and count, but few people will bother to do that, and not having a number in your face whenever you load someone's page would do a lot to curb metrics-obsession, while allowing you to see the list would be a huge help with finding people.

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drewbabe

said 8 months ago

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.