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 disagree with this. Yes, it would be useful to find people you followed on other places/who your friends are following/etc., but the potential drawbacks are larger in my opinion.

For starters, popularity contests are bad and as much as we want to think ourselves above them, having those sorts of metrics will make users more likely to fixate on them.

Also, there's the potential for harassment splashback of the "why are you following X problematic person" or "if you follow Y, you are problematic" variety. Not to mention an even more targeted kind of harassment, trying to alienate the victim from their followers or going after the victim's followers.

Yes, if they make this optional a target of harassment could hide their followers/following, but it often happens that the victim of harassment doesn't realize what's going on until it's too late.

I think there are other ways we can lower the learning curve for new users, we can try different things

finding your friends via "who your friends follow" works out ok when your friends follow maybe 12 people, but when you end up seeing a hundred or so accounts, it can get a little hard. i know a lot of people are bringing back "follow friday" posts, but i do wonder if there was a little more that cohost could do 

my modest proposal? a webring. 

users can start a group, ask people to join,  and then on your profile page, you show the webrings you're a member of, with little back/next buttons or even a random button

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.

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 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. 

Fully agree. I think its good the cohost doesnt do this by default, but it makes no sense to leave it out when it lets people get around so much easier.

In the hypothetical scenario where someone wants to follow, say, a weird nsfw account, but doesnt want that to be on their list, cohost already makes it so easy to make a side account, with its own follow list. The side account functionality is in fact, the strongest privacy tool you could give most people.

While the intent behind wanting to keep follow lists obscured is good, and im sure it saved time trying to figure out how it should be implemented, its become a redundant privacy feature that creates a sharper learning curve to cohost.

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

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

I really appreciate being able to see what mutuals follow someone. It gives me a quick way to vet their safety to follow without having to dive into their post history. I don't care about seeing follow numbers or seeing all of their followers / who they follow, just mutual connections

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.

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.

Fully agree! Having this as an option in a settings menu is useful. One of my main ways to find new artists to follow is to go into my favourite artists profiles and look at who they're following since they tend to have similar styles and/or like similar things. Not having this as an option or being able to provide that option to others makes it a lot harder to find profiles I like 

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

I disagree that it's necessary for social media. It may be if you only use social media as part of your marketing, but that's not the only use for social media and not all social media has to do everything for everyone.