cohost support

A marker next to an account's name if they follow you would be nice. Currently you will get notified if someone follows you, or you can look through your follower list, but that's not necessarily at hand when you're just browsing.

I'd also be interested in seeing if people you follow follow you back and vice versa.

I think it's nice to celebrate being mutuals.

Agreed, but also I'd like a "you follow this account" badge. Sometimes I see a post I like, and I don't remember if the person it's from is someone I already follow or not, so I have to go to their page to check. (Especially if they just changed their display name or avatar!) It would be convenient if I didn't have to do that. This would also be solved by just putting a follow/unfollow button somewhere on people's posts. 

This is one of those metrics that I'm actually okay not knowing, similarly to how we can't see the number of likes we have on a post, or the number of followers we have.

The most common case I can think of is learning that a user who was previously following you has decided to unfollow. Some people get really hung up on this, where ultimately it's the user's decision, and information that I do not need to know. Free yourself, let everyone's "follows you" status be unknown.

From my perspective, this isn't a metrics things. I'm all for the "no metrics" thing cohost is going for. To me, it's more a question of making the site and my interactions with it more legible. "Is the person replying to me or rechosting my post someone who follows me or not" is a question that informs how I might respond to them, as it spells the difference between someone who already knows my bullshit and someone who does not.

As to cases where this feature may provide unwanted information about unfollows, while I agree that's possible, It's not going out of it's way to provide this information to you (in that you'd have to remember that an account was once following you and notice that now it's not). It's also information that could come up purely as a result of social interaction. As long as the followers page exists (and let me state that i believe removal of all information about who follows you would be a very bad idea), that's information that could be surfaced.

There is also the third path of opt-in for this, but too many option flags can make things difficult to maintain, so I would leave the question of that to the judgement of staff.

 I'm a no vote on this, it strays too close the kind of clout metrics that I feel it's part of cohost's core mission to avoid

I would disagree that this gets into clout territory. Again, this information is already available from the followers page, and to have it presented in the disconnected form of "the account I'm looking at follows me" does not, I don't think, give you the kind of metrics that we want to avoid here.

 It absolutely does fall into hostility-inducing metrics, because if that information is surfaced it makes it easier to see when people unfollow. There's no real value in doing this.

I would like to be able to unfollow someone who follows me without feeling like I'm destroying some kind of tenuous relationship, the way I do on Twitter, and I would like others to be able to unfollow me without that.

"Breaking mutuals" on Twitter feels like a big decision and it's led to me muting some people whose posts I am really not interested in seeing, but who I don't want to risk upsetting by unfollowing. I heavily prefer the Cohost approach where someone's importance to me is not determined by some manifestation of a site feature, but by whether we talk and get along or not.

People interact differently with followers and mutuals than with randos, and with good reason. Providing context about your relationship with another user is not the same as incentivizing clout-chasing and metrics. It's true that it could sometimes lead someone to realize another user unfollowed them, but I don't think that's so terrible that otherwise useful features should be avoided because of the possibility. Others in this thread have already explained how it would be valuable to them. 

Addressing previous claims of usefulness: I'm extremely skeptical that this could help "monitor risk of harrassment" by seeing someone follow you. If you're concerned someone might harrass you you should just block them immediately? I'm extremely unclear what other use cases could be related to that that aren't frankly, getting into spying territory. Your use case of "I can't remember if I follow them" seems unrelated. I don't see this adding any useful functionality that a search bar on the follows page can't handle, at the cost of CONSTANTLY reminding you about follow metrics.

A common thing I've seen users describe liking about cohost over the past few months is the low risk of offending someone by unfollowing them, because there's no convenient signal as to whether the other person is following you. Personally, having lived with this dynamic on other sites, I'm quite happy that cohost doesn't have it. I'd personally request this feature not be added.

I'm in favour of this feature but yeah I'm not sure I really buy the "monitor risk of harassment" thing. To me it's just a passive way of knowing if you have any connection to another user. I've actually wished I had this or something like it on tumblr before - sometimes I see a post with a username or icon I think I recognize and don't have a good way to check if it's because I've seen them in my notes or something else.

I'm honestly a little surprised to see so many people vehemently against this. I'm not going to try to argue because idk if there's anything I could say that's going to change anyone's mind, but to me it just doesn't seem like a big enough piece of info to fall into clout chasing territory? like I know that there is some number of people that follow me. if I check someone's profile and I see that they're one of them, all that tells me is... well, that this specific person is one of them. it doesn't tell me how many followers I have or anything like that.

I guess the one scenario I could imagine is if you have a friend or something whose page you check regularly, you might notice if they unfollowed you. but then that's less a question of clout-chasing and more a question of interpersonal conflict. I do sympathize with that though, and I think there should be ways to avoid that kind of conflict if you're so inclined. It seems to me though that a better resolution is to mute them without unfollowing though? Maybe I'm missing something though

hm apparently like 4 comments were added while I was typing that dskdsjkl

I have 2 small things to add, having read them:

1. I sincerely hope this doesn't come across as insulting or anything but the "breaking mutuals" thing seems far more of a cultural issue than a technical one. I think designing things a certain way might might encourage or discourage it but not fundamentally cause it, and I think a following indicator isn't something that encourages it - it just discourages it less, which might feel the same if you're already used to communities where this dynamic is the norm.
   
2. That being said, this is ultimately not that important of a feature to me. I think it would be nice to have and ultimately benign, but if others are strongly against it I'd rather defer to their opinion