cohost support

In addition to my earlier suggestion about having an option to disable reblogs for a post that you make, I feel like another good way to give people control over their posts would be to have an option that disables reblog comments/additions, while still allowing people to reblog the post by itself. That way, you can allow for a post to be shared by other people without worrying that someone will hijack it and start a long discoursey thread on a post that you meant to be lighthearted.

And I guess another possibility here is "approved reblog comments," where if someone's going to add an addition to your post, it gets sent to a queue for you to approve before it can be posted. (That being said, this can get complicated socially when it's a reblog comment in response to another reblog comment? And I also get the sense that people might end up jury-rigging this into a private messaging system, even though it's very much not the intent.) There's also the possibility of setting "only friends can reblog-comment this post" though that would require setting up a system to decide who's a friend. Either way, I think these options are more niche and less useful to implement than just a way to turn off reblog comments entirely.

Thinking more about this - I almost wonder if, when implementing this feature, the default setting for "allow reblog comments on this post?" should be *off,* as a means to make people stop and think about whether the post they're making really would benefit from reblog comments (and all the risks involved) before toggling the option on. I imagine it might also add more friction to the temptation to reblog-comment for the sake of dunking on the original post, if you have to go hit the reblog button without knowing if the post is reblog-commentable to begin with.

Additional reading: osteophage on Pillowfort talks about how reblogs-as-reply can get very toxic very quickly. I think part of why it got this way on Tumblr is the lack of moderation - but Cohost is also just three (soon to be four!) full-time employees, and the moderation load is going to scale up very quickly with all the people fleeing Twitter. https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/312460