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"The Cohost Global Feed" as a built-in feature

I'm honestly not sure if this would fit in with Cohost's design philosophy, but might as well try.

Many people on Cohost have been using tags like #The Cohost Global Feed or #The Cohost Global Timeline and such to get extra visibility on certain posts. It's a generic tag that can be used for anything, which anyone can view. I honestly think this is a fantastic way to get content further out there for people to see, and the fact that it's opt-in by design makes it excellent for privacy's sake. Plus, it's a great way for new users to get out there and meet new people on this platform.

The only problem is that, since this is only using ordinary hashtags, knowledge of this is pretty much based entirely on word of mouth. You only really see the tag after coming across a random post tagged with it, or seeing someone talking about it. I myself never knew about this tag until *long* after I joined Cohost, and well after I posted much of my artwork I'd love to share with a wider audience.

I honestly think adding the global feed as a feature, perhaps as a simple toggle switch similar to the 18+ marker, would be an excellent addition for Cohost. I also think adding a little warning after enabling the feature (or even before posting) would be nice, so it's harder to accidentally post something to the global feed.


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this could also be accomplished with some kind of tag discovery feature; it would seem the result would be approximately the same either way. a checkbox would be more convenient, a tag would be more organic.  


Conflict of interest disclosure: this user accidentally invented the "The Cohost Global Feed" tag.


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Bumping this, because I've seen some folks wanting more discovery and socialization features to Cohost. I feel an official global feed could do just that, letting us find projects and interact with posts that pique our interest.


We could access the global feed via the timeline toggle (followed blogs, followed tags, and global feed)--I gotta check if selecting a "default" timeline is or will be a thing. I envisioned a tickbox at the bottom of the posting interface to include it into the global feed ("opt-out" by default), and perhaps including a posting limit both as an anti-spam measure and to keep the feed open for all.


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I think this sounds great and if it was a thing it definitely should be a toggle/switch for each separate post (in the editor)! I wouldn't use the "global feed" tag on my art because I don't want to overstuff my tags and this one's… waayy to general… But I would definitely opt into a feature global feed for posts I'd like to be noticed by more people!


Sorta like the main page of deviantart (don't know if it's still a thing in 2020s) but opt-in (!!!)


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Not sure about it being a toggle option, but it'd be nice if maybe they were given a pinned shout out on the sidebar - as it'll be what everyone sees, however active/new they are, and it's a place people can browse and find interests via tag-jumping etc.


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A posting limit sounds great and something you can't have with a tag!


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It's just a combination of the words, but people do use them.


#The Cohost Global Feed
#global feed
#The Global Cohost Feed
#Global Cohost Feed
#Cohost Global Feed



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a posting limit sounds like a very nice idea! fits well with cohost's theme of minimizing social media addiction. i assume it'd work as a max number of posts per day/week?

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This seems not too dissimilar from Fediverse platforms' various post audience levels; just replace the "global" option which posts to all federated instances including your local one, with a "global feed" option which adds your post to this global feed on cohost. Defaulting to the current behavior would be good, but being able to set it so that you can default to this other option (or to any other visibility levels implemented in the future) would be a nice way to ensure forgetfulness doesn't result in publication to the wrong audience by accident.


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i'd like to mention that, since posting this suggestion, i have discovered that there are like 20 different variations of these tags, which is just another reason why making this a built-in feature would be a huge improvement to cohost imo.

There are many tags (5 that I know) currently used for global feed, and all 5 of them are actively used lol.


Glad that I finally know which one is the original one.

there's 5 of them????

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