Hey there. We plan to announce any said changes on the @staff account when they come. You can subscribe to @staff in your preferred feed reader (though I think its worth mentioning RSS is a pretty bad way to reach people, considering how few people use it)
Email is nice, and something we may consider for big Terms of Service changes, but bulk sending out emails is pretty costly. Our best bet is likely to post it on @staff and put a toast/notice somewhere on the site everyone can see (The Cohost Corner!)
frayed
When deciding whether or not to sign up for a cohost account recently, what sealed the deal for me was reading the community guidelines.
As a user that has a vested interest in what cohost holds its community accountable to, I would like to see a way to follow updates and changes to the community guidelines and the mandatory content warnings listing, so that I don't miss any updates and so that I can see directly how these standards evolve over time.
As a new user who is just starting to use cohost, I would like it if while reading the community guidelines & mandatory content warnings listing, it was spelled out inline how a new user like me can follow updates/changes to these standards, so that I can find out how to do this at the point in time I would be interested in the matter.
The Terms of Service and the privacy policy would also be of interest for this as well, though I personally am more interested in the community guidelines and the mandatory content warnings listing.
I think the most difficult part of this feature request would be picking a *format* of how to communicate the changes to users. Bespoke formatting solutions would probably not be worth the effort to implement, but just to provide context on what is meant by formatting here I'll mention a few examples.
Some companies send out notice emails stating that things have changed and provide a hand written (maybe AI-generated in future?) summary of the changes to users, but I don't really find that format useful to me as a user because as it does not make it easy for me to verify that the summary is accurate.
Some software such as wikis or version control can show diffs of a document, but such diffs may be difficult for other users to grok due to:
1. Complicated formatting conventions
* ex: GNU diffutils's default output can be hard to learn to follow.
2. Broken/bad formatting conventions
* ex: Atlassian Confluence wiki diffs rely on applying colored highlights to text in the diff which can situationally be difficult to notice even if accessibility weren't a concern.
3. Formatting conventions ill suited to the document being diffed or to ill suited to how the diff is viewed/rendered
* ex: side-by-side diffs preserve the feeling of reading the original document so long as there is room for lines to display without word wrap; hence line width restrictions magically appear without explanation in some coding standards interested in code displaying well in fixed width contexts such as side-by-side diffs
Aside from the concern of the format, the means of opt-in delivery of the notice that updates happened is also of interest.
1. RSS or atom.
* I personally think RSS or atom would be an ideal way to follow updates since I can decide when I want to go through unread items in a particular feed, AND unauthenticated feed access makes it easy for me to privately consume content or notices without having to deal with authentication.
* Feed readers are complicated and not all users want to use them.
2. Email.
* Everyone has one, no one wants to read all of it.
3. On cohost.
* Some users might be interested in updates, but might find it stressful to follow the official accounts or topics (not sure, am still new to cohost!) that would be posting the updates since there could be a significant volume of updates other than just changes to community guidelines.