I think cohost keeps hidden for privacy reason. Finding people in cohost is definitely hard. Best ways are connecting to people you know elsewhere, looking through tags and stumbing on people who post-good, or reblogs, but first you have to find someone who reblogs good stuff through methods 1 or 2.
Also on more generally on the topic, Cohost is definitely not a twitter replacement, or alternative. Form wise it more closely resembles tumblr, but it’s not really that ether.
It’s getting worse and fash real fast.
Twitter is indeed suing Media Matters for talking about nazi tweets. It’s a clear SLAPP case at least, but it’ll be costly to defend against.
The Republican Texas AG is now opening a government investigation into Media Matters for “fraud.”
Paxton said his office would investigate allegations that Media Matters — which he referred to as a “radical anti-free speech organization” — had violated Texas laws protecting consumers from fraud.
And he boosting violent “pizzagate” nonsense now.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/tech/elon-musk-boosting-pizzagate-conspiracy-theory/index.html
Looks like aside from being a shitty case from the regular person’s perspective, it’s also a shitty case from a legal perspective.
The only thing that surprises me is that Auschwitz allowed them to visit.
Too many people give billionaires blind faith that they’re have a will to do good, because everyone is desperate for money and attention.
When even the UK government is sucking up to Musk, nothing surprises me.
Our government isn’t the best example, they’re an unsurprisingly huge shit stain for well over a decade, but they’re still a whole government.
All Twitter links now redirect to x.com
Twitter is now dead.
They sure do love capitalism until the invisible hand does anything but give handjobs to fascists.
Twitter is currently suspended (perhaps banned?) in Brazil.
Brazilian Miku was too strong.
TheQuartering tried to join BlueSky and is already banned.
The scales continue to tip in the Butterfly Site’s favor.
I’ve been on Bluesky for a while, and it’s wonderful over there. There’s no algorithm and no ads, so your timeline is just a chronological scroll from people you follow, and nothing else. When you block people, it completely hides everything they do from you and prevents them from replying to you. So, how a block should work.
People are also creating “Starter Packs” which are lists of people in a particular category that you may want to follow. (Or block - it can be used either way.) So if you find a starter pack for a community or interest, it’s very easy to fill out your timeline with stuff you want to see.
It’s funny, I saw a Twitter post saying “All these left wingers are leaving to go to Bluesky. Good! We don’t need any of them here.” And then a few posts later he says “I made a Bluesky account to post anti-liberal stuff, let’s see how long before they ban me.” (I already found him, reported him, and he’s been banned.) It’s amazing that having us leave Twitter isn’t enough for them, they have to follow us and harass us in a new place too. It’s proof that they need people to punch down on in order to get validation of their horrible beliefs.
I used Twitter heavily for many years. I’m very fortunate that my experience was better than most. This is largely due to my good fortune of not becoming the target of harassers. I also give a lot of credit to my very disciplined usage pattern.
I blocked all ads and sponsored content. I only ever had a chronological timeline. Eventually I even filtered out all re-tweets. I was very picky in who I followed, and very liberal with who I blocked. I almost never checked the replies on anything. When I did check the replies I often gave the block button a workout. I only saw content created and posted by the people I followed, and nothing more.
I know that for many people their experience was not the same. If people are finally able experience something closer to what I did during the better times of Twitter, I’m happy for them. And if Bluesky is the one making it happen, I’m glad. I would still recommend, even on Bluesky, following my diligent usage pattern to protect yourself.
That said, my strongest recommendation would still be to use nothing at all. There was life before social networks, and there will be life after them. Billions of people live their lives without them just fine. If you don’t absolutely need to use one, perhaps to survive in capitalist society, I would urge you not to use any no matter how good it is.
There is a pattern in my life of investing heavily in something and then dropping it suddenly. The first example that comes to mind is when I stopped playing Netrunner after six years. Every time this has happened I find I neither miss what I’ve given up, nor do I regret the time I spent.
Social media is up near the top of the list of such things. I stopped using Twitter the day they took away TweetDeck, and it was the last social network I was using. I planned to setup some alternative based on ActivityPub, but there was never any urgency. Life is fine with nothing.
As good and refreshing as Bluesky may be I highly recommend using nothing at all. If, like me, you don’t miss social media either, great.
Unlike me, you may find there are people important to you that you have lost all connection with. You may find there is information important to your life that you can’t get from other sources. If these are the case, so be it. I would recommend making a list of those things you are missing. Then go back to social media and follow only those things. Much like the grocery store, it is best to get what is on your shopping list and avoid impulse purchases.
As for me, there are some platforms I’ve already invested in. Mostly YouTube, Reddit, and Discord. These will be the last platforms I ever invest in. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m going to follow the POSSE model very strictly. I will publish my own things on my own site, and use other places only for syndication.
You may find me on Bluesky, or other platforms, camping my usernames. The only content you can ever expect to see from me there are links to my own sites where my actual content will be posted.
It’s not a big deal, but it tends to annoy me when people keep saying that “bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm”. “Show posts from people you are following in order of newest at top” is an algorithm, and even if you don’t mean it like that “Poplar with friends” is default tab, and that’s algorithmic based on likes and reposts. And there is whole Feeds menu for other feeds with their own algorithms.
And if you look at it without logging in, there is default feed of generally popular stuff and just give it time and it will become a feed of stuff that makes you angry for engagement, like what happened with Twitter.
I find that the people who want and enjoy non-chronological social media algorithms are avoiding the pain and labor of confronting and solving their real problems. The platforms that implement them are successful because they enable the users to do exactly that.
The model of following accounts on social media is a problem because everything that someone follows has equal weight. If someone follows their best friend, their favorite sports team, and a local restaurant, it doesn’t know that they care about their friend’s posts more than the restaurant’s posts.
This poses a problem for a purely chronological feed when a user follows too many things. They can never scroll through their entire feed. They might miss a very important post from their best friend if they happen to check their feed at the wrong time.
The non-chronological algorithms try to solve this by tracking user engagement. If someone scrolls quickly past the posts of the restaurant, but always replies to their best friend, that’s trackable. An algorithm using that tracking data will ensure the posts from the best friend never get missed.
We could solve this by letting users rank their follows in terms of importance, but nobody will do that. That’s labor. Algorithms succeed by letting the users avoid labor.
The real solution is to follow less things. Then a user can get through their entire chronological feed without ever missing a single post from anything. If there is something they don’t care about enough, they should unfollow it.
And that brings us to the second problem. Users want to doomscroll. They don’t want to be done. They need new posts to appear no matter what. If they hit the end they will close the app and find something else to keep their brain happy. That’s why sites with algorithms that suggest random content are successful.
Few users will recognize they have this psychological issue that causes them to doomscroll. Fewer still will try to escape it. It’s not for me to say whether it qualifies as an addiction, so I won’t say that. I will say that an algorithm that infinitely suggests content that a user doesn’t follow is successful because it enables these users.
For someone to live in a world where media is pulled, rather than pushed, requires effort. Users have to manually curate their feeds. Users have to be able to look at a blank page, think of what they want to see, seek it out, and find it successfully. Their reward is that they will not see anything they didn’t ask for. The cost is that they had to work for it. The cost is that they won’t be able to doomscroll.
If the interface is built only to serve the conscientious user, the average lazy user will bounce right off. But these kinds of platforms are just data feeds. As we’ve seen with things like TweetDeck, it is possible to allow different users to interact with that data in whatever way serves them best.
The reality is that if a platform only had pull users, it would never gain enough critical mass for major information sources to post there. There wouldn’t be much to pull. The pull-only users need there to be at least a few million doomscrollers to create an audience that make it worthwhile for creators to post.
I use rym.social as my central nexus.
I’m still using microblog.rym.social as my primary posting mechanism. It crossposts to @rym.mastodon.rym.social and my new @rym.social
Hmm, that Bluesky link doesn’t appear to be valid - unless you already blocked me for some reason. 
