#it like wouldnt even put it on the dashboard for whatever reason

[rauberrauber]

real old art for remus’ birthday from like 2020 which tumblr never let me post

[oddmerit]

i try REALLY hard to like cohost dot org and there IS a lot to like about it, legitimately:

most of the staff are jewish gaytrans furries so they Get the need for firm moderation that accounts for “plausible deniability”-type bigotry, even if they slip up it’s pretty quickly rectified (see below)

good 18+ filtering, pro-posting queer hole

NO BULLSHITE ALGORITHMS. chrono timelines only

css/html/markdown crimes

that being said.

the general culture there is rough bc a lot of the prominent powerposters are friends or friends-of-friends of the devs by nature of how they conducted the closed alpha, but bc of the lack of public metrics it’s considered taboo to claim that there ARE powerposters in the first place. and because powerposters are just a few degrees removed from the devs, people who WERENT part of the alpha want to emulate that general vibe. part of which means getting extremely hostile and defensive if anybody says something that could be construed as putting the devs down and claiming they’re “twitterbrained” or whatever and that people who “expect too much” of the devs are going to be the downfall of the site

the most recent incident of this stemmed from a moderating misstep where someone i followed reported a nazi channer who followed her and was part of an antisemitic harassment campaign, but hadn’t posted anything to the site yet. the staff who handled her report said “this is concerning so we’ll wait and see BUT we don’t take action based on offsite behaviour”, despite that being untrue based on previous moderation actions (notably TERFs getting nuked from orbit before they could even start posting). the person who reported them got upset and several of her followers (including me) were like “what the fuck, that’s unexpected and shitty”, some saying that made them feel unsafe in case that ever happened to them. once the decision got traction (and other people started reporting the account) the staff went back on its decision “based on internal review” and suspended the account in question, which is where this story should have ended

except, the day after it happened, i woke up to a post on my cohost dashboard that was someone screaming their head off about people who had said “this is disappointing and makes me concerned”, and kept quoting one specific person who they claimed had overreacted and was symptomatic of the above-mentioned “twitterbrain” and that it was all “bad faith”. like, if THAT is gonna be the community reaction to someone being alarmed about inconsistent moderation, why would you ever publicly bring up moderation concerns at all?

its one thing to ask site members to be considerate of staff (its a small team and half of them were at a con AND it was a weekend AND they eventually backtracked and apologized anyways so it was all good at that point) but its another thing to go off on a rant quoting mostly one specific person while claiming its really “just general you” and claim that they’re the reason the site will go under. if you’re going to claim that you need to bite your tongue over missteps “for the good of the community” that’s a HUGE fucking red flag! bc thats how resentment will grow and eventually explode into something MUCH worse! it wouldnt turn into “intra-community infighting” if everyone was like “cool, thank you, please make sure this doesnt happen again” after the issue is solved instead of dragging it out and turning it into an example of “oooo look how PRO-HARASSMENT twitter has made you, you’re HARASSING the devs by voicing concern”!

and dont get me STARTED on the shitfits people were throwing when staff said “we don’t allow loli on this site”. people understand “cohost isnt a free speech absolutist site like twitter” when it comes to hate speech but they absolutely do NOT understand it also applies to jerking it to fictional csa lmao. cohost isnt overrun by “puritans”. the devs will not ban queer hole*. the devs post queer hole. its fine

(*the only way i can see NSFW getting banned is if stripe drops them for processing cohost+ subs or the future tipping system and even then i trust staff will fight for Queer Hole as hard as they can)