• she/her, it/its

gay ass artist and programmer, i guess. 23. works on botania, the minecraft mod. also into weird functional programming stuff. talk to me about monads (or applicatives if you're even cooler)


nex3
@nex3

These are all nice things to do rather than things to avoid. I'm sure you can figure out how not to be a dick to other people. But there are some things we've all learned from other social media sites that are worth rethinking here:

  • Write comments, even if you don't have anything to say! Just saying "so true bestie" or "wow great art" will make the original poster feel great. The relatively low profile of likes on Cohost makes comments even more valuable, and unlike Twitter, this won't clog up anyone's timeline.

  • Tag your posts, especially if you're referring to a particular game/tv show/franchise, something that's a common phobia like spiders or mushrooms, or something that can be addictive like drugs. You don't need to add a full content warning most of the time since Cohost has the ability to muffle specific tags. (Yes this will make you more publicly visible, but Cohost has actual human moderation if people start being assholes.)

  • Rehost porn! I made a whole post about this a few months ago, but the high level summary is because Cohost requires rigorous adult content tags and has good filters there's no downside to reblogging adult content (beyond the mortifying ordeal of being known).

  • Post what interests you. I think people are constantly rediscovering this on their own, but it's worth a reminder: Cohost is a great place for long posts about whatever catches your fancy. There's a sense that this is a place for computer nerds or whatever, but that's just because that's something a bunch of the people who joined early like writting mini-essays about. I've seen great longposts here about ancient Rome, color theory, and hentai just in the last few days and everyone seems to love them.


ireneista
@ireneista

we're far happier about "what to do" than "what not to do" in general

although even there, we would get really angry if we saw someone going around being like "you posted something that didn't interest you! you're breaking the rules!"

these aren't rules they are more in the nature of good ideas to borrow when you can <3



artemis
@artemis

this is a problem we run into a lot. we have a problem, it's very easy to describe to a person, but we don't know anypony who would know what the answer is. a lot of times this is just looking for specifics commands like "surely there's a command to do this thing, what is it called??". or trying to figure out what libraries we should use for something, or what function calls or whatever.

and like, searching is often useless at this point because you don't know what to search for. so what we ask is "who else has to solve this problem?". so just now a friend of ours was asking for a specific make target to do something with their linux kernel and we had no idea how to do it. but we knew that gentoo definitely has had to solve this problem. so we looked at how gentoo's kernel build script works and found something that looked like it might be what we wanted. Then we searched the exact command that script was running online and found the documentation that confirmed that yup, it was exactly right.

in general this seems to be really effective at getting us close enough to the answers that we can go do some finegrained sifting just reading/searching around a project and expect to get what we wanted to learn.



artemis
@artemis

something kinda cool about shares is that if you share a thing and then I share your share of the thing, anyone looking at MY share knows that I shared YOUR share. Even if you didn't add any text.

so it'll look like

@artemis 🔄 @ you
@ original poster

blah blah blah

anyways the reason I think that's cool is that if all YOU do is share posts, but people notice I re-share a lot of posts from your re-shares, they might click through to your page!!!

So what im saying is this makes it possible to find pages who don't really write very often but DO basically curate a page of re-shares, in a way that is impossible if the intermediary re-shares were hidden. That's like a whole type of page that's just invisible otherwise! Kinda neat!!



ebu
@ebu

reddit-style comment discourse is discouraged by soft-capping the depth of reply threads, and it's done by just... squishing the comments against the side.

sure, you can keep replying. go ahead, get that last word in! see, your argument looks so adorable when squished up all cozy against the naughty-reply wall. who's such a silly little goofy comment? you are!!