Realizations made during a repost spree

[terabient]

So! I spent last night reposting a bunch of PSO2 entries from Cohost b/c sigh the content guideline update--technically nothing I posted in a public entry violated the new rules but i mean. feel they're just restrictive enough to make any anime/jRPG shipfic writing complicated, so it's best not to use it for that purpose. Might use it for non-fandom hobbies like photography and music sharing but idk that might be Too Much Posting to keep up with. anyway, that will take a few more days to complete but in case you had a burning need to read, or re-read, something i wrote between March and May about minor characters in a gacha jRPG, you can do that now! how EXCITING!!!

- Made a bunch of new tags to sort entries by pairing and discovered it's really easy to make cutesy smushnames with Varuna ships (just stick "runa" wherever you want!) but couldn't think of anything for Luther/Casra that didn't sound awful, same with Ash/Afin.

- Need a whole bunch of character and pairing icons tbh. technically you can never have too many icons, but I literally only have a few for PSO2, RIP.

- I forgot that dreamwidth has pretty decent support for inline CSS and HTML tags so maybe some of the image/text styling generators I was using for cohost will work here...? Would be great if could keep using nex3's image grid for screenshot posts.

- In retrospect, a blogging platform that allows for anonymous commenting is probably a better solution than DMing several people on discord with links to posts I think they would like. i struggle with real-time chat to the poin that I'll avoid messaging people even when I want to talk to them because I know I won't be able to maintain a conversation. A comment thread is so much easier for me to approach and respond to...correspondence over chatting, I guess!

- it's cool that i can backdate posts so i don't flood people's reading pages with my reposts lol

Comments

[ghoulmouse]

Honestly a bigger issue than the content policy is that according to this post about their finances they seem to be essentially hemmhorraging money, to the tune of like $40,000 a month. I would not expect them to be operational for much longer.

I think any social media which features infinitely shareable images, let alone video, is destined to crash without the backing of a gargantuan corporation.

[terabient]

Yeah, the financial report was pretty gruesome. hard to see how they get out of that hole especially when their funding model appears to be "take out loans" which is uh. Not great.

I'm not even sure it's hosting costs that are killing Cohost--ofc $10,000 a month is not trivial but the payroll costs dwarf it. When Cohost was on Cloudflare they were paying $0--apparently Cloudflare just forgot to charge them for services after their complimentary plan ran out, but if they had stayed on that plan they'd still be short several thousand dollars.

fwiw, Pillowfort's monthly costs are just shy of $5000 which makes me wonder what on earth they're doing to get it so low in comparison. They do have a much worse and buggier UI tho so that probably explains part of it.

[ghoulmouse]

Yeah, reading it again you're definitely right about the hosting. I kind of wonder the relative size of Pillowfort vs Cohost in terms of traffic; my impression is that Cohost is a lot smaller but I could be wrong. I honestly can't stand the name, lol, so I've never looked at Pillowfort (and I kind of recall their content policies being bad?)

Honestly I wouldn't mind their idea of non-targeted ads, especially since a huge portion of the people using Cohost seem to be streamers and speedrunners so I think the ability to advertise events and stream debuts and other kinds of niche fandom-y stuff might actually benefit the community sort of like Project Wonderful seemed to be pretty good for webcomic creators who wanted to increase their audience.

From this post it seems like Cohost is currently being bankrolled by a rich friend, which. I mean I guess that works but they sure are right that it isn't sustainable lol.

[shivarin]

does 'ashin' sound bad- (didn't think of anything on luther/casra)

now i'm motivated to backup 'everything' i had on there. i mean shit's scary.

[terabient]

tbh Ashin sounds alright to me, gonna steal it for tagging purposes. unfortunately, every luther/casra smushname sounds utterly terrible so

I don't think it would hurt to backup things manually. it's fairly tedious work, though.