We made it to the end of another month, and with that, another set of updates! Pretty basic stuff this time around, but hey, a review queue restate, along with more on the Bluesky I opened last time and a ramble about Cohost. Also, a little tease for my big April plan…
The Blue Sky Grows
Well, the Bluesky account I mentioned last time as a thing I’d try to use hardly at all and focus more on my Cohost still pretty much became the de facto way I share stuff from here now. Why did a site I verbally hate for a year+ end up as my main for now? Well, a few factors, some are good parts of the site, and the other is the aspect of “there’s literally no good backup”.
For the pros to the site, they recently added muted words, which helps TREMENDOUSLY for me to bury away the stressful subjects that would randomly be thrown my way on Twitter. Even if you muted or blocked phrases, they’d still be forced on you via trending tab or searches, which got real annoying. On Bluesky, I don’t seem to have this issue at all and muting is powerful. Same goes for muting accounts and blocking them, they get out of your vision way better than they would on Twitter. A godsend if I ever have to deal with weird nerds mad about my limited print articles again.
Also to be blunt; somehow, even without me trying to promote my stuff, my content/posts/etc on Bluesky got way more traction there than anything I had ever promoted on Cohost. Period. Like, right away I had people who recognized the site give me a follow, and conversations I joined in had others discovering my site and giving it a look. I actually felt growth and people seeing/recognizing me as a person and not just as “oh hey he did a cool thing let’s follow him”. Seeing people I hadn’t seen in a long time on Bluesky was pretty nice. I haven’t shared too much on Bluesky to be fair, but even the limited articles I have shared have gotten some eyeballs on them and a bit more compared to Cohost, and speaking of which….
Cohost is just done for lmao
I’m not gonna mince words here. I think my experience with Cohost (nearly 1.5 years there with it as my main social media website of choice!) was a fucking waste of time, and one I could honestly write a very long opinion article on when it collapses and goes down.
Not if. When. Because holy shit, there’s no way these guys are making enough money to keep the site going for much longer. Other people have covered their finances in bigger detail than I could so I’ll just leave that subject to said observers if you’re interested in learning more. Basically, these guys rely on a very rich guy to fund the site, and recently the site almost ran out of money because they lost contact with this very rich guy 2 weeks before they’d go broke.
Very normal financing for a website! In fact I could say from observation a shit ton of the mutual aid situations I saw on that site mostly stem from people being really terrible with money and having nothing in their bank account because of them posting about buying a bunch of stupid shit/using their rent money on Cohost Plus. Maybe Cohost is just is a platform for financially irresponsible people.
But yeah, to keep matters short, I tried everything I could think of to get my content seen by cohost users. Throwing a bajillion tags related to games, companies, and genres, throwing a bunch of reminder posts and boosts up to get the content to have more than one or two views like it was usually getting there, and just being very pissed off. This especially hurt with the Tomie documentary, which was basically only promoted on Cohost due to me leaving Twitter outside of smaller things, (which led to me leaving entirely around April last year due to the sheer bigotry everywhere) and needless to say, fucking nobody saw it. The only people who did notice it, were those I pestered by going to their own pages and letting them know I made a cool video they might like as a PMD fan.
Organic discovery on Cohost is just flatout impossible due to the tagging system; and the site’s admins are fully hostile toward any attempts to boost or help with discovery, due to some silly self-imposed mantra against “engagement metrics”. This so-called “moral standing” sounds good on paper, but when you can’t even see the likes of your posts in any way, shape or form, find out how many views it got, or even how many views each tag has, (to know which tag would be fit to use for your post, since you cannot search a post by body or title text, just tags!!!) it really makes it hard to find new people and content! Even if you favorite a tag, who’s to say it’s an active one? I sure know the PMD tags don’t get much use; the video game tags are all over the place since Video Games, Videogame, and Videogames are all separate tags, each with their own post count!
So now do you see why it was hard to grow my reach as a freelancer there? The site’s structure is hostile toward freelancers, and almost nothing I tried helped. Thus, I tried an experiment to see if adding one tag would make a different. Last week I put my Berserk Boy article up and shared it on bluesky once, and Cohost several times. Bluesky didn’t really have much of a showing for the game’s dev team for promo purposes, so it wasn’t gonna gain much traction with tagging. But Cohost had pretty much the 5 or so active people who still existed on my follower list, plus a bunch of video game tags I could think of followed by one extra; Cohost Meta.
What is Cohost Meta? Why it’s the tag everyone pretty much agreed on as the tag to discuss anything akin to the website. You can pretty much get a gist of the latest drama/discussion of the day by going to that tag. That also means it has a lot of eyeballs. Thus, I threw it on my review and posted it to Cohost.
A week later, and… Cohost hits to SFG in its entirety were 5, while Bluesky gave me 3. I barely shared anything from the site on Bluesky last week besides that review and the famidaily one, (which did spread around pretty wildly, mainly from the youtube crowd, and I wasn’t the one to directly link the interview on bluesky anyhow) and I had reshared the review on Cohost several times. Considering I did my damn best to get the article in front of as many eyeballs as possible on Cohost, while I barely promoted it on bluesky outside of a post when it dropped, I think that goes to show that even if you try to do the absolute limit of sharing content with people there, you won’t get anything. No views, no readers, no feedback, nothing. The people of Cohost are only interested in cohost things. Artists and writers are trapped in their bubbles screaming into a void due to a shitty tagging system and the site admins refusing to budge on giving any sort of bone for those of us who want to grow and want more people to find our cool stuff; keep in mind, the only accounts the site suggests you follow, all belong to the cohost staff. You have to poke around to see if someone you like is on Cohost all by yourself. Pray real hard if they’re active, as chances are they won’t be.
And honestly? I gave it one and a half years. I tried my damnest to make Cohost work. Yet considering how much more feedback and support I got on Bluesky, a site made by a hecking Cryptobro, without much effort or even including so much as a single tag or mention, I feel that for my content Bluesky is the way to go and thus my main social media going forward.
Congrats Cohost. I tried making you work, and you instead focused on other dumb shit like making your MS paint bug into a plushie while you’re running low on funds. Hope you enjoy the financial ruin from an unsustainable business model. Anyhow, I digress. I’ll be using Cohost less and less until most of my friends there move elsewhere, and almost all of them are on bluesky already; some of which post to both places at once.
Review Queue!
Onto a slightly better topic! My review queue for the month has been… pretty much the same as it was last time. Sorry to say, but yeah, the switch queue ain’t getting bigger, and the other queues I’ve kept at bay as well. The Contra review should have gone up yesterday unless my tiredness after my full time job kicked in again, so I hope you don’t mind the rambly nature of that one. I really wish I got more feedback on my sentence structure or grammar, since I feel like they aren’t that great when I give these articles a pass, but nobody ever complains about it, and I don’t like delaying my work because of my internal doubts, so…
But yeah, same as before. Lost in Harmony. Rain World. The Missing. Those are the next Switch games, and i’ll get them done when they’re done. PS4 is saved for after the other systems since it’s filled with ass long RPGs due to a bunch of them coming in at the worst time back when the derailment happened. Full Quiet will be worked on when I feel like it since it’s a low priority game, and Tomb Raider I-III is pretty much the only game in the steam queue until an embargo lifts for another game next month. TR I’ve made some more progress on but damn are these games tough. Can’t promise I’ll clear any of em before I gotta move ahead.
Still, there’s a new port of Hebereke coming out this week, and I may just do that as a free time review to fill in a gap next week so that if I don’t get to the queue games then, I’ll have something out. If I feel like tormenting myself or get a review copy, I may check out the Felix the Cat retro collection to see if the Carbon Engine finally doesn’t suck.
I plan to do a big busy thing at the end of next weekend, so thus I may be unavailable to write for a few days, but once I’m back I’ll explain why I was gone. Hopefully my experience lends to a good article, too. The full time job beckons, and so does my queue. I don’t take breaks from work, so I’ll do them when they can be done. No promises. Then when the queue’s all clear, I’ll go on a much needed vacation.
April’s BIG event…
But oooh, something good IS happening in April! Another big interview in a similar scope to the Tomie one, one I’ve wanted to do for a long while… I’m in the process of translation and getting approvals, so no firm date set, but once everything is in place and approved, I’ll announce the launch date of the next interview! It won’t be on the 2 year anniversary of my last big one, but I think you guys will like it if you’re a fan of quirky 16-bit Genesis games, and also a certain dungeon series I like. It’s coming out pretty cool so I hope it leads to people discovering new facts about some old classics.
Well, that about covers it. Was more of a social media geared update post with mostly a rant I had to get off my chest thrown in, but I do hope you look forward to April! barring any tragedies that get in my way, I should be good to go for some very exciting stuff… Until next time, take care, and be sure to follow me on bluesky or here directly via the email following list for the latest updates.
Seafoam Gaming 