I'll be on tumblr until the mods start physically prostituting me to an Ai robot overlord. But I have been experimenting with tumblr alternatives for the fun of it. Bluesky is just Xwitter, and Pillowfort hasn't accepted me yet.
COHOST HOWEVER I've had for a long while now. I signed up the moment I realized that tumblr implemented the "for you" algorithm. Cohost initially banked on the great porn ban, so it's like, 70% wacom tablet anime porn. And furries.
The ringleaders of cohost are, in fact, furries. Which would be fine, but the most notorious of these furries was part of a pedophilic bestiality cult. Apparently they're in kahoots with one of the mods too. I will be a member of the site as long as this drama persists because it's interesting and I have no moral compass.
Anyways my other statement is that I have yet to run into a single likeable person anywhere besides tumblr.
*This post was not meant to slander furries as a whole. I really fuck with whatever Fritz the Cat had going on personally.
So I've got the opposite perspective here, having only really used Tumblr as social media and not really looking at Cohost all that much, it's important to remember that Cohost was a way newer platform than Tumblr. They've also developed a lot differently than Tumblr has over their lifetime, mostly referring to the fact Cohost staff chose to shut down when their source of funding dried up. Tumblr did not do this, and instead chose to try and make this hellsite profitable (going as far as to state they want to "make Tumblr the new PDF", whatever that means). This is the main reason they banned NSFW content, because it would have been unsuitable for advertisers. Regardless, these are my thoughts about the points you made, and most of them just revolve around how and why Tumblr operates the way it does:
It does have numbers, but as you explore the site you will observe that more people seem to be upset or surprised when those actually go up. "Breaching containment" is the term used for people outside of the intended audience (which is usually just your mutuals or a specific fandom) reblogging a post. Of course you can still chase high numbers on your posts like on other social media, but you will probably notice that posting on Tumblr will often just not get you very many notes as a baseline.
You can see when someone interacts with your posts, in any way. That's a lot of fun when you see your mutuals reblogging or liking a post, and maybe leaving an addition. I don't know what your specific concern with it is, but knowing people enjoy your posts is usually a fun thing! The weight of this feature has lowered somewhat, though. Reblogging posts used to be more common (I think) compared to how often things are just liked nowadays. Because reblogs let people add their own additions, it makes them a bit more interesting and thoughtful (on top of obviously also sharing the post).
These push notifications are the reason why breaching containment is so funny. There are some great videos of people's phones getting spam-notified because one of their posts went viral. You can obviously turn them off if it's actually annoying, and can even turn off reblogs or replies on your post if you don't want it to be shared at all.
The ask system is a lot more robust, because it's pretty much the original. Sending asks is a major feature which a lot of fun things are built around (think of ask blogs where people reply in character, for example).
Tumblr lets you style your posts yourself, you can write a title in big bold letters if you feel like it, or just wing it. You can refer to the point about using html to see more about styling too. They even have a keep reading header that stops the post from being gigantic and taking up space when someone gets it on their dashboard, which you can choose to put at a specific place, too. If you really want to go wild with it. You can also style your own blog's page, which has a lot of freedom in how to layout your blog outside of posts themselves.
There is not really an algorithm on Tumblr either. Well, there is an algorithm in the for you feed. But most users just use the following or your tags pages to see the actual content they follow! You can disable all of the other "suggestion" features which are algorithmic in your settings as well, which I recommend. This is the way tumblr is most commonly used.
You can style your posts with a lot of different features! When you make a post, you can select the text editor in the gear wheel on the top right! This will let you change to html or markdown formatting as well. Colors can also be changed into whatever you want with that! (here is a link to a tool that lets you format html gradient text for tumblr posts)
As mentioned before, nsfw content is mostly banned (to the dismay of many of the actual users) because of marketing reasons. Though recently the rules have gotten slightly more lax in this regard (mostly because they got sued for their moderation targeting queer people unfairly (you can read in the next point how well that worked out)).
Tumblr does like to claim to be the queerest place on the internet, but just like many other places, the staff and shareholders aren't exactly the most in touch with their users. Even now, a lot of employees at Automattic (the company that owns Tumblr) are being laid off (16% as of April 2nd) as they keep running what is essentially still a site that does not generate a lot of profit (if any), which doesn't help review support tickets (there have reportedly been cases of haters just mass reporting accounts to get them off the platform, and people coming back to make a new account if their tickets are denied are then obviously flagged for ban evasion). I think the problem of rising anti-queer sentiments is still mostly a societal one in the end. Tumblr also uses algorithms to detect "rule-violating posts" (usually meaning nsfw or hateful ones (though a lot of people still get away with hateful things that can easily be matched for)), which have also been noted to hit a lot of false positives on queer content and resulted in the aforementioned lawsuit.
Tumblr does have at least one mascot, it's the t with eyes and sometimes hands, but I think most people agree it's kinda lame.
In the end I don't disagree Cohost had a cool thing going. But its shutdown did expose a fundamental problem with websites like these, being that you cannot really make a profit off of people talking and posting to each other online. And running a website without enough money to keep the servers online is pretty hard.
I hope you still enjoy using tumblr, though. It's a fun place to share art to me, and to just build silly things together through reblogs when the opportunity arises.
differences ive noticed between tumblr and cohost so far:
tumblr has numbers, like most social media sites, for almost every aspect of it. notifications, likes, reblogs, comments, followers, following, etc. cohost only had numbers for notifications (opt-in) and number of comments. the rest had nothing indicating a number, not even for the original poster.
tumblr has notifications for many actions, including "<person> liked a post you shared" and others. it seems you can turn them off but the fact tumblr has them in the first place is concerning. cohost, by design, had very limited notification scope. when someone rechosted your chost with added text, you only got one notification: that someone rechosted it. you won't know the likes and rechosts of it. you also didn't get mention notifications.
tumblr also offers push notifications on their mobile app, while cohost never offered notifications (and was purely a web app that could masquerade as a mobile app).
tumblr's ask system (which cohost's was based off of) is a LOT more robust. private ask answers, the option to allow media in your received asks, etc. the only leg-up cohost seemed to have was the option to allow for asks from logged-out accounts. cohost also allowed for media in asks until the feature was abused and it was globally turned off.
cohost's post format had an unstyled title that could be up to 240* characters long, and a post body that could be styled however you want. tumblr does not seem to have this title system, other than the "biggest" text style option.
cohost never had an algorithm for showing you chosts. it was reverse chronological only. the only system they had for a global feed is the #The Cohost Global Feed tag, and it was still only reverse chronological. tumblr has a For You page, with recommended posts that your mutuals liked or have many notes, but it seems to have a Following feed that's reverse chronological as well?
cohost had mostly unrestricted html and css (as long as it was inline)* as well as some basic markdown support. tumblr seems to just have a few fonts, some colors, and pretty much the same range of basic text styling.
cohost was very sex positive and allowed pretty much all p*rn (do i need to censor stuff here?) with exceptions for csam and other illegal material. (18+ content needed to be tagged as such). tumblr, as of 2017ish (iirc?) does not allow for p*rnorgraphic content of any kind.
cohost's four staff members were queer as fuck and the atmosphere of cohost was EXTREMELY queer. tumblr has seemingly had multiple instances of bans of trans users for seemingly no reason other than "they were trans".
cohost had a cool mascot while tumblr seemingly doesn't have any. eggbug win
as someone who used cohost a ton before it shut down, moved to bluesky, and is now dipping their toes into tumblr, i think cohost did it better than tumblr on a lot of fronts, even if its features weren't as fleshed out. i'll do a full retrospective piece about cohost another time though
anyways shoutout to tumblr sending one of my bullet points to the void when i was changing the formatting. very cool
and if you used cohost as well, let me know what i missed!! i'll edit this post if so :3
i saw you use cohost. would you recommend is as a good/active twitter alternative? im getting tired of the hell hole that this bird website is
i really love cohost and the community there but it is absolutely NOT a twitter alternative. if anything it's a tumblr alternative.
here's my small speech about cohost and why i like it
it's a mix between tumblr and livejournal which is fun
the community is very fun and active! when i made my intro post i had a dozen people leaving a comment welcoming me to cohost which is a very nice feeling
it is very much NOT about likes and follower counts. in fact, there is no way for anyone to know how many likes a post has, or how many followers someone has. YOU dont even know how many followers you have
the only visible number is the number of comments on a post, which is where the community comes from: if you want people to know a post is great, you gotta leave a comment saying so!!!
you can have as many links as you want on your profile, AND you can have links be only visible to logged in users, only to people following you, or only visible to pages you follow... so it's a great way to have your discord only be visible to certain people for example
if you DO want a more twitter-like experience, there is a tag that's The Global Cohost Feed, so you have a bunch of posts from a lot of people
when you first join you will have a few days where you can't post anything, but you can still look at posts and share them. a lot of it must be so cohost can prepare code to bring you in or whatever, BUT it also means you get those couple of days to get to know the culture of the website a bit more! it's lovely
chronological feed my beloved
no algorithm my beloved
cohost does have some issues (adding images is a PAIN), but the staff is working really hard to fix them and is always listening to people's feedback! i like cohost a lot. join me