New CoSoNauts coming in - Hello! I'm new, too. Only been here for a few days. I'd like to share some of what I've learned.

This is not #Twitter , which is probably why you're here. But, really... This. Is. Not. Twitter.

You can ask questions about things here. CoSoNauts are helpful. It's okay to be confused and need help. You won't be shamed for not understanding how everything works.

So, please, don't just give up and start insisting CoSo should work like something not CoSo.

You might be surprised how much Twitter stuff just processed as "how social media works". On CoSo, you don't have to word everything with a call to action at the end just to make sure somebody will see it.

Also, follower counts don't mean a lot here. Things work different, and community means more than "people using the same service". People actually act like a community here.

So you don't have to worry about getting your follower count up, promoting looking for followers, and your follower counts in other places won't matter much here.

CoSo had been around several years. A lot of us just didn't know about it. The last few days have been serious influx of new users and DoS atracks. It's not "new and unstable" or "hopefully going to be built up soon".

Also, because I've seen a lot of people ask about the star on posts over the past few days... Fun fact! The heart on #Twitter posts only became a heart a few years ago. It used to be a star.

Many who had been on Twitter for years by then felt it was a sign of "trying to be like (insert other popular platform)". Maybe, maybe not. But platforms develop their own culture, and changing to a heart did disrupt things.

Suddenly, posts that got "hearted" were seen as being liked, agreed with. The star had meant everything from, "Yes, I like and agree with this!" to, "I'm kind of bookmarking this so I can come back to it later."

Personally, I'm glad CoSo uses a star.

@weirdfizz Here the star can mean one (or all) of the following:
~you post was seen
~i agree
~a "like"

@ChillySnowgirl That was pretty much how it worked years ago on the bird app. Turned into a heart, and suddenly people were being scolded for hitting the heart on things nobody would have thought twice about hitting the star on.