hello^^ I was wondering because I'm also a system who's confused right now, and since I'm usually fronting myself and my other headmates may co-front instead of fully taking the wheel, but it's done . Rather easily. How's your experience with fronting? Anyone with an answer may help.
It feels more rapid, and I can't really have control over it and the other guys aren't always the most social people in the world so...
Of course prefacing this with this is just my experience, we're still all very new to this and there's a spectrum!
Honestly we don't really have any control over who fronts when! It's all subconscious and often affected by outside influences, for example today was one of those rare sudden switches where Jolt was literally half asleep at the wheel, getting head-achey, put on my favorite music in an attempt to wake himself up, and I suddenly swapped in- it felt like I kinda just got zapped in and oh hell yeah my favorite music is playing and I'm wide awake. Most times it's slow, like when I was panicking over being late for dinner and there was a gradual fade from me to Jolt. I can remember bits and pieces from after Jolty fully switched in, but I don't feel any emotional connection to them, and they're all from the third person and kind of blurry visually. I know we went to dinner, sat outside on a balcony, ate poke, but it feels like I'm just being told what happened by someone else.
When we do switch, we take careful note of little details to figure out who's who. Usually we go through gender (clothing taste, tone of voice, level of dysphoria with our afab body), general attitude, what food we'd eat (ex I hate dried mango while Jolty keeps some in the car to snack on), driving styles (Umbre speeds...), music taste, lots of small things! And for most people variations of these would be normal, but with us each variation in answers would be grouped together- Umbre always listens to sonic youth and always speaks in a blunt, low voice to reflect him being masc, I love flavor foley and wearing colorful clothes and speak in a higher register, Espy speaks mid-lower but is more melodic and feminine in tone. Gender is really a big thing, we just thought we might be genderfluid at first before realizing that each gender comes with a completely different set of likes and dislikes.
When it comes to co-fronting, it typically only happens with certain alters. I co-front with Aeri a lot, mostly to help her draw! What it mostly feels/looks like from my end is me hovering over her shoulder to watch what she's drawing and give advice. However the rest of us don't really front together? Sometimes we'll interject into each other's thoughts, or have short conversations, but as of right now our communication is really spotty. Espy is often around in the background, it feels like she lingers on the edge of our mind and sometimes speaks up when she notices something. Jolty will often kind of float in and be all doubtful about whatever the current fronter is doing ("I wouldn't say that... why am I saying that this is all fake..." yeah no way it's like the disorder is disordering), I'm probably the loudest but I'm just like that in general, I will sometimes butt in when I'm excited and yell in our mind about something before fading away again. When I'm not in front, I don't really go anywhere else? I just kind of cease to exist, or almost "sleep."
Another rare example of us fully co-fronting was when Absol fronted for the first time, I think Jolt was fronting at the time but basically Absol sent a bunch of messages in our chat and Jolty watched but didn't have any real control of our hands typing. And as a side note, describing this right now I kind of feel that little Jolt floating in my mind half-heartedly describing what happened to me, like I'm transcribing for a sad ghost... he honestly reminds me of napstablook sometimes (off topic hbsdfhbfdshbdfs).
I think I've gone on long enough, but there's a not-so-quick rundown of how we experience fronts and switches!! Sorry if I rambled, but I hope this helped at all. I know Jolty was thinking of this today and was trying to stay in front to answer, so he and the others might reblog later at some point to answer their own experiences. Again, this is all just our POV and we're still very new to this!