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Cohost to shut down at end of 2024
- dredmorbius 2y agoFor those wondering WTF Cohost is, or soon to be was, there's a Wikipedia article which answers some of that: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohost>
- dmonitor 2y agoDoes Wikipedia allow for an article to change its tense from "is" to "will have been" before it reaches "was"?
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe article presently notes in its lede 'graph that the service "will be discontinued at the end of 2024". Which works for me. I've seen several similar pending-shutdown notices for other sites/services.
- floren 2y agoWell it sounds like a lot of work to turn a readable and correct article (since it still "is" all of those things) into a very tortuous if somewhat slightly more technically-correct version... so I assume there are already half a dozen bots and obsessive Wikipedia users devoted to doing just that.
- codetrotter 2y agoCurrent intro of Wikipedia article: > Cohost (stylized in all lowercase letters as cohost or cohost!) is a social media website publicly launched in June 2022[1] that is currently in beta, and will be discontinued at the end of 2024[2]. And right you were!
- SahAssar 2y agoIf that was the case wouldn't the same be true for basically any physical thing? > The universe was (and perhaps was not), is, will be for the foreseeable future (of which the timespan is indeterminate) and might become (with perhaps a period of not being) all of space and time and their contents. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe
- Kye 2y agoI didn't vibe with it, but a lot of people I like went there when the shitposters came for Snouts.online and killed it. I'd like to see them come to Bluesky, but I know it's a different kind of experience.
- i80and 2y agoIf there's any good to come out of this sadness, selfishly, I think it'll be more people I used to follow who had been solely on Cohost coming to either Bluesky or (less likely, I think) back to Mastodon.
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- skyfaller 2y agoI would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without federation + account portability, there would be no easy offramp when they failed. You could say the same of almost all corporate social media, and I am phasing them all out too.
- kevingadd 2y agoFederation wouldn't have meaningfully solved their revenue problems, though. It would have just been a massive engineering timesink.
- skyfaller 2y agoIt could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation. For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.
- kevingadd 2y agoThis comes down to a question of what kind of service you want. If you want a way to "access more users and content", you can already make an account on a Fediverse instance and access those users and content there. What does Cohost offer by being yet another instance with custom software? If the vast majority of the content I'm accessing is from other instances/services, why would I pay Cohost money for the privilege of having them act as an intermediary? One specific problem with federation/decentralization is that you've now decentralized moderation and given up control over your service's culture entirely. This has some upsides and some downsides, but it again puts you into a weird position: If your moderation and culture position are identical to Mastodon's, why do you need to exist? If you're just another Mastodon instance, why would anyone give you money? When I post on HN or Twitter or Tumblr or Cohost, I at least have a good sense of how the service is moderated, what the rules are, etc. When I post on decentralized services, at any point I can discover that oh, this random instance defederated the one I was unlucky enough to sign up on, so half of my mutuals can't see my posts anymore. Don't worry, you can just migrate your account to a different instance with different rules, and hope IT doesn't get defederated! And because each instance has different rules and culture, you get to look forward to people from other instances complaining that you aren't complying with their rules. It's messy! It's not fun! Of course the rules on those services I mentioned aren't necessarily going to suit everyone's tastes. But I think that's good - a social media service doesn't need to be For Everyone to be successful, and being For Nobody is a horrible outcome. At the end of the day I see the appeal of defederation but it simply doesn't make sense as a way to spend your engineering dollars if your goal is to be profitable. It Doesn't Make You Money.
- i80and 2y agoI never got into Cohost despite making an account -- it just wasn't what I wanted as a social network. But this really is a bummer -- they had admirable goals, and I know lots of people who ended up there and who enjoyed it a lot.
- Avamander 2y agoI really wanted to start using it, but it wasn't easy enough to use to compete with the rest of social media apps I have (federated or not). Kinda like a chat app with two people, nice to use occasionally, but it doesn't get nearly enough of my time to be of much value. Things like that have to be pulled into some aggregator (even if just by federation) before they reach critical mass, I guess.
- wallmountedtv 2y agoWhat baffles me is how they have $41k in expenses monthly for so few users. I'd love to see a breakdown of what in their infrastructure is eating up so much money.
- lfkdev 2y agopresumably unclassifiable aws costs
- jkap 2y agosalary for four employees working well under market rate
- kevingadd 2y agoPure speculation, but AFAIK they provided benefits like health insurance to their staff, so even if they weren't offering high salaries I bet a sizable % of that monthly cost is personnel and associated costs. They put their money (and investors' money) where their mouth was and actually ran a co-op instead of relying heavily on freelancers or cheap outsourced labor. It's unfortunate that doing that hampers sustainability, though.
- tptacek 2y agoAt $41k/mo burn they couldn't have been offering high salaries.
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240909195207/https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down https://web.archive.org/web/20240909195207/https://cohost.or... https://archive.ph/1Oonr https://archive.ph/1Oonr
- nightpool 2y ago> We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder. I never really understood this—what is their anonymous and secret funder going to use the source code for Cohost for? They've been very closed lipped about that part. Oh well, I guess we'll find out soon.
- kevmo314 2y agoHow do I find loan offers like that? I'd take that deal on some projects...
- doublerabbit 2y agoAngel investors.
- nightpool 2y agoAngel investors generally make equity investments, not loans. Cohost in the past has been very specific about the fact that their funding was the latter.
- n2d4 2y agoVenture debt. Though, unless you have no other options, I wouldn't do it; angel investors are better in almost every way, and they can't forcefully liquidate your company when they feel like you've been underperforming.
- kevmo314 2y agoI'd rather have the possible threat of liquidity than the guaranteed loss of equity.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoThey could just... sell it. Or if they decide it isn't worth anything, open source it themselves.
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- endisneigh 2y agoTheir hosting costs are crazy for such low usage (I assume since they say no one is being paid that the entirety of their expenses is marketing and tech and 25% of that is infra specifically, but it’s hard to tell since its last months and it’s possible that today they’re not being paid). Regardless, too much expense for too little revenue.
- kevingadd 2y agoThat's total expenses, not just hosting.
- BryantD 2y agoThey say "As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor" -- I take that to mean they were drawing a salary previously, but aren't any more. Assuming the expenses include fully burdened salaries, I'd say the overall costs were understandable.
- pfg_ 2y agoPeople were paid until today, the costs are mostly salary
- aftbit 2y agoI don't really understand why anyone would use an "alternative" microblogging platform / social network that doesn't offer decentralization or federation. If you are okay with centralized, just go to the cesspool of Twitter or X or Facebook or whatever else has the most network effects in your circle. If you want to control your data, go to something like Mastodon or Bluesky, where the offramp is self-hosting of the old version forever, even if they cease development on the system. I guess I just don't understand what problem Cohost solved that other solutions didn't solve better and cheaper.
- wilsonnb3 2y agoI had never heard of cohost until today but I would have considered using it. I don't particularly like any of the current centralized options but I also don't particularly care about federation and as such don't want to deal with the added friction that it brings.
- Twisol 2y ago> I don't really understand why anyone would use an "alternative" microblogging platform > just go to the cesspool of Cohost didn't feel like a cesspool to me. That's a pretty darn strong differentiator. There are other UX differentiators for me, but it's all subjective. Cohost didn't feel as "cramped" as the others. The others really put the focus on the "micro" in "microblogging", even if technically they (now) allow for longer-form posts. The culture just isn't there for it.
- codetrotter 2y ago> Cohost didn't feel like a cesspool to me. That's a pretty darn strong differentiator. Was this due to something specific they did? Or was this just like how small subreddits can/could be the best place on earth, but then soon after they reach around 10,000 subscribers the quality of the content on the subreddit quickly drops significantly. Something like the Eternal September effect: > The periodic flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- derekzhouzhen 2y agoI doubt an ethical social media will ever work. It is either irrelevant or a money black hole.
- wilsonnb3 2y agoIt will be a money black hole but I still think it can work, just not as a business.
- rglullis 2y agoIf it can not be made profitably, it can not be made into any large scale activity and it will never reach mainstream. So, if your idea of "can work" is "it works for me and my niche group who all treat it as a hobby" it is already working. But if your idea of "can work" is "gets us rid of all social network that makes money by selling eyeballs", then the only way to work will be though finding a valid alternative business model.
- colechristensen 2y agoWhat is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network? That either means "moderates so that everyone posting agrees with what I mean by ethics to a satisfying degree" (and folks do not agree on this) or just "I have fewer complaints about the moderation of this social network than the other popular ones". To boil this down to what I actually mean with an example: What are the "ethical" allowed things to post about climate change on your social network? (please don't actually fall into the trap of actually discussing climate change here). I can think of about three or four different answers to this question that large blocks of people would passionately defend. And so either "ethical" social networks don't exist or there is only one true ethical way to do things and that way is people have to agree with my position and lots of people who don't agree with me are very wrong about ethics. You can do this for a lot of topics and you'll find that contrary to US politics, there are not actually only two ways of thinking about the world and one of them awful.
- nemomarx 2y agoI think in this respect they mean ethical to users - no ads, no charging money, features that are built to serve the user instead of optimizing for engagement, etc.
- kevingadd 2y agoSeeing this outcome definitely makes me wonder what the long-term futures of Bluesky, Fediverse, Tumblr etc are. Cohost's revenue per subscriber was really healthy, their subscriber numbers were pretty stable, etc. Sure, they weren't on a skyrocketing growth trajectory, but they also weren't spending aggressively on advertising. Their costs were super reasonable as an ongoing concern too compared with my experience at various startups. Losses that small are practically pocket change. If they weren't able to win investors over with their service's relatively strong performance since launch, what hope do these other services have when the investor money dries up? Do they have secret sauce that isn't "sell customer data to OpenAI" and "run more ads"? The former works right now but its days seem numbered as a realistic revenue source, and advertising becomes a worse revenue source with every passing day. i.e. from the sources I've seen, Bluesky is operating on something like $20m in total investment. That's a good amount of money, but what happens when it dries up? What's their revenue plan? Whatever it is, I hope it's more compelling than Twitter's answer for keeping the lights on, more successful than Cohost's model, and more substantial than the Fediverse's. From what I can tell the nail in the coffin to Cohost was having their big revenue feature unceremoniously killed by Stripe, which is sobering. Always sucks to have to put your fate in the hands of payment processors, since they have a long track record of being capricious.
- asddubs 2y agowhat feature did stripe kill?
- teqsun 2y agoI assume they're referring to this: https://cohost.org/corru/post/6551052-ko-fi-and-stripe https://cohost.org/corru/post/6551052-ko-fi-and-stripe
- roryokane 2y agoThe more relevant post is the the one from the cohost maintainers linked in that post’s first comment: https://cohost.org/staff/post/6403911-may-2024-financial-u https://cohost.org/staff/post/6403911-may-2024-financial-u. In summary, at that time Stripe forbade use of their service to pay for tips or subscriptions that do not result in access to exclusive content.
- WD-42 2y agoDisclaimer: I had never heard of cohost before. Looking around the website I couldn’t help but notice this attitude: “we hate the software industry and we hate social media”… so they decided to start a social media company? I’m curious what their vision of success looked like. To me, the fact that they burned out feels like the logical conclusion from where they started from.
- ranger207 2y agoTheir vision of success was just social media for people who hate social media. It wasn't a software goal, it was a community goal
- teqsun 2y agoNot to be glib, but Y for people who hate Y seems like an untenable business plan.
- zem 2y agoonly if you're super literal-minded. "Y for people who hate Y" is a perfectly fine shorthand for "if you like the idea of Y, or some aspects of Y, but hate what it has become today, here's a product for you"
- rebane2001 2y agoI think they were very successful in their goal, they just lacked resources and funding. Their site was a joy to use, it certainly accomplished the vision.
- rglullis 2y agoI've found myself in an argument with some people on Lemmy last week who were genuinely trying to make the case that contributing $1-2 dollars per year should be more than enough to make an open social web sustainable. It started on a thread asking how much it costs to run an instance per user. Because most admins runs things as a hobby, all answers were like "oh, my instance has a few hundred users and I run it on $20/month VPS, so it's just a few cents per user per month" No one even considered factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing. The only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for. For completely unknown reasons, there is a big overlap between the people that make this type of argument and the people that are mystified about the fact so many smart people end up using their talents to optimize the amount of ads being pushed to people online.
- rglover 2y ago> No one even considering factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing, the only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for. This is why I make it a point to pay for software that I find useful/enjoyable. One of the most obnoxious side-effects of the VC startup mill's use of "free" services to fuel growth (loss leaders) is that they tricked people into thinking that software was cheap or free to produce. Now people feel entitled to your efforts for as little as possible and, in some cases, get absolutely indignant that you'd ever try to run a real business and profit from your efforts.
- j45 2y agoFor that reason it's why I try to keep all stacks as ruthlessly simple as possible, because the complexity will come from the market and flexibility will be invaluable then. Premature over-engineering, or optimization costs a lot more developers, administration and hardware. At times it reminds me of when someone is using AI to do sometimes a SQL query might be able to. So much effort avoiding SQL, to the point of using non-relational databases... only to relate them.
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- LoganDark 2y agoOh, this is so sad... Cohost helped us immensely as a system, and it helped us find so many new friends, and we've felt bad for not checking on it recently, just to hear that they're shutting down. I'm actually really sad that this is happening. :( -Emily
- sigmonsays 2y agoI legit never knew what it was...
- allenu 2y agoI came across a few blog posts hosted on the site, but I always just assumed it was a blog hosting site. I suppose from a marketing angle, it didn't make an impression on me as to why I would use it over anything else.
- janandonly 2y agoThey’re actually bringing in a lot of money each month with a high % of users supporting as paid members. But their expenses are really high for the kind of site it is. Anyway this is what happens to a community that builds itself on closed source centralized platforms. When the maintainers decide to give up the users and community have no say.
- iteratethis 2y agoAlternative social media is discovering what hard problems centralized media has cracked. Problems we don't even see or know about, things we take for granted. Things not appreciated because we almost exclusively pay negative attention to social media, for understandable reasons. Storage, as an example. It balloons. With video even more. Ever growing costs not necessarily on par with income. Hate FB as much as you like, but my photo posted 16 years ago is still there. Depending on the software, social media can be compute intense. Not cheap. Compliance. The legal headache of complying with every jurisdiction And of course the worst: moderation. Deleting clearly illegal content, gore, scammers, spammers, impersonators followed by the large gray zone realm of the culture wars. A 24/7 operation that you can't ever walk away from and hollows you out over time. All of that for what? A little carved out box for "your" people? Just open a normal forum, Reddit, Discord and piggy back on another platform. You're carrying a disproportional burden for questionable benefits. You're never going to rebuild social media at scale from scratch. You're effectively creating a small chat group for like-minded individuals. Mastodon is the biggest attempt at alternative social media. It's 8 years old and has 800K MAU and that MAU is perpetually tanking. It carved out a little corner for misfits. Good for them, but the entire "fediverse" is unlikely to account for more than that.
- circl_lastname 2y agoExtremely saddened. I quite liked the site, I hoped it could stay afloat