I've never used cohost but I miss it
plume.pink
plume.pink
“We have watched the world buy into the lies of people who ‘believe in the disruptive potential of technology,’ and who think the best way to realize that potential is to build for-profit businesses that enable a creative-class petit bourgeois to make it through their day without acknowledging another human being,” the founders, Colin Bayer and Jae Kaplan, stated back in 2020. “We think we can do better, by building tools that focus on fair dealing and sustainable growth rather than market dominance,” their manifesto read.
The company had been sharing its financial difficulties in a series of updates starting in March 2024, which warned that the site’s major funder, who prefers to remain anonymous, had gone completely incommunicado as the funds were running out. Cohost, however, was nowhere near being able to sustain itself, as it had just 30,000 monthly active users and just 2,630 subscribers as of March 11, 2024.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/cohost-the-x-rival-founded...
You can rent a cheapest dedicated server on Hetzner for, like, $50 - $70 / month and I would expect it to be performant enough to cope with 30k MAU for a simple blogging platform.
I don't see why would it require a whole team of fulltime devs.
Inflating team size, constant feature churn etc all make sense for a VC-funded company. But they were kinda making a statement against it, so there is bo reason for them to have a whole team to maintain a blogging platform.
It's hard for me to estimate the cost of media hosting, but again, Hetzner (I'm not advertising them, it's just one dedicated server provider I heard about. There are many others) offers 20 TB / month of free traffic. Is it not enough to serve images at cohost scale? I genuinely do not know, I would love to hear estimates from more knowledgeable/experienced folks.
Or was storage the issue? How much storage are we talking about?
If you add up server costs, the cheapest possible accounting and legal services, and any other miscellaneous business costs, it doesn't really leave much of a budget for development.
I see digitalocean,datadog, aws, mailgun, managed databases kubernetes.
That costs much money, that are better spend in some classic server infrastructure like a dedicated server.
This didnt need kubernetes, datadog, all that stuff. This needed a couple of hundred a month in S3 or cloudflare or whatever storage/CDN bills, and a couple of 40$/month hetzner boxes.
"Hindsight is always perfect".
Embrace mistakes? They will learn from it, and I'm already looking forward to their new project(s) (and new mistakes)!
Just... this comes from some personal lament. Computers are so wonderful. In the time between a photon emerging from your ceiling lamp and hitting the floor, you can crank out 20-30 CPU cycles.
Yet an entire breed of developers has been raised to see 2000$/month Postgres RDS on AWS as "the cost of doing business". I wish costs wouldn't hold back great things like this that the internet needs.
No, none of my stuff has ever hit millions of users, and I suspect if it tried it would blow apart quite quickly, but none of them ever will come to 1/10th of that, and hot take: that's fine.
This whole thing strikes me as an attempt to have your cake and eat it to. Trying to recreate the vibes of the old school web that was largely ran by enthusiasts for enthusiasts while actually running it the way a big corp or a VC-funded startup would.
I think that this is a little bit hypocritical.
The founders of cohost were very explicit about not wanting to rely upon unpaid volunteer labor to run their site. The fact that they were not able to run the site profitably while adhering to this principle and chose to shut down the site rather than violate their principles is the complete opposite of hypocrisy.
If I ever build some publishing or communication tool it will be as decentralized as possible and as uncensorable as possible.
What does this even mean? This is just a word salad.
> We think we can do better, by building tools that focus on fair dealing and sustainable growth rather than market dominance
Apparently not. Marxists[1] need to realise that profit is not a dirty word, and growth is not a dirty word. Otherwise, you get things that are generally not economically sustainable, like this. The website was funded by an anonymous rich person...
[1] I'm using this literally here, not as a pejorative.
Something like this is a "mission", not a venture. If you care first about the mission, then make business/technology/lifestyle choices that support the mission:
* Don't quit your day job. Work after hours on the mission.
* Use inexpensive technologies that you can afford to pay out of pocket for.
* Have a viable plan for revenue so that incremental users are at minimum cost-neutral.
Don't get into the position where a clock is ticking down on you. As long as the product is running, the mission continues.
Is this a good way to build a business? Almost certainly not. But the goal here isn't to find a mission so we can build a business, it's find a business so we can achieve this mission. Pivoting to some other mission is a failure.
(As someone with a "side-mission", I've been thinking a lot about this subject)
It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.
These days you're lucky to get a few day's notice and a "thanks for the incredible journey, now get the hell out" email when a site folds.
This way you don’t need a single `cohost` brand to gather around, each separate space acts on its own. Yes like federation now. Only my club has mastodons and blogs and what not.
Then your club can take approach of “we allow anyone” or “you have to be vetted to join”.
Replacing Facebook, Instagram, et al. Is a different game than setting up a “cool blog host space”. People use those tools to be apart of their community, share photos of their families and find local places to buy used. They use a false promise of “everyone here is real just look at their real name we require” as an identifier that you are in the club.
If you don’t give these spaces free form identities and some sense of exclusion, however open, you’ll always suffer the tragedy of the commons without big money treating your users like cattle. And for some reason people love being treated like cattle.
As for analytics, give me analytics about my stuff. Do not create a gaming system out of it by sharing that data with uninvolved parties.
I have always found myself reluctant building a blog out of static-site generators. If writing and posting were all I want, static sites could have done everything the web technologies had been offering. But I kinda feel that the fact that we -- the small group people having "internet dream" since the beginning of web 2.0 -- has the desire to share and collaborate. The more the web is inter-connected, the more value the community can create. We are in the same boat, and this feeling is something static hosting services seldom provides.
> Please, if you are on cohost, if you have a small blog, a small personal website, please I'm asking you, don't stop. [...] I love seeing you out there and I want to see more of you.
I had only two testing posts on cohost, but I did enjoy reading and discovering posts there. The idea of forming a close-knit community was rooted at the core design of cohost, shaping it up as a nice blend of blogging platform and social media. I hope more people can build toward this.