[HN Gopher] Cohost to shut down at end of 2024
___________________________________________________________________
Cohost to shut down at end of 2024
Author : kotaKat
Score : 92 points
Date : 2024-09-09 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cohost.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cohost.org)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For 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>
| dmonitor wrote:
| Does Wikipedia allow for an article to change its tense from
| "is" to "will have been" before it reaches "was"?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Well 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 wrote:
| Current 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 wrote:
| If 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
| Kye wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| If 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.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Federation wouldn't have meaningfully solved their revenue
| problems, though. It would have just been a massive engineering
| timesink.
| skyfaller wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| So you are saying that you would pay for an account for
| Mastodon or Lemmy?
| depingus wrote:
| You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate
| money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and
| admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to
| pay.
| rglullis wrote:
| This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join
| a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only
| given to paying subscribers.
|
| I am asking because I happen to run one of those
| (https://communick.com) since 2019.
| jonathanyc wrote:
| I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host
| around a year ago. I would have been interested in your
| service but it did not come up in any search results. I
| remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process
| for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted
| towards people who wanted to host instances themselves,
| not just have an account.
|
| Even now I can't find your service in the first page of
| my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring
| donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon.
|
| Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it
| is very hard to discover even for people who are willing
| to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a
| useful experience report.
| rglullis wrote:
| Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because
| Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial
| providers, only hosting services.
|
| To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an
| evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the
| space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future
| of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into
| a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering
| ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and
| invest into promoting it.
| jonathanyc wrote:
| > To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an
| evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the
| space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future
| of the open social web.
|
| Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while
| of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was
| opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with.
|
| For example, instead of a separate UI for private
| messages, they just add another option to the visibility
| selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is
| somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt
| wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and
| the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with
| quote tweets.
|
| I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but
| are there any alternatives that you thought were
| particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little
| time to try things out.
|
| The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the
| "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error
| "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd
| love to sign up though.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Probably cheaper to run a mastodon instance, since there
| are no development costs.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported
| by donations from the community. I have not put my own money
| in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to
| run it.
|
| But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for
| a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network:
|
| https://gotosocial.org/
|
| https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion
|
| My server: https://jawns.club
|
| Our finances: https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub
|
| We're currently paying for managed Mastodon hosting on
| https://masto.host/
| rglullis wrote:
| How do you think your community would react if you switched
| to a "everyone pays a little bit every year" model?
| skyfaller wrote:
| I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to
| mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small
| community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I
| wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the
| critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline,
| which for me is a major reason to run your own server.
| I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for
| a while, and then check in again randomly when they need
| more social media in their life for whatever reason, and
| mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in
| and out of inactivity.
|
| Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as
| it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have
| money, but do contribute to the community in other ways.
| The only real reason to move away from pay what you want
| is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine
| for now.
|
| I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're
| providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid
| moderation, but I think the number of people willing to
| pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is
| rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more
| efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between
| servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by
| splitting the cost between more users, but there are
| several problems with that approach... one being that
| moderation by members of your community is always going
| to be more clueful than moderation from outside your
| community.
| rglullis wrote:
| Do you think it's a fair assessment to say then you are
| making the same argument I mentioned in the other thread:
| very few people think that the service of a social media
| account is actually worth anything, and that this should
| only be treated as a hobby?
|
| Follow up question: if everyone treats social media
| alternatives as a hobby, do you think that it has a
| chance of being a viable alternative to the Big Tech
| platforms?
| i80and wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240909195207/https://cohost.or...
|
| https://archive.ph/1Oonr
| nightpool wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| How do I find loan offers like that? I'd take that deal on some
| projects...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Angel investors.
| nightpool wrote:
| Angel investors generally make equity investments, not
| loans. Cohost in the past has been very specific about the
| fact that their funding was the latter.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| presumably unclassifiable aws costs
| jkap wrote:
| salary for four employees working well under market rate
| kevingadd wrote:
| Pure 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 wrote:
| At $41k/mo burn they couldn't have been offering high
| salaries.
| jkap wrote:
| we were not. all of us made exactly the same amount, and it
| was well under market rate
| nightpool wrote:
| Expenses also includes salary and accounting fees, AIUI
| martinky24 wrote:
| Software devs ain't cheap
| Hamuko wrote:
| Depends from where you hire them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Their 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 wrote:
| That's total expenses, not just hosting.
| BryantD wrote:
| They 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_ wrote:
| People were paid until today, the costs are mostly salary
| aftbit wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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
| Twisol wrote:
| I don't really know -- I'm a user, not an analyst. But the
| two things that drew me in were:
|
| 1. There's no global firehose that your posts automatically
| get dropped into. I'm a generally shy person, and one of my
| particularities is that I don't want my content (or, well,
| _existence_ ) to be pushed at somebody who didn't
| specifically ask for it. The number of social media
| platforms that meet this criterion is _vanishingly small_ ,
| because everybody and their uncle wants an Algorithm (tm).
| Mastodon instances also have a default instance firehose;
| I'm told people don't really look at that, but the fact
| that it's there at all makes me overthink posting, and I
| end up not posting at all.
|
| Instead of a global firehose, you can add free-form tags to
| your post that act like much, much more localized streams
| of posts. You don't have to use tags at all; and you can
| also use completely nonsense tags that are more like
| footnotes, in a very Tumblr style that I enjoy.
|
| 2. The UI is _wider_ than Twitter, or Facebook, or
| Mastodon. It _feels_ like it 's more inviting to longer-
| form content, and while there's plenty of short blurbs and
| memes to be found, there's just a _much higher proportion_
| of blog-style content.
|
| Also, the way reposting and commenting interact is just way
| better IMO. If you repost something, the comments on the
| original post are visible above the comments on your
| repost, and that makes the whole chain of interactions feel
| more cohesive. In contrast, quote-retweeting on Twitter
| creates entirely separate bubbles of discussion (often at
| odds with each other). And on Cohost, while you _can_
| create a repost chain to make a kind of "thread"
| equivalent, the UI naturally discourages it in favor of
| just making a single long-form post.
| asddubs wrote:
| are there any screenshots of the UI available? I tried to
| sign up but they don't accept any more signups
| culi wrote:
| In addition to Mastodon and Bluesky, Threads now supports the
| ActivityPub protocol that the fediverse (incl Mastodon) is
| built upon. There's also been talks about eventual interop
| between bsky's protocol and activitypub's. For now at least a
| bridge exists
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Aren't most mastodon instances intentionally blocking
| federation with threads though?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > There's also been talks about eventual interop between
| bsky's protocol and activitypub's
|
| Got a recent link for this? I wouldn't think that would work
| so well.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Threads now supports the ActivityPub protocol that the
| fediverse (incl Mastodon) is built upon.
|
| Given the recent issues with Twitter, my country's president
| started posting on an official account on both Bluesky and
| Threads. Knowing about that ActivityPub support from Threads,
| I decided to try following him from my Mastodon account,
| which is in a server which does not block Threads (it can
| follow the USA president's and vice-president's official
| Threads accounts just fine), but that didn't work. What I
| found out after a quick web search, was that this feature is
| only available for users from the USA, and even then, it has
| to be manually enabled on each Threads account.
| kevingadd wrote:
| No fediverse instance I've run across provides high-fidelity
| posting like Cohost and Tumblr. Out of the two, the Cohost
| experience was generally much nicer. I have accounts on
| Mastodon, Twitter and Bluesky along with the other two and
| Cohost was easily my preference for sharing long-form content.
| coldpie wrote:
| It had a pleasant UI and I liked their moderation policies and
| ethical business model. I don't like Twitter or Facebook's
| moderation policies or business models. I don't care about
| de/centralization.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| I doubt an ethical social media will ever work. It is either
| irrelevant or a money black hole.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| It will be a money black hole but I still think it can work,
| just not as a business.
| colechristensen wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| I think "ethical" in the context of social media means not
| doing surveillance capitalism. ie: don't cash on user data.
| Moderation is a orthogonal topic.
| coldpie wrote:
| > What is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network?
|
| For me, primarily one does not use a business model that
| profits from outrage, clickbait, misinformation, etc.
| Business models that use view-based ad revenue are unethical,
| for example.
|
| Beyond that, it should make an effort to stifle the spread of
| harmful content. Where that line is drawn is of course hard
| to define. Twitter and Facebook largely ignore their
| responsibilities here, which is one reason I don't use them.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Seeing 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 wrote:
| what feature did stripe kill?
| teqsun wrote:
| I assume they're referring to this:
|
| https://cohost.org/corru/post/6551052-ko-fi-and-stripe
| WD-42 wrote:
| Disclaimer: 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 wrote:
| Their 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 wrote:
| Not to be glib, but Y for people who hate Y seems like an
| untenable business plan.
| rglullis wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| This is a common argument, especially with tech products. The
| most recurring one that I hear is that "phone X can be made
| with Y hundreds of dollars in china". Like, have you ever
| considered the amount of software and hardware
| development/research that's needed to turn that thing on?
| tptacek wrote:
| This just came up a couple days ago with a thread about a
| programming education app with 2MM users that was shutting
| down, with the thread dominated by discussion of their hosting
| costs and how they could have cut it in half by moving off AWS;
| if they had managed to get those costs down to zero they still
| couldn't have afforded a single software developer, probably
| not even in Tulsa or Little Rock.
|
| Everyone here has hosted something and has a take on how to
| golf those costs, but comparatively few have ever made payroll.
| So that's the discussion we get.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Oh, 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 wrote:
| I legit never knew what it was...
| allenu wrote:
| I 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.
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