[HN Gopher] I've never used cohost but I miss it
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I've never used cohost but I miss it
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-10-26 08:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (plume.pink)
(TXT) w3m dump (plume.pink)
| jph wrote:
| Plume's paean/elegy is very kind. Kudos to Colin and Jae for
| creating cohost and all the optimism. For HN people who are not
| familiar with the project, here are a couple quotaions.
|
| "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...
| throwaway313373 wrote:
| 30,000 monthly active users doesn't sound as a particularly
| high load. Why were they running out of funds?
|
| 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.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Server costs are only part of the problem. They had a team of
| devs they couldn't afford to pay, they were hosting a lot of
| media (especially images) and they never quite hit the
| traction to make the project feel worth doing for free. I
| fully sympathize with their decision to shut it down instead
| of letting it run on fumes.
| throwaway313373 wrote:
| I mean, this is a blogging platform. Users, posts,
| comments, likes, that's about it. People were making
| blogging platforms since forever. Every web framework
| tutorial has a "hey, let's make a blog" part.
|
| 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?
| jeffalyanak wrote:
| I'm not sure if you actually read their previous
| financial reports, but their expenses were somewhere
| around $50,000-60,000, that doesn't indicate an inflated
| dev budget.
|
| If you add up server costs, the cheapest possible
| accounting and legal services, and any other
| miscellaneous business costs, it doesn't really leave
| much of a budget for development.
| throwaway313373 wrote:
| No, I haven't read their financial reports because I
| didn't knew they exist. I will take a look, thanks.
| 0x073 wrote:
| https://status.cohost.org/
|
| I see digitalocean,datadog, aws, mailgun, managed
| databases kubernetes.
|
| That costs much money, that are better spend in some
| classic server infrastructure like a dedicated server.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The other commenter, Throwaway3... is getting downvoted
| but I agree with the costs being excessive, tech-wise.
|
| This didnt need kubernetes, datadog, all that stuff. This
| needed a couple of hundred a month in S3 or cloudflare or
| whatever storage/CDN bills, and a couple of 40$/month
| hetzner boxes.
| rendx wrote:
| Sounds like a back-then reasonable attempt at building
| something that can be easily scaled and carried certain
| risks. You simply cannot know after the fact what the
| basis of the decision and approach to risk was, what the
| agreeemnts and expectations were of and with the
| "anonymous investor", etc.
|
| "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)!
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes, of course. You are right and I don't mean to be
| overly dismissive of them; I applaud their philosophy and
| mission, and they shipped something many people loved.
|
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The "web scale" brain rot runs deep. Every project I've
| done has been PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. I've built
| software solutions for a number of local businesses that
| are still running years on virtually unchanged because I
| just used simple tools, simply.
|
| 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._
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Ive been working in healthcare for a few years now and
| yeah, most of the stacks I encounter are similarly simple
| and get by fine while generating millions in revenue.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| If you aren't willing to have volunteers do it for free,
| moderation is _by far_ the most expensive and challenging
| part of running a social media site. Cohost was both
| developed and operated by a total of four people, one of whom
| was a full-time moderator.
| throwaway313373 wrote:
| In the days of the good old internet pre social networks
| and big tech that so many people are nostalgic about, folks
| mostly communicated using internet forums that were mostly
| moderated by enthusiasts.
|
| 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.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I think you're _more than a little bit_ talking out of
| your ass.
|
| 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.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Maybe not cohost themselves, but I think the person
| you're replying to has a point re. users with unrealistic
| expectations. People want services that are free to use,
| high quality, pruned/moderated, and not run under
| unethical practices. The problem is you can't get the
| first three (at scale) unless someone somewhere is
| working without fair pay, which effectively means you
| can't have the first three AND the fourth at the same
| time.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sounds like a real opportunity for someone with your skills.
| johnkizer wrote:
| The whole thing feels very "old school Internet" in a way - a
| bunch of misfits with a manifesto and an intentionally simple
| website.
|
| 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.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I think it's also worth lauding their approach to a shutdown.
| They informed users it was going to happen nearly a month in
| advance, and the userbase proceeded to use that time to mourn,
| celebrate, exchange contact info with their friends, help one
| another build personal sites and/or organize taking refuge with
| other websites and communication tools. At the beginning of
| October the site was "frozen" and every user was emailed a link
| for downloading machine-readable archives of every post,
| comment, and user preference from their accounts. Cohost
| remains read-only browsable until the end of the year, after
| which the founders intend to forward their domain to an
| archive.org-hosted snapshot of everything public.
|
| 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.
| anonfordays wrote:
| > - a bunch of misfits with a manifesto
|
| You're overselling them. The were your run of the mill
| terminally online leftists with a code of conduct.
| qbane wrote:
| > Tomorrow I can just simply take that and make it a static site
| that I would self-host or whatever.
|
| 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.
| righthand wrote:
| Seems like a more sustainable method would be to create
| cryptographic web rings. A series of authors or sites that are in
| the web ring or "club" that link and share and display each
| other's content. Each site has a cryptographic key that validates
| they're in the club. The next step would be to make these
| cryptographic keys a symbol of pride or brand.
|
| 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.
| oezi wrote:
| Maybe 6-12 months ago there was a site similar to cohost featured
| on HN. It was a quirky one-man project with email handle and
| subdomain. There was a fee (one time?) but it sounded rather non-
| commercial. I can't recall the name and can't find it with my
| Googlefoo. Any ideas?
| Oanid wrote:
| https://home.omg.lol/ perhaps?
| oezi wrote:
| Yes, thank you!
| stickfigure wrote:
| I applaud their goals but I think they fundamentally went about
| it the wrong way. They adopted the VC model - hire up, start down
| the runway, and hope to hit takeoff before the money runs out.
| Not having actual VCs doesn't change the process, just the
| budgets and timelines.
|
| 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)
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