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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm not sure if you actually read their previous financial reports, but their expenses were somewhere around $50,000-60,000, that doesn't indicate an inflated dev budget.
If you add up server costs, the cheapest possible accounting and legal services, and any other miscellaneous business costs, it doesn't really leave much of a budget for development.
The other commenter, Throwaway3... is getting downvoted but I agree with the costs being excessive, tech-wise.
This didnt need kubernetes, datadog, all that stuff. This needed a couple of hundred a month in S3 or cloudflare or whatever storage/CDN bills, and a couple of 40$/month hetzner boxes.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
I'm not sure if you actually read their previous financial reports, but their expenses were somewhere around $50,000-60,000, that doesn't indicate an inflated dev budget.
If you add up server costs, the cheapest possible accounting and legal services, and any other miscellaneous business costs, it doesn't really leave much of a budget for development.
No, I haven't read their financial reports because I didn't knew they exist. I will take a look, thanks.
I only knew of them because the top-level comment specifically references the financial updates and some of the numbers from them.
https://status.cohost.org/
I see digitalocean,datadog, aws, mailgun, managed databases kubernetes.
That costs much money, that are better spend in some classic server infrastructure like a dedicated server.
The other commenter, Throwaway3... is getting downvoted but I agree with the costs being excessive, tech-wise.
This didnt need kubernetes, datadog, all that stuff. This needed a couple of hundred a month in S3 or cloudflare or whatever storage/CDN bills, and a couple of 40$/month hetzner boxes.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a real opportunity for someone with your skills.
I'm just not interested in building yet another blogging platform, I think that this ship has sailed long time ago.
If I ever build some publishing or communication tool it will be as decentralized as possible and as uncensorable as possible.
> 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
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.
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)
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.
> 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.
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?
https://home.omg.lol/ perhaps?
Yes, thank you!
[dead]
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