cohost - A less-toxic Twitter alternative?

[Barry Williams]

I don't keep proper tabs on Cohost but I recall seeing somewhere that the site administrators are absolutely against selling user data to advertisers and running ads on their website. They are sticking to their guns about not monetizing their userbase in that manner and instead believed people would be willing to sign up for their Cohost Plus package for five bucks a month. Obviously few people took them up on their offer because again, if I recall correctly, you didn't actually get anything with a Plus subscription. Cohost's developers basically sold the product as an IOU saying they'd create some cool stuff that would eventually only be offered to Plus users.

Real genius stuff, here.

edit: I just logged in to my burner account to see what you actually get with Cohost Plus and there is literally one option in my user settings that is locked behind a Plus subscription, "use .beat timestamps on posts". Beat is an impossible to read time format presented in decimal that was created by the Swatch company in the late nineties as some stupid marketing gimmick to get people to buy their watches. That's literally it. Five bucks a month in order to essentially scramble the timestamps on everything you see so you can't actually tell when anything was posted.

 

[Baraadmirer]

Thanks for keeping this thread alive, y'all. Updated the OP with the most recent developments.

 

[The Real Slim Shady]

their team is so dysfunctional they can't have conversations about reassigning important tasks from the tard who literally can't work for half a year (and these are important tasks like implementing features that are supposed to make them finally be profitable).

Amd of course that person had to tell everyone they are "disabled", if he or she would shut up about it, and keep taking the wage and not doing jack shit, we'd never laugh at this. But apparently virtue signalling is more important that keeping your cash cow alive.

just logged in to my burner account to see what you actually get with Cohost Plus and there is literally one option in my user settings that is locked behind a Plus subscription, "use .beat timestamps on posts".

While I completely agree with the no ads approach, thats hilarious. Tumblr at least had the badges and that sold like hotcakes.

 

[Barry Williams]

of course that person had to tell everyone they are "disabled"

Which also, consequently, means they are probably not actually disabled in the slightest. I believe the word they are looking for is "work shy" or "jobn't".

 

[Kees H]

They should sign up for Stake.us using the promocode BossmanJack and go all-in on Keno with the funds they have remaining. That would solve all of their funding issues.

 

[skunt]

i decided to check up on cohost and they're on day numero FIVE of shit being broken

link, archive


archive with comments

archive with comments

archive with comments

 

[Markass the Worst]

i decided to check up on cohost and they're on day numero FIVE of shit being broken

And here I thought it was impossible to do worse than X. X is a slow React piece of shit with ratelimits and requires an account to view but at least you can upload images on it. How many times is cohost going to take Ls?

 

[skunt]

And here I thought it was impossible to do worse than X. X is a slow React piece of shit with ratelimits and requires an account to view but at least you can upload images on it. How many times is cohost going to take Ls?

no joke. you should check this too (https://cohost.org/staff/post/5101727-end-of-week-financia#comments). Sorry too, ghostarchive is being shit. Have you a suggestion for something better? Worth noting that archive.ph (etc) tend to usually block mullvad users which makes it unusable for me.

anyways, choice picks from that link:

even with this boost in MRR, we’re still operating at a loss of, on average, $17k per month

cohost had about 30,000 monthly active users and 2,630 active subscribers. this leads to a conversion rate of about 9%. our churn rate (the rate at which people unsubscribe) is 2.6%

(honestly these numbers really are FANTASTIC and most sites would kill for conversion and retention like this)

in order to fund 6 months of development, we’d need about $105k

i got bored and didn't even bother reading the ADs section. at a quick glance it seems they're going to entertain some kind of user-submitted ads which should be legitimately funny. it'll almost entirely be furry/NSFW commissions.

 

[Markass the Worst]

no joke. you should check this too (https://cohost.org/staff/post/5101727-end-of-week-financia#comments). Sorry too, ghostarchive is being shit. Have you a suggestion for something better? Worth noting that archive.ph (etc) tend to usually block mullvad users which makes it unusable for me.

I already archived with archive.ph https://archive.ph/UPjZf. How do they block mullvad users? They may do a captcha but you can complete it.

i got bored and didn't even bother reading the ADs section.

It won't be third party ads but apparently user to user ads. Also love the part where they say they don't want to fundraise but they're asking for people to subscribe to cohost plus anyway. Seems like they will just beg for cash every time they are close to running out.

 

[skunt]

ow do they block mullvad users? They may do a captcha but you can complete it.

Ah, I misremembered. Yeah, before I had this rage inducing issue with the captcha where no matter what, I couldn't complete it. I just tried now and it works. Will swap to that in future.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Ah, I misremembered. Yeah, before I had this rage inducing issue with the captcha where no matter what, I couldn't complete it. I just tried now and it works. Will swap to that in future.

If it gives you too many captchas then you should cycle vpn nodes.

 

[D.Va]

https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down (archive)

Cohost announced a shutdown today. It is going read-only from October and closing entirely from January 2025. To nobody's surprise, "Twitter for boring people" was not a solid business model.

Holy fuck $41,000 in expenses every month for a blog site. Most of that has to be salaries, since we know Kaara got six figs in top of whoever else Cohost employed. I think in total it was 4 people.

A software company with no physical presence whatsoever absolutely needed to give themselves salaries like they live in San Francisco because there's absolutely no alternative. How many tech companies keep dying this way

"anti software software club is a not-for-profit software company that hates the software industry."

How much would you even value the source code for a worse version of Mastodon?

Drama that I have no fucking clue about

https://cohost.org/zlchxo this guy is very upset about Cohost closing but won't move to another dead website, browse comments for an introspective to a schizoid

 

[Not Yet Implemented]

Come to think of it, not the first project I see with this trajectory.

1. holy shit we can make something like the big boys
2. let's add wacky shit!!!1
3. once the initial wave of enthusiasm fades, it dies a slow death because nobody has a clue how to manage money, a project, or both

 

[The Real Slim Shady]

Looks like the Cohost Plus thing didnt work out, to nobody's surprise. I almost forgot this thing existed and it's already on the dead orbit.

I guess the mood in SV is worse than last yea,r and they could not find another sugar daddy to fund their salaries. Nobody wanted to invest (or more like throw money, because it couldn't turn a profit) in that hugbox it seems.

That failure is glorious. I don't know anybody who has had a Cohost account, they lost to a literal twitter clone for trannies and fetishists (bsky) because that service seems to run well. I don't know who pays for the light there, I just realized that. With a larger userbase bsky surely uses more billable resources and yet they stay afloat.

Were they hosting cohost bare metal/on dedicated servers or some cloud? Either way I would be curious to see that "Expenses" figure broken up.

 

[Null]

$40k a month for a site nobody used???? I had never even heard of it

Bro that's unreal, especially how much money they were actually earning. If I could charge people $5/mo for stupid bullshit like colored usernames this site would probably generate seven figures. jesus fucking christ.

edit: @CrunkLord420 reminded me that LFJ had a cohost page. it was the only blog he used.

https://cohost.org/lizthegrey?page=0

I wonder if Honeycomb or LFJ privately financed this.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

$40k a month for a site nobody used???? I had never even heard of it

Bro that's unreal, especially how much money they were actually earning. If I could charge people $5/mo for stupid bullshit like colored usernames this site would probably generate seven figures. jesus fucking christ.

edit: @CrunkLord420 reminded me that LFJ had a cohost page. it was the only blog he used.

https://cohost.org/lizthegrey?page=0

I wonder if Honeycomb or LFJ privately financed this.

God I heaven I hope someday you can charge.

I firmly believe you could hack together a shitter wannabe in a weekend for only $10k a mo. $10k a homo.

 

[skunt]

$40k a month for a site nobody used???? I had never even heard of it

they were incredibly mismanaged. for example: https://archive.ph/Hy6mJ
they used to get free CDN from cloudflare because cloudflare forgot to bill them. so they switched to paying fastly 5k per month for....10tb of transmit?

our fastly contract is set at $4,850 per month (plus a 7% sales tax) for bandwidth/CDN and firewall services. we move approximately 10TB of data per month, 2/3 of which is images.

whomever at fastly sealed that deal must have been laughing for weeks.

they also stated numerous times in their past filings that they had one rich benefactor who basically bankrolled them and when this person went MIA for a few months they panicked and almost shut down. there's a lot of laughs to be found there.

 

[S.C.U.D.]

they were incredibly mismanaged. for example: https://archive.ph/Hy6mJ
they used to get free CDN from cloudflare because cloudflare forgot to bill them. so they switched to paying fastly 5k per month for....10tb of transmit?

whomever at fastly sealed that deal must have been laughing for weeks.

they also stated numerous times in their past filings that they had one rich benefactor who basically bankrolled them and when this person went MIA for a few months they panicked and almost shut down. there's a lot of laughs to be found there.

I think I have an idea why Cloudflare doesn't make money. No way this only happened once.

 

[Google.com]

When I gave it a peak it at least had enjoyable UI and a nice color scheme which I appreciate from a project.

But I think reading their manifesto vs Cohosts homepage is funny
Archive

In exchange for the money a startup needs to survive, before the product has shipped — often before the company even has a product they’re pretty sure they can sell — they’ve already sold 20% or more of it to some hectomillionaire venture capitalist. from here, many startups build out their growth strategy on a copy-and-pasted model:

1. cut your prices to an unsustainable minimum (Cohost 100% didn't go this route)
2. sell yourself to consumers by claiming you’ve gotten rid of “market inefficiencies” and are passing the savings on to them (Cohost 100% did this one)
3. round up more venture capitalists to throw money into the fire until you push everyone else out of the market (Well I think no ones going to argue they didn't throw money into the fire)
4. once you run out of gullible rich people, raise money through an IPO and jack the price back up until you become “sustainable” so that everyone can make a tidy return (Can't do this without users)

---

I wonder if Honeycomb or LFJ privately financed this.

This is what they claimed their funding was from in their manifesto.

while we were griping about the tech industry and considering starting this project back in September, a friend of ours stepped forward and let us know that they had hit the lottery as an early technical employee at a startup that had succeeded and gone public. the first public announcement we’re ready to make is: we have secured a deal with them for at least a year of operating funding on a non-equity basis, and we are publicly committing that we will never, under any circumstances, sell equity to non-employees.

obviously, the problems with firms under capitalism don’t just stop at the involvement of venture capital — for more information, read here — so we’re just using the flexibility afforded to us by controlling 100% of the company as a jumping-off point. once we’ve ensured that we can pay our bills and keep the lights on, we plan to build products which incorporate mechanisms for public accountability and user power.

we’ve chosen our first product, and we’ve been building it for a few months (in between a staggering amount of paperwork), but we don’t have anything concrete to announce just yet — beyond the fact that nearly every person we’ve told about our product has answered “about damn time,” so we hope we’re only being moderately foolish. we’ll make another post soon with more specifics about how we’re doing business and why — again with no product announcements — and we’ll be back in touch after that to talk about the thing we’re making.

 

[skunt]

if cohost open sources i demand a return of kiwifarms.cc on the cohost codebase