cohost - A less-toxic Twitter alternative?

[The Noise]

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.

If you ever get that TN banking stuff set up I would absolutely pay monthly to have the gayest most obnoxious username color possible.

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

Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads...probably a million other derivatives I'm missing. Platforms that only got any traction on illogical "Twitter is dying" hysteria and then burnt out when they all had the same problems as Twitter and the majority wasn't interested in moving to begin with.

Running a social media platform is a zero sum game. You will literally never be profitable unless you sell your soul to the "hectomillioniares" that cohost talked about. This has been common knowledge for years but I guess some people (like cohost's founders) had to learn this in the most expensive way possible.

 

[Crispy Pancake]

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The only people on Cohost were schizos and techtroons. The Floraverse demographic.

 

[Google.com]

You know, I am not sure if looking for a job on the platform you worked at and just lost your job after they ran out of money is the smartest move.

https://archive.ph/Rm6UC

"Mistar white cohost is shuting down"

https://archive.ph/kj5x1

Archive of the shut down comments if you want to read.

https://archive.ph/esuvm

And archives of all of the higher up atleast staff accounts
@vogon: https://archive.ph/qNPO6
@jkap: https://archive.ph/h9OFc
@Aida.n: https://archive.ph/v08Sz
@kara: https://archive.ph/Rm6UC
@eggbug(Mascot) https://archive.ph/BerV2 (I enjoy the design of this creature can we steal it?)
@assc(our brave Marxists) https://archive.ph/42qoa
@staff: https://archive.ph/ldxVy

 

[Mr. Manchester]

That's a beautiful drawing. I would hang that up on my wall and refuse to explain it to anybody.

 

[Barry Williams]

If I could charge people $5/mo for stupid bullshit like colored usernames this site would probably generate seven figures. jesus fucking christ.

And then you can also charge people $10 to change someone else's avatar or username, or $9.11 to set your join date to September 11, 2001 (you know, so no one forgets). Just uh, skip the part that happens 20 years later when you're supposed to suck start a shotgun.

 

[Instant_Pot_User]

Cohost reeks of the faggotry that 9front displays (using rio, of course) but without any irony. Joyless faggots.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Archiveteam already has a wiki page and IRC channel dedicated to archiving whatever little worth this laughingstock of a website had.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

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

Dongless' husband works for Fastly

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/liz-fong-jones-elliot-william-fong-lizthegrey.128419/post-16477313

That's correct, the third member of LFJ's tranny brony polycule is a Fastly employee. I wouldn't be surprised if many more DKF types were also in bed with the Fastly workers or their social group, since the Silicon Valley echochamber is going to tend to bring these activist types together anyway

Wonder if a certain tranny got in their ear and sold them on the Fastly dream only for them to get completely fucked by the insane monthly costs.

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

Cloudflare's trick is to offer their services for free or a relatively cheap price (for business it's $250/mo which is nothing) then if their sales people realize you're a whale, they'll start harassing you to go to the enterprise plan. If you refuse, then they'll suddenly find a ToS violation and threaten to pull the plug unless you pay right fucking now and they lock you out of your account to make it harder to transfer your zones out.

https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

They're absolute scum

 

[Baraadmirer]

Dongless' husband works for Fastly
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/liz-fong-jones-elliot-william-fong-lizthegrey.128419/post-16477313

I'm fairly certain it was one of Fong-Jones' lovers in the polycule who worked at Fastly.

But wow, I can't believe this site's finally biting the dust. I suppose this thread's going to move into Lolcows of History once it gets shuttered? In any case I'll edit the OP tomorrow to work in the site closure.

 

[Markass the Worst]

So this didn't age well:


Also:

Where's all that gravedancing now about how Musk was going to run X into the ground with advertiser money leaving?

X is still up and running and as far as I know has no plans to shut down any time soon. Can't say the same thing about the faggot "anti-capitalist" site.

Finally, that genderspecial who analyzed Cohost's financial updates and concluded that they're completely fucked gets to dance the "I told you so" dance all the way. I have no idea why anybody was using that site once those posts dropped.

More details in my community features post btw.

 

[BirdUp]

https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

I had to do a Cloudflare captcha to load this site.

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

$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.

Well why not do it? I'm sure people would be willing to spend some crypto on that shit. That retard Lowtax made money doing essentially the same sort of thing.

 

[Not Yet Implemented]

It's funny how leftists are the biggest haters of leftists. The moment they have a falling out with someone they go "oh yeah I always knew that guy was a horrible person [I just defended him because we had to win]".

</political sperging>

 

[Oliver Onions]

If I could charge people $5/mo for stupid bullshit like colored usernames this site would probably generate seven figures. jesus fucking christ.

For the record I would absolutely pay five bucks a month to support the site and have a 'Verified Paypig' badge under my avatar. I hope this can happen someday.

 

[ENDTOPII]

If I could charge people $5/mo for stupid bullshit like colored usernames this site would probably generate seven figures.

What is stoping you? I wouldn't personally pay for Discord level of shit, but just a little meme example. The merch could come with a serial/QR code to unlock (related for that merch line/ season) following things

• Custom title - True & Honest shekel giver -
• Avatar frames, the shit around the avatar (just don't make too cluttered)
• Colored text in the Chat

 

[Null]

What is stoping you?

Do new users really not know that we can't accept any payments for anything??

Section 230 isn't the problem, Payment Networks are

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. Passed into law in 1996, it has overseen the entirety of the consumer Internet’s development. Its premise is simple: Internet service providers and platform operators are not...

madattheinternet.substack.com

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet

The Internet is becoming smaller, fragmenting down national borders, and succumbing to regulations imposed by governments and various special interests. An internet is a network made of smaller networks. The Internet is the single international network you are using right now. The Internet is...

madattheinternet.substack.com

 

[The Cunting Death]

Do new users really not know that we can't accept any payments for anything??

Section 230 isn't the problem, Payment Networks are

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. Passed into law in 1996, it has overseen the entirety of the consumer Internet’s development. Its premise is simple: Internet service providers and platform operators are not...

madattheinternet.substack.com

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet

The Internet is becoming smaller, fragmenting down national borders, and succumbing to regulations imposed by governments and various special interests. An internet is a network made of smaller networks. The Internet is the single international network you are using right now. The Internet is...

madattheinternet.substack.com

Do you really think a wojak poster is capable of reading?

 

[ENDTOPII]

Do you really think a wojak poster is capable of reading?

I thought Null was about to sell merch, so why can't he have some serial- or QR-codes come with it?

 

[Spoonomancer]

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

It's some running theme where this person gets into drama and isn't liked by furries very much. I do recall there being allegations that Zilchexo is into cub porn or tried justifying it at the very least but I don't have sources on where this allegation came from so take this as a grain of salt.

 

[Logjam Sliver]

I admit I'm a bit sad about this from a technical standpoint. I didn't use Cohost much, but from a purely software perspective it seemed to be a decently designed lightweight multimedia blog platform, like a Tumblr-lite without any extra bullshit. No fucking media players blaring the user's favorite anime OP or indie game OST when you enter a page, no glittery backgrounds or indistinguishable custom cursors or clusterfuck CSS layouts, just a nice uniform interface with a distinct but muted color scheme and just enough customizability (banner, icon, blurb) to get comfortable in. It loaded fast and was very usable, not to mention its WYSIWYG editor was a damn sight more reliable than something like Twitter's (trying to avoid widows and orphans on Twitter is fucking impossible). Just speaking of it merely as a piece of software, it felt very professional. My only real gripe was a 5MB file limit for non-paying users, which made high-res image uploads near impossible without compression.

Not having Tumblr's well-known baggage (not saying it didn't have any baggage, because it clearly did) also made it a decent place for media backup to point someone to without turning them off the same way Tumblr would, since it was far less likely someone would have knowledge of any "Cohost bullshit" compared to "Tumblr bullshit". I simply didn't engage with the community in the slightest, and had a perfectly fine experience with it just as a blog website.

It's funny how leftists are the biggest haters of leftists. The moment they have a falling out with someone they go "oh yeah I always knew that guy was a horrible person [I just defended him because we had to win]".

</political sperging>

Spoiler: further political sperging

As an actual leftist who'd been cast out by other "leftists" via weak accusations of being a "-phobe", can confirm. It's not the kind of thing I'd abandon my principles and switch sides out of spite over, but if anything a lot of the alphabet soup and "-kin" freaks especially remind me of the other side with their "fuck you, got ours" in-group/out-group clique mentality, rather than having actual left-wing ideologies like legitimate egalitarianism or competent social services. More like a bunch of pampered fuckwits who never had to actually struggle over in anything real in their lives looking for a way to use that coveted "oppression" card, and if the only way that card maintains its effectiveness for their (ab)use is by making it so that only they are allowed to use it, so be it, they'll throw everyone else under the bus. And they absolutely do not want you taking their toy away by pointing out they're not nearly as special or marginalized as they claim.