cohost - A less-toxic Twitter alternative?

[Baraadmirer]

Crosspost from the Liz Fong-Jones thread where he name drops one of his co-workers.

 

[Erasmus of Rotterdam]

That Jess guy has an Adam's apple so sharp I wanna chop vegetables with it in my Chinese restaurant.
Seriously, his neck must be so aerodynamic....................................

 

[Baraadmirer]

Update: Found another lolcow with a thread here—Kevin Gibbs—and added it to the OP along with a conclusion. Going to seek another review.

 

[Baraadmirer]

Fong-Jones is now using cohost as a platform for shilling and cursing out Elon Musk.

Chost | Archive


Chost | Archive

 

[Something Awful]

Liz always has the sickest burns. Damn that muskrat, that ne'er-do-well Melon Husk!

 

[Markass the Worst]

Staff have posted a financial update. There's been so much paypigs flocking from twitter subscribing to cohost+, they now have $31k more in the bank than expected.

November 2022 Financial Update​

Ittttt’s thursday! This last month has been kind of a lot. There’s a lot of good news (the financial trajectory of the company is DRAMATICALLY different) and a lot of bad news (holy shit we are all so fucking tired) but mostly good!

No new terms! Check the past updates for definitions! I wanna make this quick because there’s a lot to do!

Users​

When we last spoke, we had seen roughly 18k new users (up to 38,165) over the last month. We were overwhelmed by this, both emotionally and logistically. We now understand that this was bullshit baby time.

As of right this second, cohost has 111,128 users. You do the math on how much of a change that is. User growth has slowed in the last week or so (b’’h) but it’s Still Happening.

We’re now at roughly 37k active projects, up from 9k last month. This number for me is somewhat scarier than the total user count, as this is the number of users we actually need to moderate.

We’re underwater on activations, but getting closer to having everyone able to post. Our big blocker remains support capacity (more on that below) and we’re trying not to make ourselves too behind there while still keeping activations up. If you’ve been waiting for a while, we’re sorry it’s taking this long. Things grew way more suddenly than we anticipated or were able to plan for; ideally the jump from 22k to 100k would have taken longer than a month, but that’s websites.

Subscriptions​

As of 11/29 (as always, stripe’s numbers are delayed a few days), we have 1852 subscribers, giving us $8,648.48 in MRR. This is well over double where we were last month (763 and $3,535).

Our active conversion rate is at 5.32%, still within our healthy range, but also deeply down from last month (9.06%). While we are getting plenty of new subscribers, we’re getting new active users faster, so this number isn’t quite keeping up.

Overall profit/loss​

This is the big one. We ended November with just over $84k in the bank. This is, as you may note, around $1k less than where we ended last month.

With the exception of some mismanaged hosting resources at the beginning of the month (issues which have been resolved), we are Profitable for the month of November.

This obviously doesn’t mean we’re fully sustainable as a company; our MRR is enough that employee #4 is effectively free for us, but we’ve still got a long way to go for consistent sustainability. The majority of our revenue this month was from the first payments on yearly cohost plus subscriptions, which we won’t see again for another year (everyone remember this when November rolls around again next year.)

You’ll recall that last month we expected to end the year with $22.5k in the bank, a healthy number that was, on its own, higher than the previous month by over $8k. We are now expecting to end the year with $54k in the bank, over double where we were last month. We’re still going to secure additional funding, but this gives us incredible buffer and means we likely won’t need as much funding overall.

Looking forward​

We remain underwater on support requests. Our upcoming hire for Support Ops is absolutely vital for the continued growth of the website, and as such we’re taking the hiring process very seriously. We’ve been spending most of this week interviewing candidates and hope to have an announcement there within the next few weeks.

Our long term plans still include user tipping and subscriptions, but these require a lot of care to ensure we get them right. We don’t have timelines here yet.

We managed this month to get most of our performance issues under control. There’s still some major issues we need to tackle (namely, speeding up post rendering), but for the most part things are running well and are stable.

That’s all for this month! Stay tuned for the patch notes later today, they’ll have the details on what’s coming up in the immediate term.

Until next time, thanks for using cohost! :eggbug: :host-love:

~jae

source (archive.ph, ghostarchive)

 

[Markass the Worst]

Cohost put out an application for support ops a while ago and it's now filled by known lolcow, terrible Discord mod and cub porn enjoyer Sam Vogel a.k.a. allthefoxes.


source (a)


source (a)

Time will tell if this means drawn CP will end up being allowed on cohost.

 

[Baraadmirer]

Sounds like a cow to keep an eye on in the new year!

 

[Polentic]

Not this faggot. God damnit.

 

[MuuMuu Bunnylips]

I prefer toxic environments; it keeps the pussies and the faggots away.

 

[Baraadmirer]

Looks like kaara is off to a lukewarm start. Apparently there's a private account, @sine.

A chost asking for well wishes ( Archive ):


An announcement about being on the corporate website ( Archive ):

 

[Mikoyan]

I really do wonder where they got a mid-90s .com era designer to make that logo, it's very weird to see.

 

[Kees H]

I really do wonder where they got a mid-90s .com era designer to make that logo, it's very weird to see.

The entire site feels like something you would find just after the 90's, just need to slow my internet speed down to 56k6 and I would be convinced I am back in 2000.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Here's a TL;DR essay written by a he/him/they/them on the Hogwarts Legacy CAD comic because trannies need to justify their relentless jihad against Queen TERF Rowling.


source (ghostarchive)

Basically he says Tim Buckley is such a midwit for not caring so much about buying or not buying bad evil transphobia game and he lives in such a small insular bubble because of it, he's so unexceptional and average.

I for one find this to be projection because holy fucking shit, buying the game does not murder trannies, simple as that, and trannies are not getting murdered in the first place, they're actually quite thriving and grooming kids freely in fact. To pretend otherwise is exactly living in a tiny bubble. Then he points out "cancel culture dindu nuffin" as if that's a point in favor of it. "I'm screeching as hard as I can but Rowling still keeps breathing!!! Clearly this means I should just keep screeching more and what I'm doing isn't useless as shit!!!"

 

[Markass the Worst]

Crosspost from LFJ thread, Cohost is now off Cloudflare and is using Fastly now.

Out of interest, I was curious who cohost was using now. They're using Fastly. HQ in San Francisco, so certainly part of the troon loving startup brigade. Had an IPO in 2019. High of $130/share in 2020 and now at $14.

 

[Baraadmirer]

Crosspost from LFJ thread, Cohost is now off Cloudflare and is using Fastly now.

Ah, so they're using the service that one of Fong-Jones' lovers works for?

 

[Kees H]

Ah, so they're using the service that one of Fong-Jones' lovers works for?

Yep. I think it's hilarious they think this is a blow to Cloudflare, that this completely irrelevant gay ass unusable Twitter clone is moving from Cloudflare to another random CDN provider.

How deranged must you be. They really think there's now someone at Cloudflare's HQ crying that the big and mighty "Cohost" left their platform. I really, really doubt Cohost will be mentioned in their SEC rapporting like Kiwifarms was.

 

[Staticness]

I love how the share price is hovering at around a tenth of the value it had been assigned at launch. What you want to bet they will reduce it to a pump and dump scheme and bail soon?

 

[Something Awful]

They posted their "H1 2023 Financial Update", and shockingly they are pretty much dead and broke. All these communist services seem to end up the same way, very strange.

https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up (archive)

Some highlights:

"we made around $5300 in may, meaning we only lost $41k. ideally, we would like to lose less money."

"previously, we were getting CDN and firewall services for free, due to cloudflare forgetting they had given us a complimentary enterprise contract. this means that regardless of how much we’re paying fastly, it’s more than we were paying before. our fastly contract is set at $4,850 per month (plus a 7% sales tax)"

"as we do every year, we increased our pay inline with an inflation rate of 8.4%, effective February 15. this means pay is now $94,616 for all employees"

"first off, the elephant in the room: at our current burn rate and bank balance, we will not make July 15 payroll."

"total users: 130k. monthly active users: 12k. (..) readers keeping score at home will note that these numbers are all down or unchanged from six months ago."

"at a certain point you have to ask: is it even possible to make money as a social media company?"

"Is There a Road to Sustainability? great question! no idea!"

"sorry to end on such a bummer. I am incredibly depressed, stressed out, and have been for a while now. things are not getting better"

"on a personal note, I burned all my savings paying bay area rent for the six months before we had funding, and then I burned all the stock I still had left from past jobs funding our move from the bay area to Tallahassee. I can’t fuckin afford to move, so I instead choose to spend my time stressed out about this job."

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

"on a personal note, I burned all my savings paying bay area rent for the six months before we had funding, and then I burned all the stock I still had left from past jobs funding our move from the bay area to Tallahassee. I can’t fuckin afford to move, so I instead choose to spend my time stressed out about this job."

I had to check the source to see if it was real. It reads like parody.