All these communist services seem to end up the same way, very strange.
Communism works until you run out of someone else's money. (See post war Europe)
I wonder how exactly they burned all their runway when they don't even have any user growth. Did they not even get any new users from the Reddit fiasco? Lmao what a failure.
They had that retarded tree house model for new signups that was supposed to "limit the user growth to a manageable rate", make sure that no bots sign up, or just keep the user count low to limit on cloud costs. This caused cohost to fill up with friends of friends of the initial group, who had gotten the invites, and then gradually filling up with people who signed up organically and got enqueued until they could post. I think I signed up for it, but I dont remember if I am still on the wait list. Once you sign up you get read access, I just scrolled for a bit and then closed it because no-one I cared about was on cohost. I think I changed mastodon instances once or twice since I signed up for cohost, because I actually use mastodon to talk to people I know and want to talk with. Mastodon is functional, decentralized and actually usable, because among the gazillion instances out there I can filter out they troon shitposting better than on Twitter, and connect to people I wanna talk to. Which is the primary aim of a social network.
Meanwhile Cohost developers opted to focus on crucial parts like setting your pronouns or giving you all the text formatting options including running WebGL or WebAssembly code in your posts. The latter, as far as I know, was not used maliciously yet, probably only because no true hacker has signed up to fuck that site up yet.
They also had no business model other than the voluntary premium accounts. This is less revenue than one dollar shave club. No ads, no selling user data, nothing. You can't run a company with no income. Hell, you cannot even run a cooperative like that because most people are taking stuff away for free. I'd be curious to see if the cohost plus income could even cover hosting costs.
Oh and while all this was happening they adjusted their wages for inflation - like, are they gonna die because of an 8% wage drop? Pumping out more money from a company that already has 8x more expense/loss than income is not going to last. I'm assuming that the
$41k was
expenses or
net loss and the $5.3k was
income, because otherwise this sentence contradicts itself (either you made money or made a loss):
we made around $5300 in may, meaning we only lost $41k.
I would be very interested in looking at their real financial reports, written by someone who uses the terms correctly, but it's an LLC so we will just get this coffee talk gibberish.
And just a final note - what a stupid idea to call a social network running on a centralized server
cohost?
) l33t computing skills will make "a series of web sites and forums" for eternal backups:
