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."
