- Joined
- Jul 31, 2009
- Messages
- 15,479
- Reaction score
- 4,280
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- They/Them
It was a short-lived social media site that sprung up and gained (limited) popularity during that initial 'Oh no Elon Musk is buying Twitter/he has bought Twitter and making fuckass changes to it, let's find someplace else to go' period.
And by 'short-lived' I mean short-lived. Launched in a closed beta in February 2022, early access via invite codes in June 2022, anyone can register and join (albeit on a wait list before activation) in November 2022, then come early September 2024 and they announce the site is shutting down at in January 2025 and going read only on 1 October 2024 beforehand.
So if we go by when it launched in closed beta to it going read-only, Cohost lasted for about 2 years and 8 months and if we count from when anyone was able to register without needing an invite code, it lasted less than 2 years (~1 year, 11 months). Either way, this was incredibly short-lived.
A lot of people were using the site as a Twitter replacement, but honestly it was more akin to Tumblr than anything else. It was a microblogging site but it had no character limit so there was no short-form posts like you'd see on Twittter. (Well I mean there were but they didn't exist because of a character limit). It also supported HTML and CSS in posts which a lot of users did to make games in their posts or what a lot of users called 'CSS crimes' (deliberately fucked up looking posts basically).
The site had a very strong queer, furry, and alternative bent to its userbase, too. (Like I cannot understate how incredibly furry this place was)
'Wow, this site sounded awesome, why'd it shut down though?' you might ask.
It shut down because of the staff. Before I continue, no this is not a case of the staff being horrible and rude to their userbase and drive them all of and they end up killing the site because of this. No, it had to do with the staff being....well if I wanna be charitable I would say they were 'overly idealistic', but if I wanna be a bit harsh I would say they were 'borderline incompetent when it came to managing the site's finances'.
Cohost had only four staff members, all of whom were paid a competitive tech salary of around $94,000/yr (they were based in San Francisco, IIRC).
Cohost ran no adverts and by the time they announced the site was going read-only and shutting down a few months later, they had around 270,000 registered accounts and only ~17,000 active users.
So how did they make money then? Well, that's the neat part - they didn't.
Not even joking, the entire damn reason why the site even lasted as long as it did was because they had a rich backer who was entirely funding the site of out of their own pocket (a backer who they temporarily lost contact with in March 2024 but then reestablished contact with).
Oh, they did have a premium option called Cohost Plus that cost $5/mo or $50/yr that provided larger file upload limits but was mostly meant to help support the website. In the same announcement post about the site's demise, it was revealed there were 3000 subscribers to Cohost Plus. Even if all of them were on the yearly plan, that would be only $150,000 per year (and that's before any fees and stuff taken by the payment processor). At $94,000/yr per staff member, they need $376,000 annually just to pay the staff.
(I will also note, and I am not saying this to blame the person but even by the Cohost staff's own admission multiple times, the member of the staff responsible for figuring out ways for the site to become financially independent and stable suffered from chronic illness and was often unable to work at all because of this)
They did have one other plan to make money though: a subscription feature (like Patreon because, fun fact, if you actually dig into the history of Cohost, you'll discover their original plan was to create a Patreon competitor, they only did a social media platform because it was 'easier' to get that set up) so they were planning on launching a tip jar feature so users could subscribe to creators on the site or just tip other users some money (which they were calling 'eggbux') but they, in their 'We're having to shut down' post (that I've mentioned before many times this post), were all 'Well see we had to cancel that because Stripe [the paypro they were going to use for eggbux] changed their policy earlier this year so we had to cancel the feature.'
Except, as people pointed out both on and off Cohost: Stripe's policy against 'tipping' (you can send people tips via Stripe but it has to be for goods and services already provided, you can't just set up a 'tip jar' where people will send you money as a gift or just to financially support you without anything being provided in return) had already been a thing for as long as Cohost was in operation. Their plan for eggbux was never something they would have been allowed to do under Stripe, so stop painting this as a 'Oh woe is us, the big bad paypro changed their policy so we had to cancel our awesome tip jar feature
', they didn't change anything - y'all just didn't actually do enough checking to see if what you wanted to do was even allowed in the first place.
Also, and this is minor in the grand scheme of things and I really don't think it had anything to do with Cohost shutting down at all, but the staff also had a very strong 'anti-numbers' stance on the platform because, IDK numbers are bad or something? Y'know how on quite literally every other microblogging platform (Bluesky, Tumblr, Mastodon, Twitter, etc.) it will show you how many people liked a post or shared it to their own feed? Cohost didn't do that. Nope, can't show those numbers because numbers BAD. They also hid the number of followers people had and the number of accounts they were following because, again, numbers are bad. The only numbers that they didn't hide were the number of comments on a post.
But I think y'all can figure out the big problem with their near complete anti-numbers stance: it meant there was literally no way to tell how active the platform even was. Like if you made a post there and it got like 22 likes and 7 people sharing it to their own page (so their followers can see it)...is that a lot? If you're an artist, an indie game dev, or anything else where you need to reach an audience, how much of an audience will you get on Cohost? There was literally no way to know.
Sorry for the long post, but since Cohost was so niche, I felt like I should give an explanation for what it even was and what happened to it, but does anyone else remember Cohost? Did y'all even use it? I used it. It was alright, but as you probably can figure: it was hella quiet because of its low active userbase (and there were a lot of fandoms I'm part of that had virtually no presence on the site). As expected with hella niche sites like this, there were a number of those 'This site is flawless and perfect and if you don't like it, why don't you go back to Mastodon?' users who'd appear in your comment section of any post if you made any post criticizing the site or how the staff was operating it (for some reason, a lot of these types really hated Mastodon for some fucking reason, I still don't understand why. Maybe because, for all my own personal criticisms of Mastodon as a user of it as well, Mastodon was actually successful within its own niche?)
But yeah, that was Cohost. I do wonder what happened to my like 15 followers though. Well one of them was already a mutual from back when I used Twitter and we were already moots on Tumblr and Mastodon and then later Bluesky and there was another user who we also followed each other on Mastodon and then later Bluesky but what about the rest lol.
eggbug forever
And by 'short-lived' I mean short-lived. Launched in a closed beta in February 2022, early access via invite codes in June 2022, anyone can register and join (albeit on a wait list before activation) in November 2022, then come early September 2024 and they announce the site is shutting down at in January 2025 and going read only on 1 October 2024 beforehand.
So if we go by when it launched in closed beta to it going read-only, Cohost lasted for about 2 years and 8 months and if we count from when anyone was able to register without needing an invite code, it lasted less than 2 years (~1 year, 11 months). Either way, this was incredibly short-lived.
A lot of people were using the site as a Twitter replacement, but honestly it was more akin to Tumblr than anything else. It was a microblogging site but it had no character limit so there was no short-form posts like you'd see on Twittter. (Well I mean there were but they didn't exist because of a character limit). It also supported HTML and CSS in posts which a lot of users did to make games in their posts or what a lot of users called 'CSS crimes' (deliberately fucked up looking posts basically).
The site had a very strong queer, furry, and alternative bent to its userbase, too. (Like I cannot understate how incredibly furry this place was)
'Wow, this site sounded awesome, why'd it shut down though?' you might ask.
It shut down because of the staff. Before I continue, no this is not a case of the staff being horrible and rude to their userbase and drive them all of and they end up killing the site because of this. No, it had to do with the staff being....well if I wanna be charitable I would say they were 'overly idealistic', but if I wanna be a bit harsh I would say they were 'borderline incompetent when it came to managing the site's finances'.
Cohost had only four staff members, all of whom were paid a competitive tech salary of around $94,000/yr (they were based in San Francisco, IIRC).
Cohost ran no adverts and by the time they announced the site was going read-only and shutting down a few months later, they had around 270,000 registered accounts and only ~17,000 active users.
So how did they make money then? Well, that's the neat part - they didn't.
Not even joking, the entire damn reason why the site even lasted as long as it did was because they had a rich backer who was entirely funding the site of out of their own pocket (a backer who they temporarily lost contact with in March 2024 but then reestablished contact with).
Oh, they did have a premium option called Cohost Plus that cost $5/mo or $50/yr that provided larger file upload limits but was mostly meant to help support the website. In the same announcement post about the site's demise, it was revealed there were 3000 subscribers to Cohost Plus. Even if all of them were on the yearly plan, that would be only $150,000 per year (and that's before any fees and stuff taken by the payment processor). At $94,000/yr per staff member, they need $376,000 annually just to pay the staff.
(I will also note, and I am not saying this to blame the person but even by the Cohost staff's own admission multiple times, the member of the staff responsible for figuring out ways for the site to become financially independent and stable suffered from chronic illness and was often unable to work at all because of this)
They did have one other plan to make money though: a subscription feature (like Patreon because, fun fact, if you actually dig into the history of Cohost, you'll discover their original plan was to create a Patreon competitor, they only did a social media platform because it was 'easier' to get that set up) so they were planning on launching a tip jar feature so users could subscribe to creators on the site or just tip other users some money (which they were calling 'eggbux') but they, in their 'We're having to shut down' post (that I've mentioned before many times this post), were all 'Well see we had to cancel that because Stripe [the paypro they were going to use for eggbux] changed their policy earlier this year so we had to cancel the feature.'
Except, as people pointed out both on and off Cohost: Stripe's policy against 'tipping' (you can send people tips via Stripe but it has to be for goods and services already provided, you can't just set up a 'tip jar' where people will send you money as a gift or just to financially support you without anything being provided in return) had already been a thing for as long as Cohost was in operation. Their plan for eggbux was never something they would have been allowed to do under Stripe, so stop painting this as a 'Oh woe is us, the big bad paypro changed their policy so we had to cancel our awesome tip jar feature
', they didn't change anything - y'all just didn't actually do enough checking to see if what you wanted to do was even allowed in the first place.Also, and this is minor in the grand scheme of things and I really don't think it had anything to do with Cohost shutting down at all, but the staff also had a very strong 'anti-numbers' stance on the platform because, IDK numbers are bad or something? Y'know how on quite literally every other microblogging platform (Bluesky, Tumblr, Mastodon, Twitter, etc.) it will show you how many people liked a post or shared it to their own feed? Cohost didn't do that. Nope, can't show those numbers because numbers BAD. They also hid the number of followers people had and the number of accounts they were following because, again, numbers are bad. The only numbers that they didn't hide were the number of comments on a post.
But I think y'all can figure out the big problem with their near complete anti-numbers stance: it meant there was literally no way to tell how active the platform even was. Like if you made a post there and it got like 22 likes and 7 people sharing it to their own page (so their followers can see it)...is that a lot? If you're an artist, an indie game dev, or anything else where you need to reach an audience, how much of an audience will you get on Cohost? There was literally no way to know.
Sorry for the long post, but since Cohost was so niche, I felt like I should give an explanation for what it even was and what happened to it, but does anyone else remember Cohost? Did y'all even use it? I used it. It was alright, but as you probably can figure: it was hella quiet because of its low active userbase (and there were a lot of fandoms I'm part of that had virtually no presence on the site). As expected with hella niche sites like this, there were a number of those 'This site is flawless and perfect and if you don't like it, why don't you go back to Mastodon?' users who'd appear in your comment section of any post if you made any post criticizing the site or how the staff was operating it (for some reason, a lot of these types really hated Mastodon for some fucking reason, I still don't understand why. Maybe because, for all my own personal criticisms of Mastodon as a user of it as well, Mastodon was actually successful within its own niche?)
But yeah, that was Cohost. I do wonder what happened to my like 15 followers though. Well one of them was already a mutual from back when I used Twitter and we were already moots on Tumblr and Mastodon and then later Bluesky and there was another user who we also followed each other on Mastodon and then later Bluesky but what about the rest lol.
eggbug forever
