Item — HN Reader

Plume's paean/elegy is very kind. Kudos to Colin and Jae for creating cohost and all the optimism. For HN people who are not familiar with the project, here are a couple quotaions.

“We have watched the world buy into the lies of people who ‘believe in the disruptive potential of technology,’ and who think the best way to realize that potential is to build for-profit businesses that enable a creative-class petit bourgeois to make it through their day without acknowledging another human being,” the founders, Colin Bayer and Jae Kaplan, stated back in 2020. “We think we can do better, by building tools that focus on fair dealing and sustainable growth rather than market dominance,” their manifesto read.

The company had been sharing its financial difficulties in a series of updates starting in March 2024, which warned that the site’s major funder, who prefers to remain anonymous, had gone completely incommunicado as the funds were running out. Cohost, however, was nowhere near being able to sustain itself, as it had just 30,000 monthly active users and just 2,630 subscribers as of March 11, 2024.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/cohost-the-x-rival-founded...

2 comments

30,000 monthly active users doesn't sound as a particularly high load. Why were they running out of funds?

You can rent a cheapest dedicated server on Hetzner for, like, $50 - $70 / month and I would expect it to be performant enough to cope with 30k MAU for a simple blogging platform.

Server costs are only part of the problem. They had a team of devs they couldn't afford to pay, they were hosting a lot of media (especially images) and they never quite hit the traction to make the project feel worth doing for free. I fully sympathize with their decision to shut it down instead of letting it run on fumes.

I mean, this is a blogging platform. Users, posts, comments, likes, that's about it. People were making blogging platforms since forever. Every web framework tutorial has a "hey, let's make a blog" part.

I don't see why would it require a whole team of fulltime devs.

Inflating team size, constant feature churn etc all make sense for a VC-funded company. But they were kinda making a statement against it, so there is bo reason for them to have a whole team to maintain a blogging platform.

It's hard for me to estimate the cost of media hosting, but again, Hetzner (I'm not advertising them, it's just one dedicated server provider I heard about. There are many others) offers 20 TB / month of free traffic. Is it not enough to serve images at cohost scale? I genuinely do not know, I would love to hear estimates from more knowledgeable/experienced folks.

Or was storage the issue? How much storage are we talking about?

I'm not sure if you actually read their previous financial reports, but their expenses were somewhere around $50,000-60,000, that doesn't indicate an inflated dev budget.

If you add up server costs, the cheapest possible accounting and legal services, and any other miscellaneous business costs, it doesn't really leave much of a budget for development.

No, I haven't read their financial reports because I didn't knew they exist. I will take a look, thanks.

I only knew of them because the top-level comment specifically references the financial updates and some of the numbers from them.

https://status.cohost.org/

I see digitalocean,datadog, aws, mailgun, managed databases kubernetes.

That costs much money, that are better spend in some classic server infrastructure like a dedicated server.

The other commenter, Throwaway3... is getting downvoted but I agree with the costs being excessive, tech-wise.

This didnt need kubernetes, datadog, all that stuff. This needed a couple of hundred a month in S3 or cloudflare or whatever storage/CDN bills, and a couple of 40$/month hetzner boxes.

Sounds like a back-then reasonable attempt at building something that can be easily scaled and carried certain risks. You simply cannot know after the fact what the basis of the decision and approach to risk was, what the agreeemnts and expectations were of and with the "anonymous investor", etc.

"Hindsight is always perfect".

Embrace mistakes? They will learn from it, and I'm already looking forward to their new project(s) (and new mistakes)!

Yes, of course. You are right and I don't mean to be overly dismissive of them; I applaud their philosophy and mission, and they shipped something many people loved.

Just... this comes from some personal lament. Computers are so wonderful. In the time between a photon emerging from your ceiling lamp and hitting the floor, you can crank out 20-30 CPU cycles.

Yet an entire breed of developers has been raised to see 2000$/month Postgres RDS on AWS as "the cost of doing business". I wish costs wouldn't hold back great things like this that the internet needs.

If you aren't willing to have volunteers do it for free, moderation is by far the most expensive and challenging part of running a social media site. Cohost was both developed and operated by a total of four people, one of whom was a full-time moderator.

In the days of the good old internet pre social networks and big tech that so many people are nostalgic about, folks mostly communicated using internet forums that were mostly moderated by enthusiasts.

This whole thing strikes me as an attempt to have your cake and eat it to. Trying to recreate the vibes of the old school web that was largely ran by enthusiasts for enthusiasts while actually running it the way a big corp or a VC-funded startup would.

I think that this is a little bit hypocritical.

I think you're more than a little bit talking out of your ass.

The founders of cohost were very explicit about not wanting to rely upon unpaid volunteer labor to run their site. The fact that they were not able to run the site profitably while adhering to this principle and chose to shut down the site rather than violate their principles is the complete opposite of hypocrisy.

Maybe not cohost themselves, but I think the person you're replying to has a point re. users with unrealistic expectations. People want services that are free to use, high quality, pruned/moderated, and not run under unethical practices. The problem is you can't get the first three (at scale) unless someone somewhere is working without fair pay, which effectively means you can't have the first three AND the fourth at the same time.

Sounds like a real opportunity for someone with your skills.

I'm just not interested in building yet another blogging platform, I think that this ship has sailed long time ago.

If I ever build some publishing or communication tool it will be as decentralized as possible and as uncensorable as possible.

> who think the best way to realize that potential is to build for-profit businesses that enable a creative-class petit bourgeois to make it through their day without acknowledging another human being

What does this even mean? This is just a word salad.

> We think we can do better, by building tools that focus on fair dealing and sustainable growth rather than market dominance

Apparently not. Marxists[1] need to realise that profit is not a dirty word, and growth is not a dirty word. Otherwise, you get things that are generally not economically sustainable, like this. The website was funded by an anonymous rich person...

[1] I'm using this literally here, not as a pejorative.