“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...
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.
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?
It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.