Cohost, a would-be X rival launched to the public in June 2022, is shutting down, the company announced via the social network’s staff account earlier this week. The service had operated much like Twitter, offering users the ability to follow others, view posts in a feed, and like and repost content shared by others. However, Cohost differentiated itself by focusing on a chronological feed without trending topics, support for long-form posts, and pursuing a business model that didn’t rely on advertising.
The startup’s premium subscription, Cohost Plus, offered advanced features like an increased file size limit on uploads, with plans to add support for creator tools like tips and the ability to sell subscriptions, among other things.
Founded by a not-for-profit software company, Anti Software Software Club, with a small handful of developers, Cohost’s manifesto had anti-capitalist and anti-Big Tech leanings.
“[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.
Despite Cohost’s ambition to disrupt the tech giants, it faced increased competition not only from X (formerly Twitter) but soon Meta as well, which launched its Twitter-like service Threads. Users who favored decentralized social networking on an open social web had various options, too, including Mastodon and Bluesky, among others.
As a result, Cohost will no longer be able to continue.
The company cited “lack of funding and burnout” as reasons for the shutdown, currently planned for the end of 2021.
“As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor,” the company shared in a post on its staff account, possibly an attempt to dispel rumors that staff salaries had eaten up the funds. “All of our money in the bank, and any money coming in from people who buy our merch or don’t cancel cohost plus, is going towards servers and operations — paying the bills so we can turn the lights off with as little disruption as possible.”
The site will become read-only as of October 2, 2024, and the team will make an effort to keep the servers online through year-end. Engineers will be focused on improving its data export system in the weeks ahead, so users will be able to save their posts. Control of the Cohost source code will be transferred to the unnamed person “who funded the majority of our operations,” the founders also said.
The company had been sharing its financial difficulties in a series of updates starting in March, 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. The company noted that with its then-current deficit of $17,000, it would need to sell an additional 3,400 subscriptions to make ends meet. Knowing that was an impossible goal, the team began looking into other means of sustaining itself, including advertising.
Already, many former Cohost users and engineers are finding their way to Mastodon and Bluesky, some of whom are posting with the hashtag, #cohost, to find one another while lamenting their loss.
Cohost is not the first would-be X rival to shut down due to a lack of traction following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which prompted a spate of development. Other efforts, including T2 (formerly Pebble) and micropayments-focused Post also closed down after short periods of operation, as well.
