Cohost, a rival to X that launched publicly in June 2022, is shutting down, the company announced via the social network's staff account earlier this week. The service worked much like Twitter, offering users the ability to follow other users, view their posts in a feed, and like or repost content shared by others. But Cohost differentiated itself by focusing on a chronological feed with no trending topics, supporting long-form posts, and pursuing a business model that didn't rely on advertising.
The startup's premium subscription, Cohost Plus, offers advanced features like increased file size limits for uploads, and also plans to add support for creator tools like tipping and subscription sales capabilities.
Founded by a small group of developers, the non-profit software company Anti Software Software Club, Cohost's manifesto had an anti-capitalist, anti-big tech bent.
“[We] “We have watched the world swallow the lies of people who 'believe in the disruptive potential of technology' and who think that the best way to realize that potential is to build for-profit companies that allow the petit bourgeois creative class to go about their day without acknowledging other human beings,” founders Colin Bayer and Jay Kaplan said in 2020. “We believe we can do better by building tools that focus on fair trade and sustainable growth, not market domination,” their manifesto read.
Despite Cohost's ambitions to disrupt the tech giants, the company soon faced increasing competition not only from X (formerly Twitter) but also from Meta, which launched its Twitter-like service Threads. Users who preferred decentralized social networking on the open social web also had a variety of alternatives, including Mastodon and Bluesky.
As a result, Cohost will not be able to continue.
The company cited “lack of funding and burnout” as the reason for the closure, which is now planned for the end of 2021.
“As of today, none of us have been paid for our work,” the company shared in a post on its staff account, in a possible attempt to dispel rumors that staff salaries had eaten into its funds. “All of the money we have in the bank, and all of the money coming in from people who buy our merch or don't cancel their cohost plus, is going towards paying for our servers, operations, and keeping the lights off with as little disruption as possible.”
The site will become read-only on October 2, 2024, and the team will work to keep the servers online until the end of the year. In the coming weeks, engineers will focus on improving the data export system, allowing users to save their posts. Control of Cohost's source code will be transferred to an anonymous individual who “funds the majority of our operations,” the founders said.
The company had been sharing its financial woes in a series of updates since March, warning that the site's main investor, who wished to remain anonymous, had become completely unreachable as funds were drying up. However, Cohost was far from being self-sustaining, with only 30,000 monthly active users and 2,630 subscriptions as of March 11, 2024. The company noted that with a deficit of $17,000 at the time, it needed to sell another 3,400 subscriptions to break even. Realizing that was an impossible goal, the team began looking at other means to become self-sustaining, including advertising.
Already, many former Cohost users and engineers have found themselves on Mastodon and Bluesky, some of whom are posting under the hashtag #cohost to find each other and mourn their loss.
Cohost isn't the first X competitor to close due to lack of momentum and rapid development following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter: other efforts such as T2 (formerly known as Pebble) and micropayments-focused Post also shut down after short periods of operation.