Posting here since native Cohost users can be a little too much when someone criticizes their favorite site.
So, as a starter, I’ll ignore the entire “we have 1 mysterious benefactor that has been holding this entire site on their backs” because that’s so absurd we would need an entire essay to properly dissect it.
What gets me is the sheer lackadaisycal attitude and shrugging that Staff has done. There’s less than one month until they run out of funds, and they’re casually considering options? Doing some brief posting and then going back to their usual lives? You can’t say something is a side project when its what paying the bills for your staff, and you can’t treat it like a side project! Run ads, accept the help that people are offering, do donation drives! Get money in a way that isn’t making some plushie and hoping for the best (and also treating that like a side project when, once more, its paying for your livelihoods) Advertise the goddamn site because like, every influx of new members comes entirely from people jumping ship from somewhere else. Have an actual, real business plan because as much as you like to pretend this is a commune of independent folks, its still a business! You have bills to pay, you have people to feed and none of you have real jobs, since you keep calling this a side project.
Like god, I’m sad about the possible end of the only place I’ve enjoyed posting in ages, but also ffs, could they act like adults about this?
even squid-board.org has a big fat donate here! button on the homepage, the fact that there was never something similar for cohost+ in the entire time i’ve been on the site is kind of wild lol
but yea i feel u on the frustration, especially because it does come from a place of love - i very much enjoy cohost and i get running a social media place isn’t some super easy thing but even the way it was posted about made it feel like shutting down is an inevitability. maybe their hearts aren’t in it anymore?
i can’t think of any alternatives i’d wanna use at this point (barring Auldnoir, but that’s cheating)
Wouldn’t surprise me if they’re really burned out on the idea, Jae mentioned in the post that the internal vibes have apparently been “rancid” at ASSC lately. I’d guess they’ve probably been extremely stressed about this ever since they lost contact with their benefactor (which I agree is a situation so absurd that that would be almost funny if it wasn’t immediately alarming). They’ve probably been freaking out about it and trying to take it as seriously as they can behind the scenes, but I imagine it’s been a long and difficult month and they might have just given up.
And one of Kara’s posts made it pretty clear she was looking for a new job, although she said she wanted to work at cohost for as long as possible. So I guess make of that what you will. But it’s very frustrating to see them seemingly give up when we’ve only just heard that things are getting rough!
I wouldn’t call it cheating as comfortable spaces online are at an absolute premium.
Yeah, the team at cohost is providing some transparency but not enough to assuage the concerns things are absolutely on fire behind the scenes.
Also maybe it’s personal feelings, but the people all talking about just throwing more money at the problem via cohost plus makes me a bit uncomfortable. Things need to change but that can’t be the only solution.
cohost, the fourth website™, was founded on a set of very particular ethics which always went a little against the grain of growth and a genuine belief that they could show the world a different social media was possible. i’m not at all surprised my fellow queer leftist furries would hold steady to their principals like this, even if it comes at the potential cost of the loss of the site and community that came together because of what assc dreamed up
losing contact with their kind benefactor and eggbux getting delayed due to florida becoming unlivable for jae and expediting their move may, unfortunately, be the boom-boom mancini counter combo that puts eggbug down and out
i can’t be angry with assc personally. i understood this was a possibility the day i submitted my registration and have seen countless communities come and go for far worse reasons. my only hope is that, in these crucial final weeks of funding, there is some real action taken to decide upon a direction for the future. they wrote up a lot of possibilities, which shows a clear dedication to thinking through this problem!
my own hope is they embrace open sourcing aspects of development and accepting that volunteer labour is not inherently exploitation - if anything, cohost has a massive amount of webdev brainpower within the userbase that could help push out eggbux or other aspects of the site that enable it to fund itself. the community wants cohost to exist, and there are other ways to ensure it continues without breaking ethical concerns that go beyond just boosting cohost plus sub numbers
Super agree. It feels like a panic. A “helpful” panic, but still, people are freaking out.
I mean what can you really expect I guess. Staff have given the userbase literally no other way to help.
I’m mostly confused about not like, doing banner ads like a billion people have said they’d gladly pay for. Do it manually if you have to, that’s free money in the bank for like…uploading a fucking .png. Or even have it be a sponsors page or whatever, I’d fuckin’ buy that.
Or yeah, just a big “donate here thanks” button. I don’t feel like anyone sensible would be mad about flat asking for money if you need it that bad!
ABSOLUTELY. Unironically it’s a weirdly good business decision for me to invest a little in keeping the place alive. It’s weird how hard I have to dig to give them the funds to do that. Let me give you my fucking money and make it easy!
It really feels like Cohost staff is so married to their “any kind of money making is unethical” stance that they’d rather see the website go down… It’s crazy seeing the whole userbase scramble to multiply their Cohost+ payments and begging their followers to do the same, while staff is in the comments of the financials post responding to people begging them to take their money saying that they’re morally opposed to passing around the donation basket… At this point, with how long they’ve waited to even talk about this situation, maybe the deficit is so big that they reasonably feel even a generous donation drive wouldn’t get them out of the red, and that’s why they’re against it. But they could’ve put a “Donate to help with server costs!” button on the site at any point, it’s such common practice and I don’t see how donations are any more unethical than having a mysterious rich benefactor. Their only money making plan this whole time has been to pivot their tumblr-like into a Patreon-like, but without taking a mandatory cut, and simply having the option to tip Cohost at payment, and I’ve always wondered how effective of a financial strategy that really would’ve been too.
It’s frustrating, because I’m a fan of the tumblr-like format without as much of a tumblr-like community, and I’ve discovered a lot of people I enjoy on Cohost. But if staff is sitting there just waiting to see what happens weeks away from defaulting, then I’ll also just sit and wait and not lose sleep over it. At least Kara is saying on its blog that she’s dedicated to continue working on the site even if it has to stop getting a paycheck for it, so staff hasn’t entirely given up.
There’s this weird thing they mentioned in the comments of that post a few times about needing to make sure ways to pay them are like, ethically done and like. If people are asking you to add them I reckon you’re pretty in the clear on that front!
On the one hand I can commend them for trying to not take advantage of people offering free labour/volunteering because they feel like it goes against their own ethics and bc they don’t want to be like the other social media sites that do take advantage of others that way.
but as others pointed out… it is very frustrating that they didn’t reach out for help earlier or even put a banner up with “hey, cohost needs help, please donate or buy cohost plus!” I don’t know if its like… pride or something or what but, it does feel incredibly frustrating. I know it must be frustrating to them but it’s just as equally frustrating for users who are willing to help but aren’t given opportunities to do so.
Even if they stick to their guns about refusing unpaid work (which again, I do find commendable even though it’s clearly putting too much work on staff themselves) I think setting up a donation banner shouldn’t be that hard and (as far as I know) doesn’t go against their own personal ethics.
Idk what to make of this bc i do like the site and I would like for it to be around longer but I would also like to see staff be willing to accept monetary donations if they aren’t going to accept free labour.
yeah, i’m hating the idea of cohost just going under so swiftly and sort of unceremoniously. i really enjoy the site, overall and I honestly don’t really feel like trying a new website; ain’t touchin’ masto or bluesky and pillowfort uhh???
I doubt it’s going to go under for real that soon. Truth be told I imagine they’ll get a pretty solid runway out of that announcement. Just hoping they figure out something to plug the hole before the next time they panic everyone by announcing something like this.
They also sold like a thousand eggbug plushes. While I agree they can’t do stuff like that every time they need seed funding, I’m willing to believe them when they say that there’s isn’t much need to panic right now on account of stuff like that; it’s not like social media is designed to be profitable in general anyway
They found the funds for another 6 months of staying afloat, thanks to the userbase’s subscription drive, re-establishing contact with their mysterious benefactor, and “funding offers”.
I still have questions and concerns, but this is at least a much better post than last week’s. They list concrete plans with time estimates, actual mentions of their roadmap, (when did they last mention their roadmap? Is it public anywhere?) and while I still disagree with their stance on donations, their explanation of “we don’t want to take donations for a specific goal for the risks of not meeting that goal and making the donations go to waste” at least make more sense than a blanket anti-donation stance.
I still wish that they had made their previous post much earlier, and that it hadn’t been worded so hopelessly. I saw many posts in the past week of folks preemptively lamenting the death of the website, talking about how they were setting up on other places, and preemptively moving to abandon blogs. Them mentioning how they’re being “transparent” in this new post makes me sigh a little, as this was the first time they’ve been “transparent” in… Half a year? And I have issues with how this was handled. I can only hope they’ll get better at posting financial updates and plans more frequently going forward, but I’m not sure how much I believe that’ll happen. In the end, I still like using the site, and I still like the people I’ve met on the site, so I’m happy for the can getting kicked down the road.