I was a Cohost Plus member for a while. The format is neat, even if it wasn't for me.
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I was a Cohost Plus member for a while. The format is neat, even if it wasn't for me.
The thing is, I kind of expected this. The maintainers had been talking about being broke and burned out for a long, long time.
Not gonna pass judgment. It was a good idea. It's still a good idea, even if the format isn't my fave. They bit off more than they could chew and/or overestimated people's willingness to pay for it.
That said, I think something like cohost could exist on fedi.
1/?
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@tess Cohost kind of made a point of being a tool for its users, rather than a product for its vendors.
Maybe we can talk about their experience, and figure out how it could be viable to build tools-rather-than-products even though capitalism still exists.
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@riley honest thought?
The problem is it was providing a service, and services cost money to run.
Wanting to be a tool is great, but the only true tool is something users have to sand up and run themselves.
What they created - what every social, online service creates - is a social space that requires active maintenance for all the reasons social spaces require maintenance.
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@tess But charitable services are a thing. And even though they're commonly underfunded, some of them manage to raise their funds in a pretty stable manner.
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@riley charitable services require grants and/or benefactors. Also note that "charitable" and "non-profit" are not the same thing.
Nearly every nerd space I've spent time in (game stores, comic shops, etc.) has been a hobby project, funded at least in part by other resources its owner had access to.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but you'd need a handful of wealthy patrons contributing significant amounts to keep a charity social space running, and it wouldn't scale.
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@tess Charitable services often have massive programmes for finding people to donate to them. It might be an inevitability in capitalism, and could, perhaps, be what the next ASSC-like enterprise could do differently, to survive for longer (and get its engineers paid).