also the August 2024 financial update, but I’m trying not to bury the lede.
Hi everyone,
We have come to the decision to cease operations of cohost and anti software software club due to lack of funding and burnout. As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor1; 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.
cohost will become read-only on Tuesday, October 1st. At this time, we will make best-effort attempts to keep the servers online through the end of 2024.
Development focus has immediately shifted to data export. We have offered minimal data export for GDPR compliance for a while now, but this is a barebones system that doesn’t meet our quality standards. We will be improving this system over the next few weeks and will issue full data exports for all users when the site goes read-only. We will continue to offer downloads of your data export through the end of the read-only period.
When the read-only period concludes, we will delete all of your data from our servers without a backup. Even now we want to reiterate that we think “data brokerage” and other common practices of the software industry are inimical to who we are as people, and we would never consider selling your data to others or asserting any rights to stuff you posted under any circumstance.
Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.
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on that note, we’re looking for new jobs. we’ll each be posting about that bit individually.
I'd really come to appreciate this space in recent months. Twitter is hell, and Bluesky is laying down an ideological roadmap to the same destination. This place was flawed but it was really starting to feel properly communal for me, and I'm going to miss that. I hope staff are able to find at least some time to rest and take care of themselves.
Do not take the stealthy approach into that good night, Eggbug. Go out guns blazing.






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Thanks for making cohost!



