Cohost’s financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won’t survive without decentralization. You can’t just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That’s a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they’ve now learned why centralization isn’t feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.
The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won’t long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It’s pets dot com again. It doesn’t last.
And this isn’t even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don’t want to go to more than one? Too bad, it’s how things will be regardless. Having One website isn’t sustainable for corporations and isn’t even vaguely feasible for little guys.
You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I’m running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It’s not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn’t. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can’t make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it’s just how the math works out. Reddit can’t make money doing it, Twitter can’t make money doing it, Patreon can’t…they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn’t advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.