[johnkizer]

The whole thing feels very "old school Internet" in a way - a bunch of misfits with a manifesto and an intentionally simple website.

It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.

[RodgerTheGreat]

I think it's also worth lauding their approach to a shutdown. They informed users it was going to happen nearly a month in advance, and the userbase proceeded to use that time to mourn, celebrate, exchange contact info with their friends, help one another build personal sites and/or organize taking refuge with other websites and communication tools. At the beginning of October the site was "frozen" and every user was emailed a link for downloading machine-readable archives of every post, comment, and user preference from their accounts. Cohost remains read-only browsable until the end of the year, after which the founders intend to forward their domain to an archive.org-hosted snapshot of everything public.

These days you're lucky to get a few day's notice and a "thanks for the incredible journey, now get the hell out" email when a site folds.