How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?
Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.
Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.
When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.
Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.
I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.
The only exchange I've had with one of the founders (Garry) was on Twitter when a YC company named SnapJoy launched a campaign to "free your photos" from Flickr.
The only problem was that SnapJoy was a bigger black hole than Flickr was. An API to access your photos was coming soon for months and never came before they were acquired by Dropbox.
Somehow he was arguing around that point. Unsure how but it couldn't possibly have made sense.
I have nothing against Garry or anyone else involved in these projects/companies but it goes a long way to hurt those of us [1] trying to build software where users actually control and retain ownership of their data.
the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service
Seriously? Just gonna throw 'em under the bus like that? Friends like these..
Its time to stop trotting out this meme that the alternative to an "aquihire" was a sustainable business. Sometimes you've got to fish or cut bait.
Ad hominem aside, trust should never be required for a good agreement. PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell. If they follow that up with e.g., transferring control of posthaven.com to a well-regarded foundation like Wikimedia, the EFF, or archive.org they could further remove the trust requirement from the contract they are forming with their users. That'd be great.
Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you?
Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be.
#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.
#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286 can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement for nginx" kinds of problems.
#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you sell it to them?
In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.
Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that is self contained.
Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.
An interesting term to look up when considering something like this is the cost to "endow a terabyte": To ensure that it's preserved continually, paid as an up-front cost.
IIRC archive.org manages this for somewhere around $2000 per terabyte. There's a lot of interesting research into predicting how changes in drive prices etc will play out and affect this number, that you can find by googleing the term.
This is what we're building with Tent (https://tent.io). The idea is since you can always host your own Tent server, it doesn't matter if your hosting provider shuts down.
You can migrate your data to another server and change your entity (global user identifier) as part of the protocol, so there's no messy "please update your address books" (that part happens automatically.
Data is stored as posts and post types are developer extensible (posts are JSON and binary attachments), so if your favorite app is discontinued, another developer can make a great app that interacts with the same post types.
We're working on a Tent app that imports Posterous posts right now.
Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet should be.
Why are people so cynical? I know garry, and he is one of the most honest and generous people around. I signed up .. posterous was awesome and should live on.
From personal experience, doing a startup is so hard that judging the co-founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.
So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.
I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?
When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.
Garry, thanks for doing this new project. We need services that are sustainable long-term. We need a solid ad-free place that people can post their thoughts and have a decent chance of having them stick around as long as the web exists.
Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a return that sustains the service.
Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities, that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.
Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that might strengthen the company, not weaken it.
I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How dare they.
We just fixed a major problem with our HAProxy instance. The floodgates are open and everything is working awesome now. Please come back and give us another chance.
We had no idea when Posterous would shut down -- it's been a project Brett and I have been working on in our spare time for a while and we had to literally scramble to get this into launch-ready state.
We fixed it (in case you're wondering, make sure your HAProxy Maxconn setting is high enough, say 1024 connections, if you're serving static assets behind it in addition to dynamic content.) and we hope you'll give us one more shot.
I'm curious how you guys arrived at $5/month. Is it based more on what you expect people are willing to pay, or based more on how much you expect this to cost to operate?
It's very peculiar that the way this service is presented is the exception, while it should be the rule. Actually most businesses should try to have this in mind: provide a service that users want and are willing to pay for and try to be cheap and sustainable.
I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now optimize for VC rounds apparently.
We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.
Please bear with us though through this launch period.
This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?
@ScoopIt (curation) launched with a layered, freemium model that made sense, as compared to the discussions around Posterous I heard, that even non-techies asked about -- what IS the funding model for Posterous.
I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!
I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the "BackUp" button appeared.
It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about this??
What does it offer for $5 a month? Wordpress.com charges as well and the bill runs up to a lot of money for typical bells and whistles needed to run a blog. Google blogspot is still pretty much free all around. Tumblr is the same.
We think the world still needs a Posterous-like blog engine that is simpler to use for everyone else. Posterous got quite complicated after I left, and I think the world needs the simple version again quite a lot.
Google, Tumblr, etc. all have investors and shareholders which are trying to turn a profit. I think the idea here (and Garry can correct me if I'm wrong) is that they'll never take on outside funding or entertain selling the company, the sole purpose of the site will be to build something that is sustainable and lasting as opposed focusing on profit.
This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.
Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.
On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.
I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.
[+] [-] jbail|13 years ago|reply
Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.
Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.
I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.
[+] [-] jmathai|13 years ago|reply
The only problem was that SnapJoy was a bigger black hole than Flickr was. An API to access your photos was coming soon for months and never came before they were acquired by Dropbox.
Somehow he was arguing around that point. Unsure how but it couldn't possibly have made sense.
I have nothing against Garry or anyone else involved in these projects/companies but it goes a long way to hurt those of us [1] trying to build software where users actually control and retain ownership of their data.
[1] I founded The OpenPhoto Project in 2011
https://github.com/photo
http://theopenphotoproject.org
[+] [-] qeorge|13 years ago|reply
Seriously? Just gonna throw 'em under the bus like that? Friends like these..
Its time to stop trotting out this meme that the alternative to an "aquihire" was a sustainable business. Sometimes you've got to fish or cut bait.
Ad hominem aside, trust should never be required for a good agreement. PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell. If they follow that up with e.g., transferring control of posthaven.com to a well-regarded foundation like Wikimedia, the EFF, or archive.org they could further remove the trust requirement from the contract they are forming with their users. That'd be great.
[+] [-] sfard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalboy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be.
#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.
#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286 can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement for nginx" kinds of problems.
#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you sell it to them?
In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.
Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that is self contained.
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeyh|13 years ago|reply
IIRC archive.org manages this for somewhere around $2000 per terabyte. There's a lot of interesting research into predicting how changes in drive prices etc will play out and affect this number, that you can find by googleing the term.
[+] [-] iSnow|13 years ago|reply
I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high-level than HTTP.
[+] [-] danielsiders|13 years ago|reply
You can migrate your data to another server and change your entity (global user identifier) as part of the protocol, so there's no messy "please update your address books" (that part happens automatically.
Data is stored as posts and post types are developer extensible (posts are JSON and binary attachments), so if your favorite app is discontinued, another developer can make a great app that interacts with the same post types.
We're working on a Tent app that imports Posterous posts right now.
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradgessler|13 years ago|reply
I've talked to Garry and Brett about Post Haven and they are genuinely committed to making this work as they pledge on the website.
[+] [-] unimpressive|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argumentum|13 years ago|reply
From personal experience, doing a startup is so hard that judging the co-founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.
[+] [-] jwwest|13 years ago|reply
I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?
When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.
[+] [-] davewiner|13 years ago|reply
Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a return that sustains the service.
Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities, that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.
Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that might strengthen the company, not weaken it.
[+] [-] davewiner|13 years ago|reply
http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/posterousArchive
[+] [-] Jeraimee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
We had no idea when Posterous would shut down -- it's been a project Brett and I have been working on in our spare time for a while and we had to literally scramble to get this into launch-ready state.
We fixed it (in case you're wondering, make sure your HAProxy Maxconn setting is high enough, say 1024 connections, if you're serving static assets behind it in addition to dynamic content.) and we hope you'll give us one more shot.
[+] [-] r0s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronpk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peterkelly|13 years ago|reply
It's pretty easy to switch if necessary (admittedly assuming you have the right technical skills).
[+] [-] antirez|13 years ago|reply
I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now optimize for VC rounds apparently.
[+] [-] aaronpk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.
Please bear with us though through this launch period.
[+] [-] jaredstenquist|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyck|13 years ago|reply
I'll stay with Jekyll and WordPress.
[+] [-] bfe|13 years ago|reply
(FYI I'm still getting the 503 for now but I'll keep checking in.)
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mceoin|13 years ago|reply
This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylangs1030|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkt262|13 years ago|reply
Let's not even go into the fact that there's a high likelihood this project won't even take off considering the high amount of competition out there.
But there are tons of uncontrollable situations that you MIGHT run into, even if there's a 0.01% chance that it will happen.
- What if someone sues you and you go bankrupt?
- What if someone offers to buy you out for 1 billion dollars?
- What if (God forbid) one of the original founders passes away and the rest of the founders decide it's no longer worth it to keep it going?
- What if the founding team just realizes the project is no longer for them?
- What if after the founding team retires, the people that they pass it onto decide THEY don't want to keep going with it?
I'm just not buying it, and I feel like a lot of people will have the same skepticism.
[+] [-] dnrevel|13 years ago|reply
I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!
I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the "BackUp" button appeared.
It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about this??
[+] [-] webwanderings|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiwillia|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benrhughes|13 years ago|reply
Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.
On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.
[1]http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown
[+] [-] woah|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|13 years ago|reply