A link compilation about dead websites.
omg i remember waterfall… i had an account on it when everyone was trying out tumblr alternatives but since only like 2 of my friends used it i abandoned the account after a week
A fellow Waterfall rememberer! Strange to think how quietly it fizzled out… I’m glad I saved some information on it when I did, because at this point a lot of that stuff is just gone.
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I don’t recall spending any time on any of these platforms.
This is a really neat idea! I think it’s great to look back on failed ventures and learn from them and why they didn’t make it. I wasn’t part of these myself, but I was familiar with some of them, and I’m sure this list will only grow.
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i tried out cohost for a bit but couldn’t quite get behind it, shame when i heard it did close since a few of my mutuals on the indie web came from there. i am curious as well how much of it was also the monopoly of the social media they were trying to be an alternate to
(mostly since it’s been in my mind with the ongoing YouTube fiasco and the fact there’s basically little to zero alternatives for it that are used by video creators)
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this was an interesting read, would be great to fill the page out more. Hindsight is great
I didn’t spend much time on these, I did join Natter which was like a joke site in opposition to Twitter where you could only post max 4 words. However it got so popular they just extended the word count. I actually ended up winning a raffle and receiving a Natter shirt, which is now for a dead site 
I guess the joke was soon over
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As someone who tried out Ello, Cohost, and Waterfall the biggest struggle for these sites is content, imho. I always end up back on Tumblr because it’s the easiest social media site to find the niche content I’m looking for thanks to the robust tagging system and it actually has content. Waterfall was the closest to keeping me, but there just wasn’t enough content.
I never use Twitter or Instagram, because I have no idea how to find content on them, and Bsky & Reddit I almost exclusively use to look at Warframe content.
Also, slightly off-topic, but the page mentions sites joining the Fediverse. What does that mean?
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Thank you!
Ah, yeah, unfortunately the Youtube monopoly is extra tough to get around because video hosting is notoriously expensive… Unfortunate stuff all around.
That’s a matter of perspective, I suppose.
If you ask me, Cohost was actually pretty well-positioned for what it was. It grew very fast relative to its degree of resources and press coverage – the site owners were already reporting 203,805 total users in November 2023, just one year after the site launched in 2022. For comparison, Pillowfort was reporting 175,075 users in 2024, which for PF was year seven. So that means that Cohost expanded its userbase roughly about seven times as fast as PF. And that’s despite the fact that Cohost got less press coverage than T2/Pebble, which maxed out at about 20,000 users.
To understand why Cohost ultimately folded, I recommend either my post on Making Sense of The End or Lori’s Cohost Financials Retrospective. My post is shorter and more focused on the debate over cause of death, while Lori’s post is longer and covers more of the background from the site’s inception to March 2024, about six months out from the closure announcement.
Hadn’t heard of that one before! I’m aware of a few other little sites like Crabber and Minus, and I decided those fell outside the scope of what I was aiming for here, but I always think it’s interesting to hear about all the different experimental things people have tried.
The Fediverse is a name that some people use for the big extended network of federated websites, which includes sites made out of Mastodon, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Misskey, Pleroma, etc. A lot of times when people refer to something being “on Mastodon“ as if “Mastodon“ is a website, this is what they’re talking about. So a site joining the Fediverse would mean hooking it up to connect with that network.
I figured that kind of response was important to acknowledge ahead of time because “they should have just joined the Fediverse“ was a common response I saw to the death of Cohost, and I don’t actually think that would have helped them with making ends meet.
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So I hope this isn’t too off-topic, but I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to make a social site that’s limited to one post per day? It would be an interesting experiment in artificially limiting how often people could interact. Maybe the comments could also be throttled.
I know daynote.club does something similar, but I’m thinking this would be more open ended without prompts.
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there’s schlaugh! the idea is you can add stuff to your post throughout the day (rambles, replies to other people’s posts) and the entire site updates at the same time once a day. i used it for a little bit, but it wasn’t really my thing.
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Was going to bring up Schlaugh but Stel beat me to it. The other one that comes to mind is Izzzzi:
izzzzi is an experiment which might be called “slow social media” where we are exploring a multitude of constraints imposed on the standard mechanism of people making posts:
posts are collected into a digest once a day.
posts from yesterday are deleted, forever, every day.
posts are a draft and can be edited until the moment that yesterday is deleted and tomorrow becomes today.
posts are only visible between people who “add” one another (“mutual follows”).
Doesn’t appeal to me, but it’s there for people who want it.
I tried izzzzi for a short time.
The best part of izzzzi was that you could only make one post per day.
The worst part of izzzzi was that posts only lasted a day.
So while one post a day puts a good limit on how frequently you check izzzzi, the fact that posts only last a day forces you to check it every day, lest you totally miss a post. Even on Mastodon and Bluesky, if I leave the platform for a while, I can come back and catch up with what I missed when I come back. I can’t do that with izzzzi.
I left the platform shortly after this realization.
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Yeah, I wouldn’t appreciate that pressure either. Too much of a disincentive for me.
Some belated commentary about the rest of these in the graveyard:
The big hurdle for a lot of these sites is the problem of bringing in enough revenue to stay afloat, and that threshold gets raised all the higher for sites that made the mistake of taking investor money and promising a return. If you accept, say, three million dollars, now you’re on the hook to bring in more than three million dollars, or find someone else to keep borrowing from, or else you fold. So a lot of them fold. In that light, I think taking venture capital should itself be considered a red flag.
But even setting that aside… a lot of these sites just didn’t have a good business plan. An idea like getting users to pay microtransactions for news articles on a per-article basis should have been laughed out of the room.
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bereal is that! people seem to like it a lot.
bereal lets you post more than 1 picture (or at least it did back when i stopped using it) and it has the same issue as izzzzi where youre basically forced to check in everyday to not miss something (unless they changed that idk i last used it like 2 years ago)
Oh wow I forgot about bereal. My sister used to use it a lot.
I don’t think posts disappear after a day, but you’re forced to post everyday because of a streak system (like snapchat and tiktok). Then again, the point of the app was that you would just take a spontaneous photo when notified (thus the name).
btw, awesome website!
haha oh man, BeReal… I wasn’t going to bring it up, but that’s one of the ones on my watchlist.
Personally I absolutely hate the concept. Here’s an article about it I remember reading a while back (discussed on PF): Will BeReal just make us BeFake?
I’m hoping this is about the graveyard and not BeReal, in which case, thank you!
back when i used it you could see your own past photos but others couldn’t