A link compilation about dead websites.
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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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