post.news is shutting down
Noam Bardin, CEO of the social network post.news:
It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.
We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.
post.news had a moment when Elon Musk bought Twitter. The product was still in its infancy, and like Bluesky, it had to put up some barriers to prevent users from overwhelming its limited resources. But despite this impressive start, at the end, post.news was too small to be viable.
post.news had plans to adopt ActivityPub, the open protocol that powers Mastodon, Flipboard, and Threads — among other platforms. ActivityPub allows all platforms that support it to interact with each other. For instance, it is possible to follow Threads accounts from Mastodon, and soon, it will be possible to follow Mastodon accounts from Threads.
With open protocols, new platforms do not need to build a user base in the first place to be viable. Because the user base is already there.
I am not criticizing post.news though. They launched right before it became apparent that open protocols would be the future of social media.
