An Epitaph For A Place That Lives
February 19, 2019 8:25 PM   Subscribe

peach.cool is an iPhone-only microblogging service that was founded in 2016. (Hackernoon, The Verge, The New York Times)
It is small and probably won’t ever be big.
At The Verge, Bijan Stevens has a short note about the community’s stress when the service went down for a few days.
posted by Going To Maine (9 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh damn I haven’t used this since it came out. Time to bring it back.
posted by gucci mane at 9:30 PM on February 19, 2019


As of this afternoon, Peach is back up. It's probably running on borrowed time, though; the company is looking for a new patron to take it over. Presumably, that's gonna be a hard sell to lose 20k a year on a zero-income social network, and I'm not expecting a great outcome.

I've pulled a core group of about two dozen friends onto Peach over the last couple years. The way it has separate timelines for people, rather than one merged one, really makes it feel personable in a way that modern feed-based social networks could never achieve. It's been a perfect little space for us. And we could try moving to mastodon or whatever, but it won't have the illusion of it just being a naturally-occurring home for us. The metaphor I kept using was that Peach was the abandoned cabin in the woods, and we were the boxcar children that inhabited it.

So I guess, enjoy it while it lasts.
posted by smasuch at 10:57 PM on February 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


The way it has separate timelines for people, rather than one merged one, really makes it feel personable in a way that modern feed-based social networks could never achieve.

This is how I use Twitter. My timeline is completely neglected in place of particular accounts whose every tweet I follow. I didn't consciously revert to pre-Newsfeed Facebook browsing; it was just the only way to manage the stress.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:18 PM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


There's a lot I liked about Peach, even if I haven't posted to it for three years. The separate timelines, for one, but also the fun little suggestions on things you could post, like your weather or the book you're reading. It's reminiscent of another old social networking app, Path, along with stickers on apps like Instagram and Snapchat.

It's not for everyone, I don't even know if it's for me, but it clearly is valuable to a lot of people. It's sad that there seems to be so few ways to support development of apps like Peach. The server costs are one thing, but you also need continued development of the app because every update of iOS tends to break something; for example, the app really doesn't look good on the iPhone X, and that's 1.5 years old now.
posted by adrianhon at 2:18 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Kinda akin to finding out my school-friends mom had a brush with cancer: makes you remember to appreciate your own mom. By which I mean to say, I love you, metafilter. Everyone hug a mod today.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:02 AM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Has anyone paged Maciej Ceglowski?
posted by SansPoint at 8:08 AM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


I loved peach for a while. It's one of those social networks that I wish had taken off more than it did, if only because it did seem like such a kind and gentle space.
posted by sleeping bear at 10:32 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Apparently the users are banding together and are going to take over.
posted by zenon at 6:36 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


> Apparently the users are banding together and are going to take over.

This makes me think of mltshp spinning up when mlkshk couldn't keep going. I hope it works, I like this trend of indie platforms becoming user supported.
posted by VeritableSaintOfBrevity at 9:32 AM on February 21, 2019


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