Post-Posterous Haven
February 15, 2013 7:22 PM   Subscribe

Blogging platform Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter in March 2012, has officially announced it is to close on April 30th 2013.

Posterous co-founders Garry Tan and Brett Gibson are setting up Posthaven, which will charge users $5 a month and is "a long-term project that aims to create the world's best blogging platform and stay that way for as long as humanly possible." Tan and Gibson are "as sick as you are about having to move your posts and photos every time a service goes away."

A further list of Posterous alternatives is here.

(previously)
posted by motty (24 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Posthaven? Better to give money to Pinboard, add all your posts and have Maciej archive them for you.
posted by migurski at 7:50 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Well I guess if that comics dude last time can spare $5 a month, all his problems will be solved.

But, as I said last time, you can get hosting for cheaper than $5 a month if you want to actually be responsible for your own data...
posted by Jimbob at 8:12 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


"Buy him out, boys!"

*smashsmashsmash*
posted by Sys Rq at 8:16 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Last forever - a web app? Making such a claim is silly and borders to false marketing.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:17 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Making such a claim is silly and borders to false marketing.

Well, it is. But it would be great if such a thing were possible.

My wife has over 100,000 images on Flickr - on a pro account, of course. We're just sitting here waiting for the apocalypse...
posted by Jimbob at 8:19 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm still posting on Livejournal. Via the LJ crossposting plugin for Wordpress nowadays.

I don't think anyone I know ever touched Posterous. Nobody in my circles, none of the younger folks I know through other circles. I think I only ever really ended up on Posterous when looking at the blogs of some startups that hosted them there instead of their own sites. Just who was the main demographic that used it, anyway?
posted by egypturnash at 8:29 PM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Nobody. That's why it closed.
posted by happyroach at 8:41 PM on February 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't think anyone I know ever touched Posterous.

Yeah. In my mind, it was just a fairly vague service that interfaced with Twitter and allowed you to post longer blog entries / images / videos. I'm kinda surprised anyone used it as a serious, independent platform.
posted by Jimbob at 8:42 PM on February 15, 2013


Another example of why you should keep your stuff on your own server instead of random services. Yes, it's a pain, but if your hosting provider goes out of business all you have to do is take the backups of your server and restore them to a new one. Plus, hosting companies seem much more stable then random social media startups.

The obvious problem is that it's actually a huge pain in the ass to setup and run a web server, but I don't think there's anything intrinsically difficult about it, it's just that the software that's out there now requires a lot of command line/text config editing/shell scripting to get running and integrated with itself.

And in turn there's no financial incentive for anyone to spend the time to make a really nice, user friendly GUI based server config architecture - but there are plenty of financial incentives for people to create unsustainable social media "services" designed to suck down as much personal data as possible - or just get bought out before they need to actually make money.
posted by delmoi at 8:52 PM on February 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


My husband asked me about Posterous when he saw something about this and neither of us even really knew what Posterous was other than in a very vague fashion. I think I may have had it confused with some other minor blogging platform, even.

Yeah, that kind of thing is why it failed.
posted by immlass at 9:29 PM on February 15, 2013


Last forever anything is silly and borders on false marketing.
posted by Apropos of Something at 9:42 PM on February 15, 2013


I think they were aiming for people who just wanted a really easy way to keep a blog updated. You could do a video post by sending an email with the video in the attachment.

Of course since all my friends are tech-savvy enough to figure out tumblr and wordpress and livejournal, etc, none of us used it.
posted by subdee at 9:57 PM on February 15, 2013


Um, isn't Posterous just Tumblr, but less popular?
posted by Canageek at 10:38 PM on February 15, 2013


This kind of thing is partially why I broke down and converted all my blog stuff from Movable Type and WordPress to Jekyll/Octopress (i.e. flat Markdown with a tiny bit of metadata) instead of going to something hosted. I don't really have an answer for comments—they live in Disqus—but the writing (~750k words, ~1850 entries, 11 years) is all in a relatively bomb-proof format and self-hosting isn't a huge technical/security challenge because it's all static.

Pictures are in Flickr, but also backed up locally and on Amazon Arq.

Anything else feels like saying I don't care about the work.
posted by mph at 11:10 PM on February 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


The obvious problem is that it's actually a huge pain in the ass to setup and run a web server, but I don't think there's anything intrinsically difficult about it, it's just that the software that's out there now requires a lot of command line/text config editing/shell scripting to get running and integrated with itself.

It's not even that hard. On Dreamhost, you can click buttons and have, say, Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal or many others set up in minutes without ever looking at a shell prompt.
posted by Jimbob at 12:33 AM on February 16, 2013


Ya, I use nearlyfreespeech and it's pretty trivial to set these apps up and then know you control stuff. Even if NFS goes out of business I can just point my domains at a new nameserver and let SFTP get me back on line. I mean my father couldn't manage it but most people could with a bit of effort or they could just hire someone to do it for them.

delmoi: "Plus, hosting companies seem much more stable then random social media startups. "

Because they have a business model that has collecting money from their users as a profit vector.
posted by Mitheral at 12:49 AM on February 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


It's safest to self-host, but at the very least you should use your own domain (Tumblr doesn't even charge for this). That way, when coolwebservicethingy.com shuts down you can get something similar running on your domain via another service or self-hosted software. Yes, there'll be broken links galore unless you can match the old URLs or set up redirects, but it's far less catastrophic.
posted by malevolent at 2:41 AM on February 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


WTF! Ours launched a print magazine.

RIP you bastards.
posted by infini at 4:14 AM on February 16, 2013


I read the advice on teh thread. But when I started Posterous was a joke along with Tumblr, so I picked one. Just to play. And like my games on Tumblr, its grown outside of its box/host/app.

But, I wonder, if beginning to host it with a brandname URL and whatnot might not jeopardize its organic growth?

You see?
posted by infini at 4:17 AM on February 16, 2013


I don't think anyone I know ever touched Posterous.

I use it as my second-grade class' blog... it's perfect because I can password protect it so only my parents can see it, and it's so easy that I can let the students use my old iPhone to create videos about what we're doing in class and upload straight from the phone.

I was actually planning to look for another service, though, because it's pretty buggy... so no big shock.
posted by Huck500 at 6:04 AM on February 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Dude! I use Posterous! Because I got fucking sick of how terrible WordPress used to be at handling images and Posterous made it STUPID EASY. But now that Flickr has wheezed back to life and I've gotten over myself about paying for it, and even WordPress isn't quite so stupid anymore...welp.
posted by clavicle at 8:08 AM on February 16, 2013


All these years I've been confusing Posterous with Vox, which apparently shut down three years ago. At least I won't have to feel bad about the confusion for much longer.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:10 AM on February 16, 2013


> This kind of thing is partially why I broke down and converted all my blog stuff from Movable Type and WordPress to Jekyll/Octopress (i.e. flat Markdown with a tiny bit of metadata) instead of going to something hosted.

I was going to come here and point this out as well. The cool thing about Jekyll/Octopress is you write your blog posts / articles / nifty things in markdown, which is a very simple markup language meant to help you keep typing while also allow for style changes, without having to actually do HTML. Then you run the markdown through jekyll/octopress, which makes pretty html / css. Then you just upload those files to a server somewhere. That server can be the most basic webserver on the internet, one that just has to be able to serve up these files and allow you to upload new versions of files once you've made changes locally. My coworker (and mph's as well) put together a really good blog post about his experience switching to it and what one has to do to get up and running with it quickly, in case folks are interested in taking the plunge (as I am planning to do this weekend as part of my IT housekeeping projects).
posted by mrzarquon at 11:26 AM on February 16, 2013 [6 favorites]


The only person I knew who used it (and I don't know him IRL) was Dustin Curtis, and he rolled his own blogging service that owed a lot to the look and feel of Posterous but wasn't Posterous after a while. So...yeah.
posted by limeonaire at 11:45 AM on February 16, 2013


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