I’ve never invested a huge amount of time into Ello, a social network for creatives which launched in 2014. But I did appreciate the idea of a community which promised to never show adverts or sell user data, and found an audience for some of my personal projects.
Even if it was funded by VCs from the start, which always seemed like a potential issue for the future. Particularly as it explored selling merchandise, affiliate revenues, collaboration and hiring options, and other ideas to bring in revenue before it was eventually acquired by Talenthouse in 2018. And seemingly shut recently in 2023, with an error message on the homepage, and the status page inaccessible for a few days.
I’m old enough to remember a time when social networks were springing up like daisies on a Spring lawn. Particularly in the ‘microblogging’ era of Twitter competitors launching on an almost weekly basis, and then being cut down regularly by the need to actually generate some kind of profit rather than growth metrics.
It’s why there’s a nostalgic, early-web feel to the current 2023 resurgence of Twitter alternatives as a billionaire turns it into a right wing bin fire. I don’t have any problem with someone having different political views to my own, or polite and respectful debate based on facts, but that’s very different to endless Blue Tick spam and pile-ons.
It’s also why I’m wary of committing much time and effort into any new social network with VC funding and investors. The need for financial returns means the timeline to carve out revenue against the big players will be limited by the requirement for payouts or acquisition. I’m not judging anyone who needs money to run their service, but it adds an extra challenge from the start.
The Fediverse gives me some hope for the future, whether it’s Mastodon, Pixelfed, Calckey, or something new being built on a federated system which means you’re not relying on a single point of failure due to an acqusition, or funding disappearing etc.
But it’s also why you should self-host your central identity. You should back up any of your valuable content, and anything you want to refer back to from other people. And ultimately, the internet is an ephemeral as a Snapchat message or Instagram Story, just over a longer period due to link rot, domains expiring, or storage limits running out.
It’s why physical objects haven’t disappeared, and vinyl, film cameras, diaries and notebooks continue to sell (and see various resurgences and sales growth). There’s been a return to physical communities after pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, and maybe that’ll continue. Hopefully with the right measures in place so that the vulnerable, immuno-compromised and anyone concerned about the growing number of problems associated with Covid infection can attend safely.
But it’s also why I still get a little sad whenever an online community or network closes, especially without warning and the chance for anyone to export their content or transfer their communities elsewhere.
Update July 4th, 2023:
Strangely, Ello appears to be back up and running, with no information or acknowledgement of the downtime. So it may have been a temporary technical glitch or error, which isn’t particularly reassuring for anyone who is investing lots of time and effort into creating and sharing content there.
But it’s definitely good news if you had anything on there which you wanted to back up and avoid losing forever.
Update July 27th, 2023:
And it’s gone again…
Funny that no one else is talking about this. Yours is the only article I could find.
Yeah, it seems a bit strange that I could only find a few tweets, and nothing else. But I think a lot of people have fallen into the trap of thinking only the biggest networks with huge audience numbers matter to anyone.
I’ve always found smaller communities tend to be more interesting, and often as valuable in terms of what gets created as a result. Which was one prompt for writing about it, as it’s always a shame to see something close, especially when there was no warning or method for anyone to export all that they had contributed over the years…
I loved it but it just disappeared. I posted so many times. I never thought they would just disappear…
I have always loved this site and the particular way it mixed old and new images. I have a thousand images up, luckily they are real and I still own the images but I have lost contact with a lot of people and their work and have also lost the ability to browse through really first rate, wonderful art. I wish they had the common decency to warn us or at leas admit it’s gone.
Why were we not informed, and where is our data, technically our property.
Sadly, there’s no obligation for a platform to inform users, even if they know in advance (sometimes technical issues or bankruptcy etc can cause sudden closures). And data uploaded to a third party platform will generally be covered in the terms and conditions (for instance, whether you share something on Facebook, X, TikTik etc, you generally give up many of your rights to that material).
My Facebook account recently got disabled for no very clear reason. The only explanation being an art poster for an upcoming exhibition I am the fb administrator for. The poster had 6 portraits, one of which had some uncovered skin. Anyways, I have apparently earned myself a permanent ban for that service and am so fed up with Facebook that I thought it was time to re-visit Ello, only to find this: That is is over. It was otherwise much more attractive, but just a bit empty. :'(
I had a huge galley on ello.co so I hope it comes back. This is the only mention I could find.
Yours was the only article I could find too. I have a lot of Artwork up there, and it was my main point of reference. I hope it’s just another glitch.
It seems likely they just ran out of funding. There’s now an ‘invalid SSL certificate’ message on trying to access the site, rather than their ‘something went wrong’ message.
Some of the groups had a sense that it was going soon, with members exchanging contact information to stay in touch post-crash. As a site for art, it didn’t really recover from the Tumblr refugee porn invasion, when the porn sharers had to leave tumblr, and suddenly rules had to be made up PDQ.
I like smaller communities too, though they seem to exist in forums more than social networks, with some exceptions, like Libertree.
Not finding anything else on the subject. Whimper, not a bang, I guess.
Talenthouse acquired Ello.co in 2018, and Talenthouse is currently “restructuring”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talenthouse
“As of July 2023 Talenthouse is going through financial restructuring and seeking outside investors.” – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/09/creative-tech-firm-talenthouse-is-close-to-failure-as-debts-mount
Article makes no mention of Ello.co
Sad to see it (mostly likely) go, always enjoyed the ability to share with other creatives and was inspired but so much shared with us.
Do you know how we can get our work back? Because with ello gone I have lost all my poetry 🙁 there is no one to contact, what a shame! No one tells anything to their clients, the artists who made ello possible and alive! I’m really upset! You cannot just shut down a whole site without us being able to take our work back. I should have saved it but well I thought it was safe there , my bad!
Unfortunately, I don’t think many options will be available unless the owners make old content available once again – I’ve had a quick look at the web archive, and it seems that any archiving was blocked by a recaptcha. And user accounts were crawled rarely looking at my most popular profile.
Even if you’re a paying user of a service, I’d always recommend backing up all your work. Or publishing it on a site you own in addition to any third party service (e.g. I’d either publish an article here and then republish it somewhere like Medium, or save the original text document in Word). Setting up a basic hosted blog is fairly cheap, or investing in a removable hard drive if you’re short on storage space on your computer…
Sad to see Ello gone. They made me into a featured artist. All my posts went up to the main music page and I required around 30k followers 🙁 really wanted to at least take my audience with me.
You could try the waybackmachine …
Unfortunately it won’t work for Ello, as everything was behind a login (I think for gated content, the site owner would have to organise access). So the only archived material I’ve found is when posts were shared publicly on the homepage.
You could try internet archive and for the poetry you can try WritersCafe, HelloPoetry, or AllPoetry. All quality poetry websites. Storywrite is also by the allpoetry people bur for stories.
I wish I would’ve captured all my writing posts. I’m a little saddened, but hopeful once they come back I can transfer my works.
Like others I was surprised that no notice was given and no communication offered. I have a few pieces there that I have no other copy of. I hope they come back online long enough for us to get our stuff!
Please post any updates that occur! Thx.
It’s such a great site from which I’ve gotten much inspiration and discovered countless incredibly skilled folks- many of who I was only connected to on the site, unfortunately now. I am hoping for it to come back, or at least get an official statement of the closure. It’s so strange. It was also a house for a lot of my work that I no longer have… Anyways, thanks for writing about this.
I never put any original material on the site, but I always included links to where users could find my material. Thus I didn’t lose anything, especially since I also backed up my original content. It’s a shame if it’s gone, though; it was a good resource for sharing and networking.
I had a lot of contemporaneous musings posted to Ello along with much of my portfolio although I thankfully own all the images. So sad to lose that archive — but I appreciate your comment about owning your central identity on the web — and I’ve begun to do just that. Sad to lose the community though. I followed a lot of great artists on Ello.
I think a lot of us have learned from experience that a lot of the web is temporal and impermenant – I just went through it years ago with forums, websites and early social networks. And as a freelancer/self-employed writer (I’m part writer/part SEO), it’s also important to retain copies of everything published for my portfolio. Nothing worse than discovering an article on a really prestigious website has been deleted without having a screenshot at least…
The one thing that’s slightly different now is the rise of ‘federated’ social networks – e.g. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, which have more options to transfer and backup profiles/content, or to run your own server on their platform, which lessens the chance of losing everything if a site gets sold/closed/radically altered.
Actually, I realy liked that platform until they seem to have sold it to “Talenthouse”…which made it crap for a few years…and all the uploads and the 60k followers I had just vanished in their gravestones…shame!
Really miss that community of creatives and the constructive feedback. Will never post images only to an art platform and always as you suggested, to an original portfolio and then to a third party. Felt like ELLO was a great workaround to the gallery circus and was a fresh and inspiring place to participate and engage. I was posting up until last summer, until the error message appeared. Now using Bechance, but I miss ELLO.
https://www.tumblr.com/elloon is a nice alternative. I highly recommend it.
Thanks for writing about this. I pieced together a long postmortem of what happened at Ello and how it died, which may interest others stumbling on this blog post looking for answers.
https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/
Hi,
It’s definitely a comprehensive and interesting look at Ello, and thanks for mentioning my post in it. After going through the initial social media boom, and seeing how many microblogging sites launched not long after Twitter, the story of VC funding going to whatever is ‘hot’ at the time, and then leading to most platforms failing due to a lack of scale/revenue to please investors is a pretty familiar one. Which is one reason why I’m so intrigued to see what happens in the future with Fediverse projects.
And thanks for commenting – I’ve not only read some of your articles and followed XOXO from afar, but I still remember Upcoming pre-Yahoo. Funnily enough, XOXO launched around the same time I started a local Digital People in Peterborough meetup, and since then has spawned Peterborough STEM Festival.
I’ve found another social network called cent.co to be pretty similar, but it used to be linked to crypto earnings, but now it’s full of bots so it’s pretty dead too
I hope a platorm like it pops up. We just found out that all content posted on Instagram or feeds into the META AI database and there is no right to object. I’m looking for another space to share my work. I imagine this demand for a new platform will cause another one to pop up.
As of today, ello.com is now “Your child’s reading companion.”
I guess the original owners let the name go
Ello’s domain was Ello.co, not Ello.com.