Ello and Path both ended, and they did not end the same way. Path, the deliberately small network built for phones, became inaccessible on October 18, 2018, three years after Kakao bought it. Ello, the ad-free network that went viral in September 2014, stopped working in July 2023, and its address now redirects to a gambling site. Every entrant in that wave hit the same wall, and it was not design or funding. A social network is worth what its members are worth to each other, and a challenger opens its doors owning none of them.
The Wave at a Glance
Each of these launched as an answer to something people disliked about Facebook. Ads, tracking, real-name rules, the size of the feed, the ownership model. None of them lost on those terms.
| Platform | Started | Peak claim, and who made it | How it ended | Status checked 2026-09-02 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Path | November 14, 2010 | “More than 10 million registered users,” the company’s own figure, cited by VentureBeat in 2018 | Announced September 17, 2018, inaccessible from October 18, 2018 | path.com did not resolve at all |
| Ello | 2014 | 30,000 to 50,000 sign-up requests an hour, all from co-founder Paul Budnitz to reporters, late September 2014 | Servers failed in June 2023, gone for good July 18, 2023 | ello.co returns a redirect to a UK casino site |
| Diaspora | Kickstarter announced April 24, 2010 | $200,000 raised from over 6,000 backers against a $10,000 goal | Handed to its community August 27, 2012 | Still active, version 0.9.1.0 released April 7, 2026 |
| App.net | Crowdfunded August 2012 | Around $750,000 from more than 11,000 backers | Announced January 12, 2017, service ended that March | Closed |
| Google+ | June 2011 | Google’s own user figures were repeatedly disputed | Consumer accounts shut down April 2, 2019 | Closed |
Note the third row. Diaspora is not a corpse, and writing it up as one is the most common error in this genre. The last row is the other outlier, the only entry in the wave with a search company behind it, and its ending is documented separately in our account of what happened to Google Plus.
Ello: Eight Weeks of Being the Answer
Ello was created by Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger and funded with a $435,000 seed round from FreshTracks Capital in January 2014, according to the Wikipedia record of the company read on September 2, 2026. Its launch date is genuinely disputed. That same record dates the public, invite-only site to April 3, 2014, while Andy Baio’s detailed account on Waxy, published in January 2024, dates the launch to August 7, 2014.
What is not disputed is late September 2014. Facebook was enforcing its real-name policy, drag performers and others were being locked out, and Ello was ad-free and anonymous-friendly. Sign-ups spiked. In October 2014 Ello reorganized as a public benefit corporation, signed a charter promising to stay ad-free, and raised $5.5 million.
The Numbers Everyone Repeats, and Where They Came From
Here is the part the listicles skip. The famous Ello sign-up figures are not measurements. They are things a founder said to journalists over the course of one week.
Depending on which September 2014 report you read, Paul Budnitz gave a rate of 30,000, 40,000, 45,000 or 50,000 sign-up requests an hour. The numbers were never audited, never filed, and never compared against how many of those requests became accounts that anyone used twice. The one retention estimate that circulated afterward, that roughly a fifth of sign-ups were still active a week later, is an estimate and should be read as one.
Set that against the other side of the same quarter. Facebook reported more than 1.35 billion monthly active users in its Q3 2014 results on October 28, 2014. Even at the highest number Budnitz gave, running every hour of every day, the gap was not something a good week closes.
Path: The One That Was Not a Toy
Path is the stronger case, because Path was good. It launched on November 14, 2010, built by Dave Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, and it was mobile-first at a moment when that was still a choice rather than an assumption. It was designed for the phone screen rather than shrunk onto it.
Its defining idea was a cap. Fifty friends, later raised to 150, later removed. The pitch was that a network with a ceiling produces different behavior from one without.
TechCrunch reported on February 2, 2011 that Google had offered around $100 million plus an earnout and that Path declined, taking $8.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures instead. That decision is the reason Path is discussed at all.
Path’s Ending, in Order
February 2012 brought the address-book controversy, when Path was found to be uploading users’ phone contacts. It ended in a federal penalty: on February 1, 2013 the Justice Department announced that Path had agreed to pay $800,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, involving personal information collected from around 3,000 children under 13.
Path was acquired by Daum Kakao on May 28, 2015. By then its center of gravity had moved. VentureBeat’s shutdown report noted that more than half its user base sat in Indonesia, and that at its peak the company claimed more than 10 million registered users. That is a company claim, not an audited figure.
The end was announced on September 17, 2018. The apps came out of the stores on October 1, the service stopped being reachable on October 18, and support channels closed on November 15. When we checked on September 2, 2026, path.com did not resolve at all.
Why the Pattern Repeats: A Network Is Worth Its Members
This is the part almost no ranking page states plainly, so here it is.
A social network’s value to you is not its software. It is the specific people inside it. That makes every challenger’s first day its worst day, because on day one the product is finished and the value is zero. Ello in September 2014 was described by nearly every reviewer the same way: interesting, empty. That is not a criticism of Ello. It is a description of what a new network is.
Three consequences follow, and they explain the whole wave.
The switching cost is not the account, it is the archive. Leaving meant leaving years of photos and posts behind, which is why guides like our 2011 walkthrough on how to back up your Facebook pictures existed at all. People did not need a better feed. They needed somewhere their history and their family already were.
The incumbent was not just a feed, it was a platform. Facebook was where games, apps, selling and promotion happened, a shift visible in our 2015 note on Facebook’s new group and selling features. A challenger was not competing with a website. It was competing with an economy.
Attention concentrates where everyone already is. Nobody sets a record in an empty room. Creators go where the audience is, which sends the audience where the creators are, and that loop is tight enough that closing a mid-sized network takes an entire creative scene with it, which is the story told in our account of what happened to Vine.
Anger at a platform is real and it is not portable. People were furious with Facebook in 2014, in 2018 and again after that, and the fury did not move their mothers, their group chats or their photo history. The one time a crowd genuinely did move at scale, it moved away from MySpace and toward Facebook, and it worked because almost everybody went at once.
The Control Group: Threads
If the mechanism is right, then a challenger that starts with members instead of without them should behave completely differently. One did.
Threads launched on July 5, 2023 and passed 100 million sign-ups in five days, a figure Mark Zuckerberg announced and TechCrunch reported on July 10, 2023. It did that with a product thinner than Ello’s, because it let people import an Instagram account and follow list. It did not have to solve the empty-room problem. It inherited the room. In June 2026 Meta announced Threads had reached 500 million monthly users.
Compare Bluesky, which had to build its graph from scratch. TechCrunch reported on August 11, 2026 that Bluesky had nearly 46 million registered users by its own public stats, while Similarweb measured 10.4 million monthly active users in June 2026, down 27.2 percent year over year and down roughly 52 percent from a peak of about 22.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Same era, same category, two very different curves. The difference is not product quality. It is whether the members came with you.
What “Failed” Actually Means Here
The word does a lot of hiding. Four different endings get filed under it, and the same four run through the wider set of names in our guide to the platforms that shaped the internet and then vanished.
Shut down and deleted. Ello. Baio’s account records the servers failing in June 2023, the network gone on July 18, 2023, and the web app deleted on August 9, 2023, taking nine years of posts with it. The domain has since changed hands.
Sold, run down, switched off. Path, bought by Kakao in 2015 and closed in 2018.
Ran out of money after being honest about it. App.net’s founders said in May 2014 that subscription renewals could not fund staff, kept it running without salaries, then announced the end on January 12, 2017. Even the shutdown date is reported inconsistently: some contemporary headlines said March 14, 2017, while the fuller record puts the final cutoff at 06:45 UTC on March 17, delayed by data-export failures.
Still going, just not winning. Diaspora. The founders handed it to its community on August 27, 2012, and it is still maintained, with version 0.9.1.0 released on April 7, 2026. Its own federation statistics are opt-in, so the counts you see for it are a floor, not a census. Calling Diaspora dead is simply wrong.
One more honest note: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of Diaspora’s four student founders, died in November 2011 at the age of 22. The project outlived that, which is its own kind of answer to what these networks were for.
What This Means If You Are Choosing Where to Post
The lesson is not that alternatives are pointless. It is that the thing you are actually choosing is a set of people and an archive, and neither of them belongs to you.
Ello’s users had nine years of posts deleted with no warning. Path’s had a month’s notice to export. Diaspora’s are on servers run by whoever runs their pod. The pattern that killed the better Facebooks is the same pattern that decides what happens to your own material later, and it is worth knowing before you build anything on top of it.
FAQ
Is Ello still online?
No. Andy Baio’s account dates the failure to June 2023 and the permanent shutdown to July 18, 2023, with the web app deleted on August 9, 2023. Checked on September 2, 2026, ello.co returns a redirect to an unrelated UK casino site.
When exactly did Path shut down?
Path announced the closure on September 17, 2018. Apps were pulled on October 1, the service became inaccessible on October 18, 2018, and support channels closed on November 15. Kakao had acquired Path on May 28, 2015.
How many users did Ello actually have?
Nobody published an audited figure. What exists are hourly sign-up request rates that co-founder Paul Budnitz gave reporters in late September 2014, ranging from 30,000 to 50,000 per hour depending on the outlet. Sign-up requests are not users, and the two should never be quoted as the same thing.
Did Path really turn down $100 million from Google?
TechCrunch reported on February 2, 2011 that Google offered roughly $100 million plus an earnout and that Path declined in favor of an $8.5 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. The figure comes from that reporting rather than from any filing.
Is Diaspora dead?
No, and this is the most common mistake in articles on this subject. Diaspora was handed to its community on August 27, 2012 and remains active, with a stable release on April 7, 2026. It never reached Facebook’s scale, which is a different statement from having shut down.
Why do new Facebook alternatives keep failing?
Because the value of a social network is the people inside it, not the software. A new network launches with a finished product and zero of the relationships that made the old one hard to leave. Threads is the exception that proves it: it imported Instagram’s follow graph and passed 100 million sign-ups in five days.
The Short Version
- Path: November 14, 2010 to October 18, 2018. Acquired by Kakao on May 28, 2015, fined $800,000 in a February 1, 2013 FTC settlement, strongest in Indonesia at the end.
- Ello: 2014 to July 18, 2023. Went viral in late September 2014 on founder-supplied sign-up numbers, converted to a public benefit corporation in October 2014, sold to Talenthouse in 2018, deleted in 2023.
- Diaspora is still running. App.net closed in March 2017. Google+ closed for consumers on April 2, 2019.
- The mechanism is the story. A network is worth what its members are worth to each other, so a rival starts at zero however good the product is, and only a challenger that imports an existing graph escapes it.