> This is a big change, but it’s not an “Our Incredible Journey” post
and then never, nowhere, at all, makes clear that the post means "We're shutting down Glitch". At least the "incredible journey" posts are clear about that, somehow this here is even worse. It suggests that they're just shutting some small part of it down but actually if I read it right (and the comments here) it actually means they're shutting the whole platform down but might someday want to try and do something else with the name and the userbase.
I simply don't understand why people write like this. What's the benefit of trying to fool your userbase into thinking that maybe not that much is changing when in fact everything is? Who wins when, the day after they pull the last plug, lots of people email them in panic, because they hadn't realized that "important changes" means "we'll delete everything"?
> The post carefully avoids calling this an “Our Incredible Journey” moment, but removing project hosting and user profiles is the end of Glitch as a platform. What’s left is essentially a redirect service with some backlinks (hosted on the Fastly Edge Compute Platform™, naturally). You can’t spin the removal of the core product as anything other than what it is: a shutdown.
https://keith.is/blog/the-end-of-glitch-even-though-they-say...
It's a bit ironic coming from Anil, who has quite a following on social media due to "calling it like it is" when big tech or VC culture does something rotten or self-serving.
The doublespeak and evasiveness in this "incredible journey" post is exactly the sort of thing he'd typically criticize!
Very strange situation.
Though, this was a real product, with almost 10 years of operation; very few products last this long, and the product wasn't immediately shuttered after the acquisition, so it is unfair to categorize them into the same OIJ bucket.
https://blog.glitch.com/post/my-last-day-at-fastly/
https://www.fastly.com/blog/fastly-announces-acquisition-of-...
You are probably spending too much time on a discussion forum sponsored by a startup accelerator if you think that defines the American dream, though.
An entity would have to really want to do all that for the “American Dream” to happen.
It's going to get worse.
> We’re thinking through what’s next. I’m really interested in how we can look at all the other amazing creation and app experiences out there (I really love stuff like Val Town and Fly.io and Deno and Netlify, etc.) and bring all those together for easily making and remixing new apps. Will take a bit to figure that out.
This absolutely is a "Our Incredible Journey" story, but just with a good migration off-ramp.
If HN said they're disabling new submissions and comments, that'd effectively mean they're closing the site, and would probably say that outright.
But Glitch aren't saying they are shutting down, but they're removing the feature that I thought made Glitch a thing. So nothing is left, yet they continue? Is this a 180 pivot or? Are there other features that will still be usable?
They're still just hosting websites in that scenario, which seems to be exactly what they don't want to do. A bit like if GitHub decided they didn't want to host source code anymore.
It's sad to see it go. I was always somehow worried. They had an awesome and super generous free tier. You don’t even need to create an account! Unfortunately, it looks they couldn't make the numbers work.
Codepen, jsfiddle abstract away too much with the UI and different panels. You're coding their way.
To quote a response from their forum: https://support.glitch.com/t/discussion-thread-project-hosti...
--- start quote ---
I’m not a fan of those overly sweet, corporate-style messages that try to sugarcoat the truth: Glitch was simply too good to last, and you’re losing money...
That said, my only real complaint is this: if you knew the situation wasn’t financially sustainable, you could have at least announced it a year in advance—not overnight.
--- end quote ---
I kept reading because I assumed they were going to - idk open source it or allow you to host Glitch apps elsewhere - but nope, it's just a straight shutdown announcement. What have I got wrong?
I'd assume there is some obfuscation required by owners or whatever pending a change of ownership, something like that?
Anyhow, RIP, if the internet has taught me anything it's that we can't have nice things for more than about 10 years.
This is one of those classic examples of awful communication dressed up as some kind of “good news everyone!” treatise on a founders personal feelings while being clear as molasses about reality.
I wonder if anything is left of the company besides Joel's blog posts.
Yes, giant piles of money!
I am curious what Glitch will look like after July. If they aren’t hosting apps, will they still be hosting code and letting it deploy elsewhere? It says it’s not a full shutdown, but it doesn’t appear to say what will be left to do on Glitch after that date.
They got bought, Fastly doesn't want it, they're killing it.
Also it’s been a while since I mailed a check to pay for anything, let alone an online service!
You have to bring your own server to selfhost but it's dead dead easy.
If you have a nodejs app you can basically just click "new project from github", select the repo, and click deploy. Then it'll be there on your domain (or a free one) and auto redeploy any time you push to master.
Really appreciate the suggestion. Couldn't be happier with the setup!
1 GB RAM KVM VPS
1x vCPU Core
1 GB RAM
20 GB SSD
2 TB Bandwidth
Price: $10.96/Year
I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's less than $1/month right there.
2 TB Bandwidth
This was on a box that was firewalled and ssh was locked down. It was running an older kernel - that was probably my downfall.
I immediately shut down and rebuilt the droplet with a more modern kernel. It wasn't too hard because my site is (mostly) static with a simple custom service but is very discouraging to find that somebody has damaged your home project just to (I assume) make a small amount of money.
seriously, it's not that hard to keep a server uptodate
Lowendbox has lots of cheap shared VPS providers. For small projects that's all you need.
I could stand up a server if there’s some open-source glitch-like for just static HTML and JS.
GitHub Pages?
They're cheap (thanks to corporate upgrade cycles and the sheer number of "obsolete" models that are out there on eBay et al.), quiet, reliable, low power consumption, and generally pretty capable for the money.
> running cloudflare tunnel
There's some irony here.
I don't think it's a great tradeoff, when optimizing for independence of specialized solutions at least.
BTW, Tailscale Funnel²³ (in beta) does provide public reachability! ² https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel ³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpxmfpCl20c ¹ Please enjoy this hand-typed em-dash.
But fortunately IPv6 is maybe finally happening, which solves many of the NAT problems, and in the meantime there's clever things like Tailscale.
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23126349/glitch-fastly-ac...
[This had substantially less coverage than forming the union, so I wanted to link it here]
When it went out I was super impressed, but they failed to monetize it and got badly abused by bad actors
https://web.archive.org/web/20161124184152/http://www.glitch...
If it doesn't, in what world is this good communication?
We would love to speak to any Glitch users about their particular use case. Please reach out to natalie [at] gitlip.com
https://magnet-caper.glitch.me/
https://generative-placeholders.glitch.me/
https://spurious-soup.glitch.me/
https://conways-webcam.glitch.me/
https://doodle-jump-html.glitch.me/
https://fragmatic-glsl.glitch.me/
Both Mozilla and Glitch are doing something on July 8. Is there something significant about that day?
"On July 8, 2025 Glitch project hosting and user profiles will be shut down."
"We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-implements...
> As explained in NSD’s Data Security Program Implementation and Enforcement Policy Through July 8, 2025, NSD will not prioritize civil enforcement actions against any person for violations of the Data Security Program that occur from April 8 through July 8, 2025, so long as the person is engaging in good faith efforts to comply with or come into compliance with the Data Security Program during that time. These efforts include engaging in compliance activities described in that policy, such as amending or renegotiating existing contracts, conducting internal reviews of data flows, deploying the CISA security requirements, and so on.
> At the end of this 90-day period, individuals, and entities should be in full compliance with the DSP. This policy does not limit NSD’s lawful authority and discretion to pursue civil enforcement if entities and individuals did not engage in good faith efforts to comply with, or come into compliance with, the Data Security Program.
How do you think this could be related?
> How do you think this could be related?
I didn't quote that when I said it may be related. I have some ideas of my own, but I just want to be clear so that I'm not being held to account for things I never said. How do you think it may be related?
People in other threads on this post were saying that Glitch was being used by bad actors, and if Glitch was aware of this or reasonably should be, then they would likely have issues with complying with audits for compliance with the new order, I would think.
If anonymous people are abusing free tiers on Glitch, it's hard to say if some of those bad actors are also foreign adversaries. People will make C2C infra out of anything these days, and even if they were making a net profit on the whole enterprise, which remains to be seen, perhaps the costs of compliance for Glitch (or Pocket) were not worth paying.
I went out of my way to do original research for HN, and made a case for why I think the results are respondent to the original query as asked. I think that it's likely that the new parent company of Glitch, Fastly, is subject to the DSP, and that obligation probably extends to their subsidiaries. Same for Pocket and Mozilla.
It's clear to me that this situation deserves further study.
It feels likely that it could apply to any company that draws the current administration’s ire.
I agree it’s very reasonable to imagine that legal departments across tech are worrying, and might consider shutting down — especially if they are already losing money.
These are questions for your lawyer, and if they don't have good answers, questions for your new lawyer. If you don't have a lawyer yet, there's your problem.
When I saw this announcement after seeing pocket earlier, I immediately started to wonder if there was a regulatory change on 8 July.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-implements...
> As explained in NSD’s Data Security Program Implementation and Enforcement Policy Through July 8, 2025, NSD will not prioritize civil enforcement actions against any person for violations of the Data Security Program that occur from April 8 through July 8, 2025, so long as the person is engaging in good faith efforts to comply with or come into compliance with the Data Security Program during that time. These efforts include engaging in compliance activities described in that policy, such as amending or renegotiating existing contracts, conducting internal reviews of data flows, deploying the CISA security requirements, and so on.
> At the end of this 90-day period, individuals, and entities should be in full compliance with the DSP. This policy does not limit NSD’s lawful authority and discretion to pursue civil enforcement if entities and individuals did not engage in good faith efforts to comply with, or come into compliance with, the Data Security Program.
I mean, it's kind of curious that the Pocket server source code never got fully released, even though Pocket was promised to be open sourced by Mozilla when they bought it. Now, Mozilla is ending Pocket, without ever delivering on their obligation to their users and donors. I don't mean to cast aspersions here, but this is not a good look for Mozilla, as their hand was forced, if our reading is correct, and this upcoming enforcement deadline is the reason behind Mozilla ending Pocket. Would they have closed Pocket on their own if they didn't have a reason? What was their stated reason?
Mozilla Firefox collects user data and shares it automatically:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
We should assume Firefox is sharing data because Mozilla tells us they are. Why should we believe differently for their lesser-known properties?
Firefox built-in spyware that cannot be disabled - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166801 - January 2024 (45 comments)
> Looking at about:networking I can see connections to pocket (despite me disabling pocket in about:config) as well as connections to "firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com".
> And after research, it appears some of these are hard-coded into the source code on purpose for "security reasons" which is ridiculous.
> Mind you, my browser is hardened to it's best.. just felt like sharing this for anyone unaware that even if you harden Firefox, even if you go the extra 10 miles and edit about:config, it will still spy on you!
https://blog.launchpad.net/general/sunsetting-launchpads-mai...
Lots more shutdowns in the coming months:
> 2025-07-01: Vrijeschool Waldorf elementary school will close, due to lack of schoolchildren.
OK.
If you appreciate this level of communication and respect, avoid Digital Ocean at all cost. They will fail to send you emails for a few weeks and then delete your resources permanently with no recourse. They are the literal opposite of Glitch. Avoid Digital Ocean.
I would recommend Glitch remove Digital Ocean from their list of alternatives.