Keith Kurson, "The End of Glitch (Even Though They Say It Isn't)":

The thing that breaks my heart isn’t just that another platform is shutting down—it’s that we’re losing one of the last places on the internet that prioritized joy and experimentation over engagement metrics and revenue optimization.

Glitch was always one of those platforms I wanted to love more than I actually did. I kept a paid membership for a while, built a few projects there, and genuinely rooted for what they were trying to do.

But I kept bumping against its limits. The editor never quite clicked for me, and I found myself gravitating toward other hosting options: AWS, GitHub Pages, even hardware in my basement. When Fastly acquired Glitch, I assumed they'd evolve it toward something more like Amazon Cloud9 or GitHub Codespaces—powerful cloud development environments where I've actually gotten real work done. Fastly has all the pieces to build that kind of product—but maybe the Glitch folks could have done it with a bit of whimsy?

The social aspects never hooked me either, though that's more a reflection of my own limitations than of Glitch. Being social takes effort for me, and I never quite got pulled into that community.

The Sustainability Problem

I admired how the Glitch team cultivated that community space, even if I didn't fully participate in it. Which makes its wind-down all the more frustrating.

What breaks my heart is the same thing Kurson identifies: platforms that prioritize creativity over metrics rarely survive. Most of these efforts end up ephemeral unless they're self-funded labors of love by people who pay their bills elsewhere.

I keep wishing Mozilla offered something like this—imagine if every Firefox Account came with hosting, storage, and compute, maybe with an IDE integrated right into MDN. But even Mozilla has struggled to find sustainable models for tools that help people create rather than just consume.

Casualties of the AI Gold Rush

There's something particularly galling about Glitch's timing. We're in the middle of an AI gold rush where capital flows freely to companies building the next ChatGPT wrapper, but platforms that actually help humans learn to code and create can't find sustainable footing. The bots are watching us dance and getting all the funding instead.

It feels like 2000-2002 all over again—a lot of frothy investment that'll eventually crash, leaving us to figure out who was pets.com and who was Amazon. I don't expect it all to evaporate, but we're headed for serious churn until or unless new actually generative cycles emerge. Glitch feels like a casualty of that transition.

The web needs more places that prioritize joy and experimentation. Losing them one by one makes the internet a little less magical, a little more extractive, and a lot less welcoming to the next generation of creators who might have learned to love building things on the web.