Posterous made publishing as close to sending an email as anyone had managed. You signed up, got a posting address, and wrote to it; attached photos arranged themselves into a gallery, and a couple of keystrokes cross-posted the result to Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr. Launched in May 2008 out of Y Combinator, the service attracted contributors who wanted a thought on the web in about thirty seconds, without learning a dashboard or picking a host. It grew audacious: in 2010 Posterous shipped a long list of import tools and openly pitched itself at people using competing publishing and sharing services.
An acquihire does not buy a platform
On March 12, 2012, Twitter announced it was buying Posterous, which almost everyone read as a way to absorb the team. At the time users were told Spaces would “remain up and running without disruption,” with migration tools promised. That promise held in the sense that nothing changed for almost a year. Then, on February 15, 2013, founder Sachin Agarwal announced the end: posterous.com and its mobile apps would turn off on April 30 so the team could “focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter.”
Writers had roughly two months to download everything. The backup tool at posterous.com/#backup packed posts as HTML plus their photos, videos, and documents into a zip file, and the downloads stayed available until May 31. The community had built itself inside a service whose sale value turned out to be the engineers, not the product. A home port for people who just wanted to write was a headcount asset to its acquirer, and the same ad campaign that once lured writers off “fading” platforms was no protection when the tables turned.
What the writers carried out
The exit was organized, which is more than most shutdowns manage. The notice listed WordPress and Squarespace importers, and a third party named Justmigrate offered Tumblr moves. Early transfers mostly worked: Chris Nadeau, formerly a featured Posterous blogger, reported that the WordPress importer brought everything over, comments included, in a few clicks. Gaps remained — co-founder Garry Tan said the WordPress importer lost document and audio files and shrank large images, with fixes later.
Tan and co-founder Brett Gibson did more than hand out advice. They built Posthaven, a $5-a-month refuge whose importer preserved URLs and comments and whose public pledge was blunt: “We’ll never get acquired. We’ll never shut down.” Posthaven reached public beta in March 2013 and financial sustainability by September, and it is still running today.
So an acquisition answers the ownership question without consulting anyone who wrote there. Posterous’s community was luckier than most: it had a working export path, and co-founders willing to charge money for permanence. Whether writers moved to WordPress, Tumblr, Squarespace, or Posthaven, the work traveled as data in a zip file. What stayed behind — the galleries, the post-by-email address, the friendly URLs — is a ghost city, now preserved mainly in the Internet Archive.