You asked about Messaging
9 people built something like it. 5 are gone.
That is 56% of the ones whose fate we could settle, against 23% across the whole register.
| Launched | What it was | Today |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-06-09 | airy.co | still up |
| 2021-02-23 | quill.chat | gone |
| 2021-01-10 | ephemere.app | gone~22mo |
| 2021-06-16 | joinportal.com | moved |
| 2021-06-25 | birdslate.com | still up |
| 2021-02-27 | mebeam.com | unverified |
| 2021-02-17 | tardamail.com | gone~49mo |
| 2021-06-15 | fiotron.com | still up |
| 2022-12-24 | mats3.io | still up |
| 2021-03-12 | superpage.to | unverified |
| 2026-08-20 | praxos.ai | unverified |
| 2022-03-10 | throwaway.sh | gone |
| 2022-01-02 | glancy.io | gone |
How this compares
The register re-probes every domain it holds. Some that answered last month stop answering. We send that list — what went quiet, and what it was — once a month. Nothing else.
How this was made. Show HN entries are every post from 2021 to 2023 with at least five points that linked to its own domain; code hosts and free hosting are excluded, because a repository outlives the effort behind it. Product Hunt entries needed 100 votes — a far higher bar, so they are the promoted top slice rather than a like-for-like sample. Both are judged by asking the domain whether it still answers: gone means it no longer resolves, refuses the connection, serves a parking page, or says plainly that it shut down. An HTTP error is not counted as gone — a server answering 404 is one somebody still pays for, and an audit of 25 gone-calls found two such sites alive with only a moved homepage. Y Combinator entries use the status YC publishes itself, which is why only those can say acquired. Squatted domains — a lapsed name now serving somebody else's site — are not detected, so these figures run slightly low.