Kozmos

» see getkozmos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Most people who recognize this name do not recognize it from the product. In March 2016 Azer Koçulu pulled his packages off npm after a dispute over the name of one of them, and a module of eleven lines called left-pad went with the rest. Builds broke across the JavaScript world for a few hours and the incident got a nickname. That is the sentence his name normally appears in. Kozmos is the other one, and it has a worse ending.

He started it in 2017 as a side effect of something larger. The original project was an experimental web browser called Kaktüs, and the piece of it that survived contact with reality was the new tab screen: a place to keep what you had found. You pressed a heart button in your browser, Kozmos stored the page locally and synced it to a server, and when you opened a new tab the bookmarks were there, searchable by their contents rather than only by their titles. The company name was Kod Fabrik. Both of those words are Turkish, which tells you how big the team was.

It cost $4.99 a month and it never got large. The author was candid about that in the end: investors passed, the offers he did get were ones he did not want, and he kept it running because keeping it running cost him nothing and paid a little. His wife used it. The marketing page listed a ceramicist and an entrepreneur among the people it had filmed user interviews with, so the scale we are discussing is not in doubt.

Then Google's extension review system started sending takedown notices. They came every few weeks for about two years, each one automated, each one claiming a policy violation. He would reply and the bot would restate the accusation. That loop ran until a human finally looked at the extension and apologized. In early 2020 the extension came down for good, with no email at all. It was not removed for cause. It was removed by a process that had been wrong about it repeatedly and offered no way to be told so.

~ the case file ~

~ the machine on the other end ~

The farewell post is worth reading for the transcript he wrote out from memory, a four-line script of the same conversation repeating: the bot says the extension will be taken down, he says it must be a mistake, the bot restates the policy, a human eventually concedes the mistake. "Imagine having the same conversation, and starting it over and over from scratch every a few weeks," he wrote. "Robots can afford it, as they are good at repeating, but it was quite stressful for me as I had to deal with it besides of a full time job, being a father of a toddler."

His complaint went past the takedown itself. What he kept returning to was the absence of anyone to talk to. Every developer publishing to the Chrome Web Store paid a five dollar registration fee, and that fee bought no support channel, no contact address, no route to a person who could correct the record. The extension was open source, down to the library that did the syncing, and it asked for access to the browser's tab API and to Kozmos itself. Nothing else. None of that was reviewable by the thing doing the reviewing.

~ the funny part ~

Kozmos never got a tombstone. Refunds had been going out since February and the site ran in free mode while the last users pulled their backups, so the homepage simply stayed as it was. The final capture in the Internet Archive is 26 May 2020 and it is still advertising a $4.99 subscription to a service that had already decided to stop. Both of its domains are gone from DNS now, and kodfabrik.com, where the goodbye was originally published, has been bought and turned into an online casino that returns a 404 for it. The post survives on the author's own site, where he moved it. Without that, none of this would be quotable.

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