Rabb.it

» see rabb.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

rabb.it never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us product with a tiny global tail, and the tail did not include the part of the world i was in. the people who used it heavily lived in english-speaking discord servers and fandom subreddits, and used rabb.it to watch youtube videos and twitch streams together in the same room with voice and webcam tiles in the corner.

technically it was strange. instead of syncing playback across browsers, rabb.it spun up a full virtual firefox instance for each room and streamed the video frames out to everyone in it. the host clicked, everyone saw the click. that meant netflix worked, hbo worked, any login-walled stream worked, because the actual browser was on rabbit's servers and the viewers were just watching a remote desktop with a chat panel. it also meant the unit economics were brutal, because each room burned cpu and bandwidth on rabbit's side regardless of whether the content needed it.

at peak it had 3.6 million monthly active users and an average session length of 12.5 hours per user per month, which is enormous for a social streaming product. the model never scaled into profit. each new user cost real compute, and the company never found a paid tier or ad model that covered the burn.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

in may 2019 a series funding round collapsed at the last minute. ceo amanda richardson laid off most of the 30-person staff within weeks, kept the service running on skeleton crew for two more months, and on july 31 announced the shutdown alongside the news that streaming service kast had bought the intellectual property and patents. the servers went dark the same day.

~ what got buried with it ~

the virtual-browser-as-co-watching-room model died with rabb.it. nothing since has tried it at the same scale. discord screen-share and teleparty-style browser extensions all picked the cheaper route of syncing playback timestamps across each viewer's own browser. that route does not work with arbitrary content, but it does work with the unit economics, and the market chose unit economics.

kast inherited the codebase and built a different product on top of it, lower-fidelity, free tier capped at lower resolution, with a different target audience. it still exists in 2026 but as a small platform, not a successor at scale. rabb.it the brand is gone.

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