I wouldn't personally say it is dead, but the speculations are clear. However, I will say the business model was a terrible one for the market it was built for.
First off, congratulations to all the crypto influencers who shilled this crap just so they can do what they know how to do best - robbing their followers - it filled their pockets and that of the developers of the platform and for the rest of us who didn't even attempt to use it, it leaves lessons.
Subscriptions are difficult to scale
Especially when you're not trading porn for it.
Underneath all of it, Friend.tech was “subscription-monetized” platform for creators, only that it functioned on a model that could either made it cheaper for the next subscriber or 10 - 100x costly, but at the end of the day, only two were really profiting from this design and neither of those two included the users.
In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, influencers don't care about pushing out valuable content or working/promoting valuable stuff, they quite simply only care about milking the ecosystem.
Given this reality, most influencers cannot maintain an active subscriber network. When users figure that being a “premium follower” isn't really bringing them anything valuable, they'd stop. It's evident on X, I have never come across any influencer boasting about having an active subscriber network on X because nobody wants to subscribe to crap content that they will likely see 10 times daily from other influencer accounts.
If any of these people had an active subscriber network, they would talk about it a lot to get more people on-board. But given that they understand that it isn't there, and they frankly can't deliver anything extensively valuable, they don't bother compelling people to subscribe, they simply turn on the feature for anyone crazy/dumb enough to pay to see their shit posts.
Judging by this market, Friend.tech could not possibly scale. Fact is, there are reasons to believe that users that flooded the platform weren't after being part of no exclusive club of no influencer, rather, most were after flipping the “influence shares” they'd buy for profit.
As with the rest of the crypto ecosystem, most users are after profits, and trends like this can only last so long. This is really like what we saw with NFTs. It was never about community, long-term value or exclusive access, all that loyalty program crap, most of the volumes were from traders trying to catch some big bank.
Even An Airdrop Could Not Save Friend.tech
I only recently discovered that the platform did organize an airdrop, and the token has since crashed over 80%.
Recently, the project renounced control of the platform's smart contracts and that caused an uproar in the community, leading many to suggest that the team is rugging the project, effectively signaling its death.
Friend.Tech's developers called a function on the platform's smart contracts early on September 8 which transferred their control to Ethereum's null address, effectively locking the current system in place and preventing further changes. "No fees from either smart contracts or [the website] currently go to the friend.tech dev team multisig," the team clarified in its announcement post on X. While the platform will seemingly continue to function, the revocation of control makes the implementation of new features unlikely, if not impossible.
Dead or not, the business model was not scalable and thrived only on hype. It isn't Onlyfans whose target market has a repeated urge to invest, hence, to survive, it either revamps its design, or dies slowly, which in my opinion, the latter seems like the route it's taking.