I used to use Glitch in my web development 101 classes for students aged 13 to 15. It was my favourite tool for that purpose because it met the following conditions:
It was free of charge.
Simple access with local account. No 2FA, no google or facebook SSO.
Ubiquitous. Just a browser away. No special hardware requirements. Zero software installation on the user’s computer.
NOT proprietary.
Straightforward working environment. No extra setup or build steps.
Immediate results with the preview pane.
Automatic hosting online.
Full support for collaborative work.
In a nutshell, everything an educational platform could wish for. Free, Simple, Ubiquitous, Immediate, Collaborative.
I am really, really sorry it’s gone.
And I am even more sorry to say that alternatives by fastlydoNOTmeet any of the above.
In that respect, I wonder, is there really any other platform/tool out there that could replace Glitch?
Probably not. The odds that someone else is still willing to let people create “whatever they want”, for free, without even logging in, is pretty close to zero. My own solution to Glitch shutting down was to write a new platform that fits my own needs, and so might not fit yours, does require you set it up first, does require logins, and does require you have a network-accessible deployment machine that you can use for that purpose. But once set up, the experience is very similar to what Glitch got me: just open the website, create a new project, and start making stuff.
People have always found ways to abuse free, loginless hosting, which is why places like Glitch were so rare, but recent LLM advances, especially “real world interaction” capabilities (like Atlas etc) have supercharged the ability for someone to just set up five thousand phishing/spam websites in a minute or two, folks don’t even need to write the scripts anymore, just tell the computer you want to exploit the web and go make a coffee.
So the odds of anyone ever putting up a platform without logins and moderation checks are maybe not zero, but close enough to round down to it.
We can keep on talking about whether Glitch should be shut down or not but personally I believe that it shouldn’t. It was a general purpose platform that could easily fit educators and their students, hobbyists and even people who would use it to prototype their ideas, too.
We don’t need complicated SSO or 2FA or to be professional software developers with accounts on GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket and heavy tooling like VS Code (whether online or installed locally) -to us, those are all like using a sledge hammer to hit a nail.
I can even reverse your security concerns by saying that Glitch could use AI, Cloudflare, heuristic analysis and so many other modern mechanisms to reinforce its security and keep fraudulent activity away.
