At a time when established social media platforms are facing criticism and turbulence — from TikTok’s temporary shutdown to Meta’s withdrawal from fact-checking and growing criticism over political content moderation — a new approach to social media is gaining some attention.
“Help us put control back into the hands of the people!” declares Canadian developer Daniel Supernault, whose open-source platforms aim to provide privacy-focused alternatives to mainstream social media.
Supernault’s Kickstarter campaign, launched on Jan. 24, has already exceeded its initial CA$50,000 goal, TechCrunch reports, raising CA$93,022 (approximately US$64,839) as of 11:02 a.m. PT today. The funding will support the development of three platforms within the Fediverse — a decentralized network of interconnected social media services. These platforms include Pixelfed, Loops and Sup, designed as privacy-focused alternatives to Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp, respectively. Each platform rejects traditional venture capital funding and ad-based revenue models in favor of community-driven development.
One thing we need to mention is funding.
While BlueSky may benefit from venture capital, free (as in beer) open source projects where user data is not commercially exploited for revenue do not have the same benefit. They rely a LOT on donations for running the infrastructure and for the hours and hard work that people are putting in.
I know ads are very hated here, but I wouldn’t be against an ad at a reasonable cadence to increase sustainability. Then create a pro version that gets rid of ads that’s like $2-5 a month or $30 a year. The real problem is the exploitation of this system like Reddit/Insta feeding an ad every other post. Or Twitter charging nearly $13 a month for a check mark.
The sync app got so much hate for having ads during the original migration, but a lot of us here are devs and we should definitely get paid for our effort and be able to maintain our infrastructure without our of pocket money.
Yeah, ads also wouldn’t be an issue if the user was given control about how their data is used to decide on what ads to show them. Users could have an option to opt in to more targeted ads but be able to choose what aspects of their data are taken into account, if at all. Maybe all data sharing is turned off by default, but a user could opt in to ads that interest them like interior decoration, or furniture, or workout equipment, etc… while still being able to ban ads they don’t want to see, like political ads.
Venture capital doesn’t benefit you any more than a leach benefits you
Well it sure benefited a lot of new tech projects and companies.
Harmed*
WhatsApp ❌
Signal ✅
I was pissed at Signal for dropping SMS support. Their rationalisation was kinda bs. Now I just use matrix instead, since it’s decentralised.
In practice Matrix isn’t decentralized in the slightest. Almost every account is on Matrix.org or a server they host. The whole protocol is a data/metadata syncing machine that isn’t good for privacy & is prohibitively expensive to run anything beyond a single-instance since all history of all users in all rooms necessarily needs to be synced onto the server. Many medium-sized servers have shutdown on storage costs & system resource requirements (especially RAM)—which forced its users often to flock back to Matrix.org. This is wild since it is mostly text chat.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
Thank you for the illuminating post. Could you name a few alternatives that better align with the ethos of the fediverse?
XMPP for reliable, lightweight, & stable. SimpleX is a project worth keeping tabs on as well.
They literally were not given any out (and were unwilling to take the one they had, or forgot they had it). People were complaining that SMS isn’t secure even in Signal (when SMS by design can’t be), which buils undue mistrust on the project, and Google is the one who controls all the keys to RCS so implementing that was not an option either.
The part where Signal dropped the ball hard is that they could just as well perfectly revived their old, perfectly functional SMS app with a new name and add it to the project,and thus be able to claim they still support SMS. Since SMS is pretty much a build-and-done for thing, it would barely if ever need any maintenance or updates.
That’s my initial thought, but what do we know about who owns it?
It’s owned by Brian Acton. The original founder of WhatsApp before it was sold to Meta. I’m yet to hear of controversial stories about him. Unless him being a billionaire irks you, i think it’s fine.
I wish I could get everyone to use it but many of my friends are having trouble with notifications not working reliably for Signal. Or sometimes messages are simply not sent immediately, even if both sides are online. This is not helping to get people over. Also no one but me really cares about all the reasons why I would like to get rid of Whatsapp, especially if they would have a lesser experience.
Big ups to @dansup@lemmy.world for his contributions and congrats to him being mentioned in the article.
Impressive that a site like Forbes is writing about the Fediverse. A small step to helping it into the mainstream.
My only issue is having WhatsApp in my circle is a must.
Friends and families are more than happy to text or call. But the numerous contractors and engineers I work with and request their service, to them WhatsApp is a must to send photos of issues or videos of faults.
“Sorry, I don’t have WhatsApp but you can send me those photos or videos on Signal, Matrix, SimpleX, Briar, Wire, Session, Jabber, Threema, or Line.”
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Good luck getting anyone to download any of those😂
Signal? Isn’t that the app for drugs? /s
lol wut
Sorry, did you have a question?
Nope
I hope that’s going to succeed. And those are the platforms in demand. While Mastodon is losing users, and we’ve been stagnating for quite some time already… Pixelfed is currently going off the charts. We’ll have to see where this leads to and if it’s going to last.
My experience is that nobody cares about privacy, moral issues or anything that might be an issue in the future. They only care about convenience, distraction and whatever their peer group is doing. So the “attention” this is getting is never going to reach the spineless mass audience.
Why does it have to be about privacy? Why can’t it be about not centralizing power into a handful of for-profit entities?
This is where „… or anything that might be an issue in the future“ comes in.
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Sup
Signal is better as a centralized alternative and Matrix is better as a decentralized alternative. We don’t need another messenger.
