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.
“Mastadon”
I’ve been on ethical alternatives for social media for a while and the one thing missing is just everyone I know
Heads up @dansup@lemmy.world the creator of these apps refuses to open source the projects stating (Loops):
Not until it’s stable
Anyone who’s followed any project of any kind knows that this is just a formal way of saying they just won’t do it.
Not only is it not truly OSS, but he’s a bit of dick. Like weirdly so. Banning people for reverse engineering the API, creating a poll on whether or not ads should be introduced (only to 180 on the matter claiming the poll was a joke but also emphasizing that the poll was in favor of ads)
On the plus side he dislikes Trump, so there’s that I guess.
In any case I highly recommend people read this comment and the sources linked:
I think the weirdest thing I ever saw him do was discuss meeting with Meta when they were working on Threads, get called out for it so he made a post somehow distancing himself from it and saying something along the lines of, “C’mon, guys; I’d never cozy up to Meta,” and then, when Threads started federating, posted a screenshot of being able to see a post from a Threads account from PixelFed and gushing about how incredible this was.
Dude is suspect, for real; glad to see I’m not the only one getting that.
EDIT: just read through what you linked to and wow; that’s so much worse than I originally thought. That’s an inane degree of unprofessionalism.
So get them on there.
“Hey dummies, this here is the place that isn’t trying to fuck us, let’s move it over.”
For me the way bigger issue is clunkiness. The fediverse needs a massive push for UI, usability, intuitiveness. Not having that will turn people away, but part of what will get it to happen is more people showing up and saying “stop making this otherwise objective improvement so janky that I second guess coming here in the first place.” Maybe a few will be inspired to help, if they have the skills.
To everybody working on the fediverse in any capacity: thank you. You are building a digital Noah’s Ark for the future.
I’ve been getting into the fediverse for less than a month, and it seems the biggest barrier for a newcomer like me is settling on a select few out of many clients/apps. One question I think a lot of people migrating want to know is (and I open this up to anyone):
What’s the fewest signups needed if we want to enjoy all of the federated replacements to corporate social media? It sounds like each client demands its own account but I’m wondering where/if there’s overlap, because…
My Lemmy account already worked on movim before i discovered movim. That’s really cool but I don’t know 100% how that worked (same community server, I think), and how many other apps/clients offer that.
Movim is XMPP and I don’t know how that overlaps with ActivityPub, but I want to better understand so that I know how few accounts are necessary so I can micro and macro blog, share original/repost images videos and music, have group communities, and have a personal page to post things on as opposed to thread/conversations/forum posts and not have to manage ten separate accounts if I can help it
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.
Agreed.
However these ads need to be curated as well. This is the other thing that makes ads unbearable, is that a lot of them are just blatant scams.
I have learnt about proton and tuxedo from ads as well, which i use both.
Yeah I think this is a very important point.
I think people will need to learn to accept that there is no such thing as “free”. The current social media sells you to advertisers, taking every bit of data they can get.
So for independent and privacy focused social media, we’re going to have to accept we have to pay for it.
I’ve moved to paying for my email, my file storage, my VPN and my password manager - all for privacy and security. I pay for subscriptions for streaming to avoid advertising. So I would pay for social media.
In the early days of the internet, people accepted paying for things but then the “free” model came along. The fediverse will need to persuade people to pay for it. That may limit it from being the big everyone social medial, but it could be able to become the high quality version of social media that people pay for.
No mention of Lemmy. Hardly a mention of Mastodon. The leading image is all the oligarch apps. I’m not impressed.
Hitching on the wagon that Pixelfed is leading is good. There’s a lot of talk even from those who don’t care about FOSS, or Fediverse projects. Let’s give some credit and let things slide so the whole can succeed.
Big ups to @dansup@lemmy.world for his contributions and congrats to him being mentioned in the article.
