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.
Big ups to @dansup@lemmy.world for his contributions and congrats to him being mentioned in the article.
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:
And the ads… There is a correlation there I’m sure.
Yvan eht noij!
No mention of Lemmy. Hardly a mention of Mastodon. The leading image is all the oligarch apps. I’m not impressed.
It’s Forbes - if they don’t use an image in the thumbnail of a thing people know, they might as well not use anything. It’s normie-facing.
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.
This right here.
Look at the objective. The objective is to kill corporate sponsered social media. Well what better way to do that then by normalizing non corporate social media in the minds of the masses?
Yeah, I don’t mind Pixelfed getting attention at all. It’s just that I don’t trust Forbes, and this article seems to want to muddy the waters.
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“Mastadon”
MastaDon is the new TruthSocial app.
The normies are trying :)
Not too be confused with the Masturbatron.
While Masturdon was ripe for the picking
Yes masta
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.
Good point. Theoretically surmountable because Wikipedia.
But donors are going to have to be convinced that social media is a social good.
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.
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.
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*
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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.
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.
Their rationale was that SMS is not secure and having something not secure on their app was damaging.
In what way is it insecure? If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS. If users didn’t understand the distinction, that’s a design failure on signal’s part.
To a lot of us, SMS fallback was the killer feature signal provided.
At least with matrix, it’s decentralised. If they ever try to rug pull like signal did, their users can at least choose to not update if they self-host their own instance. I’d imagine a lot of lemmings would appreciate that, considering.
If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS.
It sounds like they don’t want to take responsibility for that user choice or be connected to anything that happens because of that choice.
It would still be an insecure choice, even with obvious UX distinctions. It would only be a matter of time before headlines muddy the waters with “intercepted Signal messages reveal…” or “Judge rules in favor of subpeona for unencrypted Signal messages…”
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.
It’s owned by Brian Acton
No, he is a founder and a donor. It’s owned by the Signal Foundation, which is a classic non-profit that seeks funding from lots of sources.
The other founder is Moxie Marlinspike who is a security researcher
Impressive that a site like Forbes is writing about the Fediverse. A small step to helping it into the mainstream.
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 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.”
e…e-mail?
I would never tell anyone to email me…
Email alias?
That’s a last resort for me, personally.
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Signal? Isn’t that the app for drugs? /s
Good luck getting anyone to download any of those😂
Yeah but you see the point? They offer us one option. We offer them ten.
“You don’t have any of them installed? Well, I don’t have Whatsapp installed. So one of us is going to have to go out of our way. Why should you assume that’s for me to do, just because everyone else including you behaved like an unthinking herd of sheep?” That’s what I feel like saying, and occasionally do actually say.
It’s a difficult conundrum. Speaking personally, but at this point resisting the Whatsapp fascism has become a stubborn article of faith for me. I won’t do it.
Yeah… But to them, why should they deal with one difficult customer when they have a dozen more that are easier to work with?
My point was about the social scenario, which is a genuine puzzle because most people want to have friends. I’ve lost some over this.
For the business context (this was the subject, true), I find that’s much easier: “F*** off and send an email.” Impossible? Well then that’s one less customer for you. I have lots of experience of doing exactly this. Almost always the email suddenly becomes possible after all.
lol wut
Sorry, did you have a question?
Nope
They don’t have email? It’s like the 1980s when only nerds had email.
I know. But most of these engineers are on the job and on the road 99 percent of the time. And a quick WhatsApp message is all they want.
MMS?
MMS are sent by mail protocol between operators 🤭
I don’t understand how it’s worse for the guy in the truck though. I’ve never used Snapchat so I’m likely missing something.
I don’t know, but for the context let’s say that MMS are as safe as a mail could be: « not so much or not at all » depending on one privacy needs
Can you guys help me: I have Facebook and instagram which isn’t great. Never got twitter or tiktok and I’m very glad about that. If I get bluesky will I end up using instagram and Facebook less or just get addicted to another regretful thing? What’s it actually like?
I joined Pixelfed yesterday, the Instagram alternative. I wasn’t really active on IG and haven’t logged in in years, but Pixelfed seems solid. The glaring issue though is that none of my friends use it, so it’s just a personal photo for now, but hopefully that will change.
I tried to create an account days ago and never got a confirmation email, which server did you make your account?
Metapixl and signup was instant for me.
