‘Open Source And Ethical’ TikTok, WhatsApp And Instagram Alternatives Could Transform Social Media
‘Open Source And Ethical’ TikTok, WhatsApp And Instagram Alternatives Could Transform Social Media
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 @[email protected] 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
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.