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.
I’ve been on ethical alternatives for social media for a while and the one thing missing is just everyone I know
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.
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.
“Mastadon”
The normies are trying :)
“Hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t use a name that’s so easily misspelled by normal people.” - words that are never said among free software circles
