The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps’ further development.

The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon. The latter saw increased signups and use after the company formerly known as Twitter sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X exodus that followed the U.S. presidential election.

In the months and years following that sale, open source and decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky (which uses the newer AT Protocol), have continued to grow their user bases, as people sought alternatives to centralized social media apps controlled by billionaires like Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

MBFC
Archive

Edit: Link to the kickstarter

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why are there so many downvotes? Dude said the truth. Signal, like whatsapp, is a single point of failure. It can be enshittified just like whatsapp.

[–] moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We are on Lemmy and some are against everything who is centralized.

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With so many examples like twitter, reddit, Factbook, whatsapp, instagram etc. can you really blame us for not liking centralized services? Also, I don't hate all centralized services. I love Wikipedia, Openstreetmap.org etc. Also, the outage of OSM earlier proves that single point of failure is a reason for concern.

[–] moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't like centralized services. I also never pretended the opposite.

This is for me and my usage. The caveat is that not everyone is in the tech. We can look at the disastrous communication of Mastodon. They focussed and lots of people promoting it focussed too on the “decentralized argument”. This backfired. It was not clear for the public. A good strategy would have been to market Mastodon as an alternative with an easy process to create an account on the general website. Tech people would have chosen another server and do their stuffs. People would learn progressively the decentralization part and move from server to server. This takes time. We have to put great strategies in places and be patient to bring the public to the fedi.

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

I don't know if you know about it, but there's this new community !growthefediverse@slrpnk.net They got some nice discussion about how to on-board more people on here.