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.
WhatsApp ❌
Signal ✅
I wish I could get everyone to use it but many of my friends are having trouble with notifications not working reliably for Signal. Or sometimes messages are simply not sent immediately, even if both sides are online. This is not helping to get people over. Also no one but me really cares about all the reasons why I would like to get rid of Whatsapp, especially if they would have a lesser experience.
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.
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.
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.
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 such a poor excuse. If they really really thought it was a problem, they could obscure-gate the feature. Make it so you have to long press on the 3rd word of the ToS or something ridiculous, and share that info online.
This is a fairly common practice for potentially dangerous android features, for example. It keeps the less tech savvy audiences from accidentally impaling themselves in the foot.
Usually the vanguard of adoption for platforms like these are fairly technical users. When you start cutting the feature set that brought them to your platform, it starts the death knell for your platform. They’ll go elsewhere to find a platform that respects them more, and they’ll drag everyone else with them sooner or later.
When was the last time you saw android getting a severely bad rap for including ADB?
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.
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