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.

MBFC
Archive

Link to the Kickstarter

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

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Their rationale was that SMS is not secure and having something not secure on their app was damaging.

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

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

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..."

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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?