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.

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Link to the Kickstarter

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[–] Noedel@lemmy.world 82 points 3 days ago (7 children)

I've been on ethical alternatives for social media for a while and the one thing missing is just everyone I know

[–] NudeNewt@lemm.ee 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Heads up @dansup@lemmy.world the creator of these apps refuses to open source the projects stating (Loops):

Not until it's stable

Anyone who's followed any project of any kind knows that this is just a formal way of saying they just won't do it.

Not only is it not truly OSS, but he's a bit of dick. Like weirdly so. Banning people for reverse engineering the API, creating a poll on whether or not ads should be introduced (only to 180 on the matter claiming the poll was a joke but also emphasizing that the poll was in favor of ads)

On the plus side he dislikes Trump, so there's that I guess.

In any case I highly recommend people read this comment and the sources linked:

https://lemm.ee/comment/17804959

[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I think the weirdest thing I ever saw him do was discuss meeting with Meta when they were working on Threads, get called out for it so he made a post somehow distancing himself from it and saying something along the lines of, "C'mon, guys; I'd never cozy up to Meta," and then, when Threads started federating, posted a screenshot of being able to see a post from a Threads account from PixelFed and gushing about how incredible this was.

Dude is suspect, for real; glad to see I'm not the only one getting that.

EDIT: just read through what you linked to and wow; that's so much worse than I originally thought. That's an inane degree of unprofessionalism.

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