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.
Edit: Link to the kickstarter
If all my friends, family, and coworkers could get off WhatsApp, I would be so happy.
I’m trying to convince mine to get on Signal
RCS could be also an option. Now mostly backed by google but it can be unplugged whenever we want
afaik not really, only cell phone companies can apply to join the rcs federation and all of them just outsourced it to google and apple so it under control of just 2 companies.
so no, rcs is not an open standard.
I’m not going to use a proprietary protocol to chat through Google’s (Jibe) servers running proprietary software. Even if the messages are e2ee, Google can still collect metadata. Google never provides anything for free and collection of data is kinda their thing.
yeahhh nah