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
WhatsApp? Just use signal already!
It’s not really a whatsapp alternative. More like a facebook messenger alternative. It replaces and encrypts dms from mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, etc
incorrect
Care to elaborate? Genuinely i interested as to why that is
no
ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ Allllrighty then
Centralized. Not good. Conversations is on fdroid and is decentralized, federated, open source and uses a mature and battle tested protocol (XMPP). If I wanted something new, I would prefer Matrix over Signal.
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.
We are on Lemmy and some are against everything who is centralized.
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.
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.
I don’t know if you know about it, but there’s this new community [email protected] They got some nice discussion about how to on-board more people on here.
People act like we need an alternative to Whatsapp but XMPP/Jabber exists and is much older.
what happened to pidgin
Pidgin is a client, not a specific protocol.
I know, I just remember I used to use it with jabber xmpp but I think after everyone got gtalk and then everyone got cellphones everyone moved away from those types of clients
Fun fact, Google Talk and Facebook used to be compatible with XMPP.
Nobody but a handful of nerds uses it though. You won’t get your grandparents and less tech literate friends to leave whatsapp in droves, simple as that.
And they’re not going to leave WhatsApp for Sup? either. All I’m saying is we’ve had an alternative for decades, even before WA was created, we don’t need another one, we need the one we already have to have more success.
What about Simplex over Matrix?
Sure, it looks great. But it doesn’t have the popularity of Matrix, which is already less popular than XMPP which has enjoyed decent adoption since it’s inception.
What are some good examples of apks to use in regards to this use-case?
Signal? Just use matrix already!
Matrix? Just use telepathy already! /s
I prefer Matrix over Signal because it required personal numbers.
Simplex is a much closer alternative
I tried using it with a friend, and it completely nuked my phone’s battery, while my friend’s phone silently killed it (likely for using too much battery). I understand that truly privacy-respecting messengers will always use slightly more power than apps that use the google notification thing, but simplex is just a complete power hog beyond any reasonable limit. Hopefully they fix it at some point, it seems like a pretty solid messenger otherwise, and their approach to privacy and anonymity is unparalleled, at least in theory.
you go on matrix and some of the communities are like no matrex bad goto simplex we’re there now
Or XMPP for those who doesn’t like matrix