this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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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.

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Edit: Link to the kickstarter

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If all my friends, family, and coworkers could get off WhatsApp, I would be so happy.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm trying to convince mine to get on Signal

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I just did convince my family and all close friends to move to signal.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (12 children)

RCS could be also an option. Now mostly backed by google but it can be unplugged whenever we want

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Also, Google will kill RCS sooner or later.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 67 points 3 months ago (30 children)

WhatsApp? Just use signal already!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

People act like we need an alternative to Whatsapp but XMPP/Jabber exists and is much older.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Signal? Just use matrix already!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Matrix? Just use telepathy already! /s

I prefer Matrix over Signal because it required personal numbers.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (5 children)

It's not really a whatsapp alternative. More like a facebook messenger alternative. It replaces and encrypts dms from mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, etc

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 months ago

Stuff like this is a major, major component of dealing with nazis.

And even after they're dealt with, it's a better way of doing things, anyway. If it's a company, you're not on their social media platform, as much as you can possibly manage.

Which is a lot.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago

which uses the newer AT Protocol

This "newer" seems to be doing a lot of work.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Btw, you can also donate on Patreon, OpenCollective, and Liberapay.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I’m guessing using Kickstarter has the benefit of adding hype as a new thing. I’ve always been curious about Open Collective and Liberapay. Have you tried it? Was it a smooth process?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Okay so

BlueSky = Twitter
Loops = TikTok
PixelFed = Instagram
Sup = What's App
Lemmy = Reddit

[–] [email protected] 63 points 3 months ago (6 children)

~~BlueSky~~ Mastodon = Twitter
Loops = TikTok
PixelFed = Instagram
Sup = What's App
Lemmy = Reddit

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (8 children)

What can replace Facebook?

And how can anyone convince all their friends, family, and random people the follow, to jump platform?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What can replace Facebook?

Facebook was a mistake that doesn't need to be repeated, but both Friendica and GoToSocial have facebookish UI, if that's what you mean.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

100% disagree. Facebook, at one point, had a close to ideal interface, in my opinion.

Mastodon adopted the very annoying features of automatically tagging users, and character limits which inherently create conflict, and make reading statements confusing as fuck. Then refuses to offer an option for admins to adjust it. And I need a fuckin decoder ring to decipher the replies.

PixelFed adopted the very annoying features of Instagram that require photos, but no one cares and they just post photos of text, and with the federation of other platforms like Mastodon, that's just going to happen. It also lacks the ability to follow hashtags, so it's actually worse than IG in some ways.

Facebook supports all types of media and the groups feature actually works pretty well. I probably don't need to explain what makes it shitty now.

Don't get me wrong, I hope people join any of these, as they're inherently superior to their more popular alternatives, but I wish the devs would actually consider how the platform should work rather than just copying and pasting their mistakes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

PixelFed adopted the very annoying features of Instagram that require photos, but no one cares and they just post photos of text, and with the federation of other platforms like Mastodon, that’s just going to happen. It also lacks the ability to follow hashtags, so it’s actually worse than IG in some ways.

The purpose of Pixelfed is photo-sharing. When I'm using Pixelfed I don't want to see everything, I just want photos. It is insanely rare for people on Pixelfed to post images of text. In fact, the global feed is mostly useless on Pixelfed because you're inundated with Mastodon users "quoting" by posting images of text. But they just announced that they're soon including a setting to allow text posts, allowing the Pixelfed app to be used as a Mastodon client.

You can follow hash tags on Pixelfed.

I don't see why everything has to be everything. Mastodon is for micro-blogging. If you're posting 20,000 word essays, you're not really micro-blogging. These all seem like reasonable choices for their intended purposes, not like mistakes at all. It might just be a mistake for you to choose those when what you want is Friendica.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Friendica.

As for convincing people to join, I'm not sure if we can. Lead a horse to water and all that.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

BlueSky is another corporate microblog platform, which could end up going the way of Twitter. I'm not saying it will be bought by a fascist billionaire, but they will be beholden to advertisers at some point in the near future.

I would highly recommend finding a Mastodon, Akkoma, or GoToSocial instance that aligns with your values and use that instead. If you are concerned about the network effects of not being on the 'biggest' platform where all the celebs are, there is a Bluesky->Mastodon bridge available.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Bluesky is just Twitter before being bought by Elon Musk. The real alternative is Mastodon. Bluesky can go fuck itself.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Never heard of Sup for some reason, gotta check it out.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Sup hasn't been released yet, so that's probably why you haven't heard of it. Dan says beta testing launches early 2025.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Is it really just one guy writing three different platforms?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

There's hundreds of other contributers, but he started them all and did the bulk of the work. The plan is to have more regular developers if they get enough donations.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago
  • PixelFed
  • SUP
  • Loops
  • fedidb
  • pubkit

Five.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It started out as a major upgrade to Pixelfed's dm system and got spun off into it's own thing, same as Loops.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Man, Dansup is tearing it up like an absolute beast. Donate to his fund.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Has anyone here tried Loops? Does it have an algorithm and if so what's it like? Any good?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It has a "For You" tab but it's not doing anything yet. Or... I don't know what it's doing, to be honest.

Dansup said that he's adding an algorithm soon.

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113849380427277273

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I got it on my android phone. Currently just a chronological stream off all posts. A lot is just resposts of tiktoks or other cribbed content. When it's not taken from tiktok, I feel like it's pretty mild random video of pets or landscapes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Folks if you still have legacy social, agitation over there is doing rounds right now. Unfortunately, there's significantly fewer of us working to get people onboarded than thee last migration. If you still have those accounts, please consider plugging fedi.

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