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.
RCS could be also an option. Now mostly backed by google but it can be unplugged whenever we want
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.
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.
WhatsApp? Just use signal already!
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.
People act like we need an alternative to Whatsapp but XMPP/Jabber exists and is much older.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not really a whatsapp alternative. More like a facebook messenger alternative. It replaces and encrypts dms from mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, etc
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.
But it is open source. And there’s a fork of Signal available on F-Droid called Molly.
It is not open source. That’s why its not allowed on fdroid. It has parts that are open source, like most apps. But the app itself is closed source and a risk
Not open source
There are lots of good reasons to be upset with how Signal produces builds. And maybe Signal has no good reason why they keep opaque dependencies. But by every common definition of the term, Signal is open source. Being on FDroid is not the definition of open source.
Please don’t gatekeep. There are better ways to criticize Signal. This is not one of them.
If your releases include closed source blobs, then your software is closed source.
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.
I’m all for fediverse.
