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.
I’ve been getting into the fediverse for less than a month, and it seems the biggest barrier for a newcomer like me is settling on a select few out of many clients/apps. One question I think a lot of people migrating want to know is (and I open this up to anyone):
What’s the fewest signups needed if we want to enjoy all of the federated replacements to corporate social media? It sounds like each client demands its own account but I’m wondering where/if there’s overlap, because…
My Lemmy account already worked on movim before i discovered movim. That’s really cool but I don’t know 100% how that worked (same community server, I think), and how many other apps/clients offer that.
Movim is XMPP and I don’t know how that overlaps with ActivityPub, but I want to better understand so that I know how few accounts are necessary so I can micro and macro blog, share original/repost images videos and music, have group communities, and have a personal page to post things on as opposed to thread/conversations/forum posts and not have to manage ten separate accounts if I can help it