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 think the weirdest thing I ever saw him do was discuss meeting with Meta when they were working on Threads, get called out for it so he made a post somehow distancing himself from it and saying something along the lines of, “C’mon, guys; I’d never cozy up to Meta,” and then, when Threads started federating, posted a screenshot of being able to see a post from a Threads account from PixelFed and gushing about how incredible this was.
Dude is suspect, for real; glad to see I’m not the only one getting that.
EDIT: just read through what you linked to and wow; that’s so much worse than I originally thought. That’s an inane degree of unprofessionalism.