‘Open Source And Ethical’ TikTok, WhatsApp And Instagram Alternatives Could Transform Social Media

[email protected]

Hitching on the wagon that Pixelfed is leading is good. There's a lot of talk even from those who don't care about FOSS, or Fediverse projects. Let's give some credit and let things slide so the whole can succeed.

[email protected]

Yeah, I don't mind Pixelfed getting attention at all. It's just that I don't trust Forbes, and this article seems to want to muddy the waters.

Cyborganism

Well it sure benefited a lot of new tech projects and companies.

[email protected]

Metapixl and signup was instant for me.

[email protected]

And the ads... There is a correlation there I'm sure.

[email protected]

Their rationale was that SMS is not secure and having something not secure on their app was damaging.

[email protected]

Yvan eht noij!

[email protected]

MastaDon is the new TruthSocial app.

[email protected]

This right here.

Look at the objective. The objective is to kill corporate sponsered social media. Well what better way to do that then by normalizing non corporate social media in the minds of the masses?

[email protected]

I'm in need an open source and ethical Amazon alternative. Any ideas? It seems like every website I can order a box of varied goods from (Amazon, Walmart, Target) is owned by somebody who sucks off Trump on demand while somehow ending up paying Trump for it too.

Desert Hermit

It's Forbes - if they don't use an image in the thumbnail of a thing people know, they might as well not use anything. It's normie-facing.

Cyborganism

Big ups to @[email protected] for his contributions and congrats to him being mentioned in the article.

enkers

In what way is it insecure? If the user was going to message someone off platform they'd still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS. If users didn't understand the distinction, that's a design failure on signal's part.

To a lot of us, SMS fallback was the killer feature signal provided.

[email protected]

They literally were not given any out (and were unwilling to take the one they had, or forgot they had it). People were complaining that SMS isn't secure even in Signal (when SMS by design can't be), which buils undue mistrust on the project, and Google is the one who controls all the keys to RCS so implementing that was not an option either.

The part where Signal dropped the ball hard is that they could just as well perfectly revived their old, perfectly functional SMS app with a new name and add it to the project,and thus be able to claim they still support SMS. Since SMS is pretty much a build-and-done for thing, it would barely if ever need any maintenance or updates.

[email protected]

Yeah, ads also wouldn’t be an issue if the user was given control about how their data is used to decide on what ads to show them. Users could have an option to opt in to more targeted ads but be able to choose what aspects of their data are taken into account, if at all. Maybe all data sharing is turned off by default, but a user could opt in to ads that interest them like interior decoration, or furniture, or workout equipment, etc… while still being able to ban ads they don’t want to see, like political ads.

[email protected]

If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS.

It sounds like they don't want to take responsibility for that user choice or be connected to anything that happens because of that choice.

It would still be an insecure choice, even with obvious UX distinctions. It would only be a matter of time before headlines muddy the waters with "intercepted Signal messages reveal..." or "Judge rules in favor of subpeona for unencrypted Signal messages..."

[email protected]

Heads up @[email protected] the creator of these apps refuses to open source the projects stating:

Not until it's stable

Anyone who's followed any project of any kind knows that this is just a formal way of saying they just won't do it.

Not only is it not truly OSS, but he's a bit of dick. Like weirdly so. Banning people for reverse engineering the API, creating a poll on whether or not ads should be introduced (only to 180 on the matter claiming the poll was a joke but also emphasizing that the poll was in favor of ads)

On the plus side he dislikes Trump, so there's that I guess.

In any case I highly recommend people read this comment and the sources linked:

Stock photo for the Fediverse by Elena Rossini - lemm.ee

Source [https://mastodon.social/@_elena/113900211541640872] CC BY-ND Elena Rossini [https://mastodon.social/@_elena] — Update: The image is now available on unsplash.com [https://unsplash.com/photos/9Xf-jxvfpW8]

(lemm.ee)

[email protected]

Someone should create a mastodon instance called "Masta Dom"

Something something about race play domination kink

enkers

That's such a poor excuse. If they really really thought it was a problem, they could obscure-gate the feature. Make it so you have to long press on the 3rd word of the ToS or something ridiculous, and share that info online.

This is a fairly common practice for potentially dangerous android features, for example.

Usually the vanguard of adoption for platforms like these are fairly technical users. When you start cutting the feature set that brought them to your platform, it starts the death knell for your platform. They'll go elsewhere to find a platform that respects them more.

SushiRain

Takes time. Spread the message. I joined Instagram in 2017 by pure FOMO. Let's create FOMO for the Fediverse by speaking about it over and over.