The developers of Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, are currently raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel further development of their apps.
The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as Fediverse, and leverages the same ActivityPub protocol used by the Mastodon X alternative. The latter saw an increase in registrations and usage after the company formerly known as Twitter was sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X leak following the US presidential election.
In the months and years following that sale, people are looking for alternatives to centralized social media apps controlled by billionaires like Musk and others like Mastodon and BlueSky (which uses the new AT protocol). The open source decentralized app continued to grow its user base. Meta Mark Zuckerberg.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Meta realized that he too needed to plant a flag in the Federation world. This led to the company releasing its own X rival called Instagram Threads in 2023, which is currently being integrated with ActivityPub.
Daniel Supernault, a Canadian-based developer currently building a federated app to rival Meta's social media empire, is seeking funding for continued development and support of the open social community .
“Help us put control back in the hands of the people!” he said in a post on Mastodon announcing Kickstarter's Thursday launch.
As of this writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. Although the goal on the Kickstarter site has been met, Supernault said he hopes to raise more than $1 million so he can hire a small team.
Image credit: Loops/Daniel Supernaut
Supernault hopes its app set will be the first in the Commonwealth to reach a network of 1 billion people, but of course there's still a long way to go to reach that lofty goal. Pixelfed has been around for years, but it just released the 1.0 version of its mobile app earlier this month, for example, and Loops is still in alpha testing on Apple's TestFlight. Sup, on the other hand, hasn't been released yet, but its Instagram page says it's “coming soon.”
Both Loops and Sup will be released to Kickstarter supporters.
Image credit: Sup/Daniel Supernaut
A fourth project, PubKit, is also part of these efforts and provides a toolset to support developers in the Fediverse.
It includes interactive tools and testing frameworks that allow developers to mock popular activities on the service, set up an inbox to capture and debug activities in real time, and use HTTP You can configure tools to inspect, debug, and verify your signature implementation.
Image credit: PubKit/Daniel Supernaut
This is the first time Supernault has used Kickstarter to support these efforts, which also aim to benefit the Pixelfed Foundation. (The ultimate goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register Pixelfed Foundation as a nonprofit organization and grow its team beyond volunteers.)
If this campaign is successful, it will also fund a blogging app that will be an alternative to Tumblr and LiveJournal at some point in the future.
This funding will also help the app manage the influx of new users. According to campaign details shared with TechCrunch, Pixelfed's main instance, Pixelfed.social (similar to Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), now has 200,000 users, thanks in part to the release of its mobile app. There are more users than . According to FediDB network statistics, this server is currently the second largest server in the Fediverse after Mastodon.social.
The new funding will help us expand the storage, CDN, and computing power needed for our growing user base and accelerate development. Additionally, they will allow Supernault to spend more time on the app and across Fediverse, while also helping extend the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs required for social apps.
As part of that effort, Supernault wants to bring E2E encryption to the Fediverse.