The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops and SUP, Open Source alternatives to Instagram, Tiktok and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to feed the further development of the apps.
The trio is part of the growing social web growing, also known as Fedeverse, fueled by the same ActivityPub protocol used by an alternative X Mastodon. The latter saw greater registration and use after the company previously known as Twitter sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the Esode X that followed the US presidential elections.
In the months and years following the sale, open source and decentralized apps such as Mastodon and Bluesky (who uses the new protocol), continued to grow their user bases, since people were looking for alternatives to the centralized apps on social media controlled by billionaires such as Musk and Musk and Musk and Musk and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta.
Seeing the writing on the wall, even destination realized that a flag had to plant in the federal. This led him to release his rival X in 2023 called Instagram Threads, which is about to integrate with ActivityPub.
Now, Daniel Supernault, the developer with Canadian headquarters behind the federated apps that challenge the empire of Meta social media, is looking for funds for continuous development and the support of its open social communities.
“Help us to put control back into people’s hands!” He said in a post on Mastodon, where he announced the launch of Kickstarter’s Thursday.
At the time of the drafting, the campaign has collected $ 58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter website has been overcome, Supernault said it hopes to collect $ 1 million or more so that you can take a small team.
Supernault wants his app set to become the first in the Federal to reach a network of one billion people, but obviously there is still a long way to go before they can reach that high goal. Although Pixelfed has been in circulation for years, he has just launched version 1.0 of his mobile app at the beginning of this month, for example, and Loops is still in Alpha test on Apple testflight. In the meantime, SUP has not yet been released but it is said to be “coming”, according to his Instagram page.
Both Loop and SUP will be released to Kickstarter supporters.
A fourth project, Pubkit, is also part of these efforts, offering a set of tools to support developers in the construction in the Federal.
Includes interactive tools and test framework, allowing developers to derive popular activities on their service, set up an coming mail to ingest and debugity of real -time activities and tools to inspect, debug and check the http signature implementations.
This is the first time that Supernault turns to Kickstarter to help with these efforts, which they also aim for the Pixelfed Foundation. (The goal of lengthening the Kickstarter campaign is to record the Pixelfed Foundation as a non -profit and grow its team beyond the volunteers.)
In case of success, the campaign would also finance a blog app as an alternative to Tumblr or Livejournal at some point in the future.
Funds will also help apps to manage the influx of new users. On pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed request (like Mastodon, anyone can perform a pixelfed server), now there are more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the launch of the mobile app, according to the details of the campaign shared with Techcrunch. The server is also the second largest in Fedeverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to Fedidb network statistics.
New funds will help to expand the storage, the CDNs and the calculation power necessary for the growing users of users and accelerate development. In addition, they will help Supernault to dedicate more time to the apps and the Fedeverse as a whole, also expanding the programs of moderation, security, privacy and security that social apps need.
As part of his efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the Federal.
