The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel further development of the apps.
The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternatives Mastodon. The latter saw a surge in signups and usage after the company formerly known as Twitter was sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X-exodus that followed the US presidential election.
In the months and years following that sale, open source and decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky (which uses the new AT protocol), continued to grow their user bases, as people sought alternatives to social media apps centralized controlled by billionaires like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Meta also understood that it was necessary to plant a flag in the fediverse. This led it to release its own X rival in 2023 called Instagram Threads, which is in the process of integrating with ActivityPub.
Now, Daniel Supernault, the Canadian developer behind the federated apps challenging Meta’s social media empire, is seeking funding for the continued development and support of his open social communities.
“Help us put control back in the hands of the people!” he said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter launch on Thursday.
As of this writing, the campaign has surpassed its original goal with $58,383 raised so far.
Supernault wants its series of apps to become the first in the fediverse to reach a network of a billion people, but there’s obviously still a long way to go before they can reach this ambitious goal. While Pixelfed has been around for years, for example, it just launched version 1.0 of its mobile app earlier this month, and Loops is still in alpha testing on Apple’s TestFlight. Sup, meanwhile, hasn’t been released yet but is said to be “coming soon,” according to its Instagram page.
Both Loops and Sup will be released to Kickstarter backers.
A fourth project, PubKit, is also part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse.
It includes interactive tools and testing frameworks, which allow developers to simulate popular tasks on their service, set up a mailbox for real-time ingestion and debugging tasks, and tools to inspect, debug, and verify HTTP signature implementations.
This is the first time Supernault has turned to Kickstarter to help with these efforts, which aim to also benefit the Pixelfed Foundation. (The Kickstarter campaign’s extended goal is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a nonprofit and grow its team beyond volunteers.)
If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal in the future.
The funds will also help the apps handle the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main instance of Pixelfed (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the launch of the mobile app, according to campaign details shared with TechCrunch.
New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs and processing power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. Additionally, they will help Supernault spend more time on apps and the fediverse as a whole, while expanding the moderation, safety, privacy, and protection programs that social apps need.
As part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.
