The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps’ further development.

The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon. The latter saw increased signups and use after the company formerly known as Twitter sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X exodus that followed the U.S. presidential election.

In the months and years following that sale, open source and decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky (which uses the newer AT Protocol), have continued to grow their user bases, as people sought alternatives to centralized social media apps controlled by billionaires like Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

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Edit: Link to the kickstarter

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[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 13 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Is it really just one guy writing three different platforms?

[–] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There's hundreds of other contributers, but he started them all and did the bulk of the work. The plan is to have more regular developers if they get enough donations.

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ah ok that makes sense. In my head this guy was maintaining four codebases which did seem impossible

[–] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

It's not impossible if you are a good developer

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 9 points 5 days ago

PixelFed
SUP
Loops
fedidb
pubkit

Five.

[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 days ago

Loops and sup started as upgrades to pixelfed and then got spun off.