Mastodon is great, but think Web 2.0 needs more open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram et al that have all their features and are just as easy to use, or the public won’t join. With Zuck and Elon now owning some of the world’s largest public forums, their policies have to satisfy everyone, which is impossible. Not to mention that governments can pressure them into stuff. So we once again get to this same conversation.
We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site.
For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce.
All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL).
Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed.
But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments:
If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.
I think it's because it's crypto-currency related.
It’s not.
From your own site this seems like another crypto scam:
“QBUX is currently an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum protocol. In the future, versions of QBUX running on other protocols may be developed, exchangeable 1-1 with the current QBUX token.”
Maybe you’re not willing to cop to it being “crypto” but it’s in essence the same.
Have you even clicked https://github.com/Qbix/Platform? Qbix is an open source platform that doesn't require a token for anything. You can use it, with absolutely no encumbrances or needing to buy any token at all. There is zero need, right now, for a crypto token. And going forward there will never be a need to do anything it currently does now. Qbix is like Wordpress. So please explain what the scam is, I am lost.
The QBUX ecosystem is something that is planned for 2024, to denominate micropayments between sites, if they choose to pay each other for content. For example, monetizing open source plugins, digital content, journalism, user attention, and so on. Right now, the Web ad-supported model is broken, as the Ecosystem page explains. Qbix does plan to have sites (not people) settle balances with each other in something eventually. For micropayments between sites to be possible, there has to be a unit of account.
There are a few other things that immediately put me off as well, though they may be just wording/messaging. Let me dissect just half of the first sentence from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform, and what springs to mind reading it:
> Our company spent 10 years building a decentralized Social Operating System for the web
Who is the nameless "Our company"? Even if we know who they are, building on open source projects controlled by a single company is often a bad idea. How did you spend 10 years on this? Is it the open-sourced corpse of a failed commercial endeavour? Also bad to rely on. Or is it new? Most people that spend 10 years building something in private with no users end up building the wrong thing. "Decentralised" may be true, but screams "trendy buzzword". "Social Operating System" doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense. "Operating System for the web", oh, so it's like Linux or FreeBSD, or maybe WASI? How is that social or web-specific? No, it's not like that at all; reading a bit further shows that it's not anything like an operating system (AFAICT), and is actually a web framework (I think?).
There are plenty of other things that look like warning signs on that page too.
These immediate first impressions together with the apparently off-topic self-promotion of your first comment explain the down votes. (For the record, I upvoted.)