What does HackerNews think of Platform?
Qbix Platform for powering Social Apps (http://qbix.com/platform)
Or you could contribute to open protocols, and do to the tech giants what:
The Web did to AOL, MSN, etc.
VoIP did to AT&T, Sprint, etc.
Wikipedia did to Britannica
OpenStreetMap will do to Google Maps
etc.
I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want:
Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
(And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).
https://www.flipcode.com/tpractice/
(If you check it out, I’d love to know your opinions).
Also, I wonder what are your local state laws about hiring a 17-year-old to work on open source stuff as an intern. I checked out your github and think you might enjoy part-time discovering what we build. Here is the codebase: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It isn’t perfect but we are ahead of most others (Mastodon, Matrix). We have spent TWELVE YEARS building the free, permissionless open source platform for anyone to assemble and host their own community software with all the features of Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for their own community:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are about to roll out version 2.0 — I have never done this before but I would like to invite whoever wants to learn about it or build on it, to a Zoom webinar where I will demo anything and answer any questions. Starting in Q3 this year all the webinars will take place on our own platform — no Calendly, no Zoom, no Google, just the free open Web.
Anyway, sign up here if you want. Will do it every Sunday throughout August:
https://calendly.com/qbix/qbix-2-0-platform-demo
Whether you’re a developer, a businessperson, or just want to learn about the latest technologies moving the Free Open Source Web forward, this platform can help empower you to build and engage a community around yourself and your projects.
Imagine you are a great speaker and instructor and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a tiny percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos!
I say — opt out. Run your own everything! Your own community software (instead of Discord). Your own videoconferencing, livestreaming, chats, presentations, gated content, accept payments with crypto in addition to PaymentRequest. It’s hard to build an open-source alternative that is good enough (no, Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t — yet).
Which is why (shameless plug warning) I spent 12 years and $1 million dollars with my team to build it. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Use it — as 1 of hundreds of features, you can have your own analytics on your own database on your own community site. The other features are here: https://qbix.com/features.pdf
PS: Don’t get me wrong. Keep using YouTube to host your content, etc. But relegate it to hosting short form teasers and highlights and testimonials all of which link to your site. People can discover you on the big sites but if they are serious about your long-form content and community they should buy a membership on YOUR site and have a direct relationship — then deplatforming or coersion will be the last of your worries.
I've had a similar situation with PHP, where we had written quite a large engine (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform) with many features (https://qbix.com/features.pdf) . It took advantage of the fact that PHP isolated each script and gave it its own global variables, etc. In fact, much of the request handling did stuff like this:
Q_Request::requireFields(['a', 'b', 'c']);
$uri = Q_Dispatcher::uri();
$this->getContext()->request()->requireFields(['a', 'b', 'c']);
$this->getContext()->dispatcher()->uri();
amp
reactPHP
Swoole (native extension)
Fibers (inside PHP itself)
Then I realized... we would have to go through the entire code and redo how it all works. We'd also no longer benefit from PHP's process isolation. If one process crapped out or had a memory leak, it could take down everything else.
There's a reason PHP still runs 80% of all web servers in the world (https://kinsta.com/blog/is-php-dead/) ... and one of the biggest is that commodity servers can host terrible PHP code and it's mostly isolated in little processes that finish "quickly" before they can wreak havoc on other processes or on long-running stuff.
So now back to postgres. It's been praised for its rock-solid reliability and security. It's got so many features and the MVCC is very flexible. It seems to use a lot of global variables. They can spend their time on many other things, like making it byzantine-fault-tolerant, or something.
The clincher for me was when I learned that php-fpm (which spins up processes which sleep when waiting for I/O) is only 50% slower than all those fancy things above. Sure, PHP with Swoole can outperform even Node.js, and can handle twice as many requests. But we'd rather focus on soo many other things we need to do :)
Oh wait I have you one better — it has been 12 years and https://github.com/Qbix/Platform is only now almost ready to be released, as v2.0
Sure we “ship” it all the time, on github. We even released v1.0 but we didn’t announce it because we aren’t great at PR.
People who discover https://qbix.com are shocked that there is a decentralized open source alternative platform to Facebook and Twitter that is far more full-featured than Mastodon, Bluesky or even Matrix and they never heard of it.
Well… the problem is that I picked a very complex space, one where no one got this far except for billion-dollar companies. People kept expecting everything to be real-time and rock-solid, and even when we finally got that done after many years, they still complain it “doesn’t look as good as Twitter”.
Every time I shipped half-baked stuff, it didn’t actually take off. Now, I believe it WOULD have taken off if it had a low demand surface area (eg Bitcoin just stores value and transfers it, period). But I tend to build stuff that is similar to what people use EVERY DAY, and that kind of stuff accrued lots of features.
Oh yeah my other project https://intercoin.org blockchain platform took 5 years to create. During that time we went from a crypto winter to a super bull market in crypto to another winter with super bear skepticism on HN.
On HN we knee-jerk get lumped in with stuff that isn’t even blockchain, like FTX or Binance, or ridiculous shitcoins that have no utility at all.
Imagine if I shipped https://intercoin.app and announced it on HN lol. At best it would be crickets, at worst I would be berated for somejow being a scammer by… working 5 years and putting all my money into making these blockchain solutions for the world. Most people wouldn’t even bother looking past the title.
Our stuff is FREE AND OPEN SOURCE and you use it if you want, or don’t. Before complaining that it even exists to help people for free, or calling it a scam, at least click the link to https://github.com/Intercoin
A word about regulations, because you shouldn’t “just ship” in violation of laws (unless you’re Uber or AirBNB lol). Even though we raised money in an ICO pursuant to Reg D and Reg S exemotions, filed Form D with the SEC, got people who worked at the SEC as active advisors, complied with laws in multiple other jurisdictions, innovated in many areas of securities law, and carefully developed tokens to fit the No-Action letters grantsd to projects like PocketFullOfQuarters, people on HN just assume that we are like most of the others who didn’t treat their tokens as securities. Which is understandable. (I am not admitting the token ARE securities, this is a matter of opinion that a judge would determine, merely that we didn’t want to take the chance that the original transactions weren’t securities transactions.)
Btw besides securities there is also this FATCA, FINCEN and other stuff that many startups here should read even if they aren’t making web3 or crypto projects, but ARE dealing with money and payouts to people on their platform: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...
Not to mention that if you make your software available in Europe, you have to comply with GDPR and soon might be forced to comply with the draconian new CYBER RESILIENCE ACT. If it passes then we will have to honestly change our OPEN SOURCE license to no longer allow Europeans to legally access our software:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/in-letter-to-european-comm...
So yeah. Shipping at scale is complicated !!
If you do, please share your experience in a comment. I’d love to hear it. I architected this framework over the last decade :)
I have spent 12 years and 1 million dollars to date (no exaggeration, I worked jobs, architected trained / paid my developer team for years, we are now good friends) on a project to hopefully help people get a viable alternative to the Big Tech, and have choice where to host the infrastructure they typically expect from Facebook, Twitter, Telegram etc. It’s open source and it’s the only way you can make it expensive to backdoor everyone in bulk, or shut down a platform altogether:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
If you spend an afternoon playing with, I think you’ll feel like you’re discovering superpowers (like Batman or Iron man or something). It’s free to use. We’re launching https://qbix.com/ecosystem soon, with courses and certification so anyone who wants to learn, click on my profile and email me.
Here is the philosophy behind why we built it: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
And if you like what we do and you’re thinking of supporting us with $100 or more, feel free to do it here… November 5 we are launching, until then you can voluntarily put a “no-obligation” contribution: https://wefunder.com/Qbix
When you have a centralized system like ICANN DNS, the governments know which IP addresses the domain points to. They can go and serve them National Security Letters or shake them down to install secret backdoors.
WhatsApp and Facebook can lie to you that they’re end-to-end encrypted. There is nothing stopping them from shipping custom updates. In facg they’ve been caught red-handed spying on both your video and audio. The only way you can be SURE an app isnt lying to you is with open source software, then you only have to trust the OS and browser (the Trusted Computing Base).
(That is why I am a big fan of blockchain-based smart contaracts. But blockchains are slow, so the next best thing is hosting your business logic using open source software on servers you control.)
Why do so many people trust Big Tech? Simple. We have no other choice!
Where are the VIABLE AND USER FRIENDLY open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram backends?
No one seems to have built anything better or more efficient than, say, Mastodon.
Except us. It was a labor of love and cost me a million dollars to date: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
PS: If you play with it for a afternoon, post your experience or email me. I would be thrilled to hear about your experience, good or bad. And of course use it for anything you want.
I would be very happy to be proven wrong and see some more competitors being mentioned here, but if you do, make an honest assessment of how they compare! People need alternatives to the closed walled gardens, but having all these features working and up-to-date with browser tech is extremely hard: https://qbix.com/features.pdf
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
I believe in gift economies (science, wikipedia, open source) being superior to capitalism and private ownership of platforms.
Instead of Zuck, Elon and Bezos we could use more Linus, TimBernereLee and Vitalik.
Back in 2011, I saw this and started a company to try to build a viable open-source alternative to Big Tech. While we were building, I saw Diaspora*, Mastodon, etc. SoLiD (now Inrupt) by TimBL, and others. But none of those can compete with Big Tech on features.
I launched https://Qbix.com hired some developers in Ukraine and put out apps for community leaders, that now have been downloaded by over 10 million people in over 120 countries. We translated it into 15 languages. But the apps were relatively simple. We reinvested $1M of our profits into the Qbix Platform, which is supposed to be an open-source Social Operating System that takes what Big Tech has (but will never give you) and give it to the people.
You can play around with it now. But you might want to wait until version 2.0 is released, with all the documentation, in 15 languages. Anyway it's free and open source at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Somewhere around 2017 I wrote a vision of where we were and how we can go further: https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/
We went further, spinning off a separate new company called Intercoin to build Web3 smart contracts, so that communities can do all the following things without trusting any middlemen, not even their own corporate directors: https://intercoin.org/applications
One target market for instance is a fund for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees
But most implementations are designed to be local. Smart contracts are optional, but once the community gets large enough that a few people start being in charge of securing a lot of money, votes, or whatever, that's when they become useful.
In my experience, talking to VCs and other capitalists, most of them feel we are doing "too much". But I feel the rest of the liberty-loving world isn't doing enough*. At least I put my own money where my mouth is, and built it, and now we're giving it away. Use it ... if you want.
People often hate Big Tech and Big Government overreach and surveillance capitalism and war and … but there is no viable alternative.
Since 2011 I have been writing, with my own dev team, at my own expense, an open source platform so communities worldwide can have an alternative to Big Tech. We reached 11 million users in over 100 countries and translated to 15 languages.
But most VCs and investors don’t understand it and say we are doing too much. You can use it here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Then in 2018 I launched a spinoff company to create Web3 smart contracts for communities to govern themselves, manage their own currencies and generally run software they don’t have to trust any central parties.
But here on HN many people knee-jerk hate and downvote it because it’s Web3 and blockchain based. You can grab them and use them for free: https://intercoin.org/applications
So I don’t know… to build these things for the good of the world takes a lot. It took me 10 years and $1 million dollars so far, and my team probably several man-decades put together. And we give it all away. But what I have noticed is that people don’t really get why something is important until they start to use it in their life.
Also we started two youtube channels where I interview people including regulators and sociopolitical thinkers and tech people. This Thursday I have Noam Chomsky and David Harvey on a panel, for instance:
https://youtube.com/IntercoinOrg
https://youtube.com/QbixPlatform
If I needed people’s appreciation or VC investment I would have given up long ago.
It really depends on the VC, but actually on how much control that VC would have. Even Basecamp in 2006 announced they were taking money from Jeff Bezos's VC fund, but see how they justified it: https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
I'll be honest, we applied to many VCs when we starting out building https://github.com/Qbix/Platform for instance. But it was just too open-source and too general-purpose to be of interest to most VCs. To his credit, Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures (the same guys who led the Twitter rounds) met with us in 2014 and said he totally OK with disrupting the VC model. He later became a partner in USV. Albert is a rare VC who writes about a post-capitalism world... here is a book he wrote, in which he is giving it away: http://worldaftercapital.org/
I also like USV because even its principal, Fred Wilson, talked for years about crypto leading to cooperatives where the network is owned by the participants: https://avc.com/2016/01/network-equity/
I will reveal the "realpolitik" (i.e. the industry without the romance). VCs often write really cool things and the top ones end up supporting world-changing companies. And many of them are really nice people, in real life, and want to do good, just as many CEOs of large Wall St firms. But the job changes you. Just like a car salesman has to do certain "assholish" things or someone else will make the sale, similarly being a VC makes you do certain things. VCs definitely write a great lot of great things, and on their own those things are awesome. But they're also signals the VC puts out in order to attract "dealflow", so they can be surrounded by "orbiters" of startups the way artists have an entourage or directors have a portfolio of actors.
Most of these startups never make it (think of actors who move to Hollywood and take many extras roles for years) but they are indeed valuable to show the new tech that is being worked on, when need be. The larger VCs ultimately get all the best deal flow, while the smaller VCs attend lots of events and try network their way into deals with the big VCs. The "best deals" are the ones where a company gets heavily funded, attracts a lot of users, and more VCs pile on, followed by Private Equity firms etc. It's a self-fulfilling thing, not too different from DogeCoin or SafeMoon or EverRise -- the only difference is that in the latter, everyone can play VC.
Since 1933, the Securities and Exchange Acts by the US Federal Government established the SEC, and the idea of an "accredited" investor. Crypto made it so that everyone can invest. But to be legal, the crowd would have to through an accredited crowdfunding portal. This is something enabled by the JOBS act, which many people underappreciate.
So yes, if I had a choice, I'd definitely prefer crowdfunding, and we do: https://wefunder.com/Qbix
There are companies (like Rialto Markets and others) that will let you do a whitelabeled crowdfunding on your own site. It's legal and you can sell tokens. There are also other ways to raise money: https://community.intercoin.org/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
If you want to know my personal stance, here is a video I recorded recently, it's actually for angel investors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFuZcaNuRI
You want to see alternatives? Here is an alternative we've been building since 2011, it's a labor of love in which we invested over $1 million and 10 years. It is far, far more extensive than Mastodon and you can see below why that matters. Would you check it out? It's free and open source: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Not only have we built it, but we've interviewed a ton of people around the broader topics of capitalism and free speech. There is the idea that capitalism is the best system for promoting free speech, but that is not, in fact, the case. Just as one example of many, Sinclair Television told their anchors word-for-word what to say, and anyone who doesn't do what the employer says is fired and replaced by a different mouthpiece. Intellectual property, and other forms of ownership, are by their very definition designed to exclude people from using certain content / property in certain ways.
In fact, conservatives who bristled at Obama's "you didn't build it" used to say "I built it, I own it!" In that case, they should celebrate the way that Twitter and Facebook were privately managed. But many of them instead were calling for regulations to prevent them from doing just that. So which is it? I had an interview with Noam Chomsky twice about that, here is the latest: https://qbix.com/chomsky
If you allow me to bring up a taboo for a bit, I think it's important to bring it up on Hacker News. VCs as an industry, and YCombinator as part of that, specifically try to fund platforms that end up being managed by only a few people and extract rents. Most of them avoid funding open source platforms, which end up crowdfunding from the People (thanks to the JOBS act, for instance). Or from the Knight Foundation. Or Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress funding Matrix.org
VCs specifically tell you that they want you to "focus" on one feature, to "capture" enough of the market, and some of them (e.g. Peter Thiel) unabashedly proclaimed that "competition is for losers", build a monopoly. Zuck used to be a guy who turned down a $1M acquisition offer from Microsoft, and open sourced his code. He wanted to build Wirehog as a decentralized platform for the people (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/) Peter Thiel and Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" (their words) and groomed him to build a monopoly and extract rents. Zuck and Elon privately control the major PUBLIC forums we all use. And are we all better for it?
I think the work of Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Vitalik and others has benefitted the world far more and enabled trillions in new ideas (including Google, Facebook, Amazon) precisely because it was based around open source and protocols, and didn't prevent people and organizations from using it the way they wanted! Google, Amazon etc. could have never started as "keyword: Google" on AOL, for instance. Think about it.
Over the last decade I have been steadily drawn into the open source camp. My team and I started an open source alternative to Big Tech 10 years ago. We've applied to YC probably around 8 different times, as we kept growing and reaching 10 million users. We never even got to the interview. Such general-purpose ideas are just not something interesting to most VCs. It took MySQL, NGiNX, and other platforms 7-10 years before they got funded in a capitalist manner. By then, they'd taken over the world.
I'm sure there are exceptions, and YCombinator has recently started to fund open protocols and nonprofits - I'm glad to see it. For reference, our pitch to VCs for years had been along these lines:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
PS: For those who downvote, please write a response. After all, I've spent a decade and $1M of my own money putting together an alternative pg is looking for, seeing the need for it way before others. I give it away for free. All I ask is that you take a minute to write your own words in the conversation about why you disagree :)
PPS: I think the rule that you can downvote on HN to signal mere disagreement (as opposed to logical issues, dishonesty, etc.) is flawed. This is also a free speech issue ... on this site, if we want to be intellectually honest, we should at least downvote and then comment.
Here you can use this to build your own Twitter, complete with video broadcasts peer to peer: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We started before Promises were standard, before composer and NPM. Before Virtual DOM. Back when we started, there was CodeIgniter and Kohana and jQuery (anyone remember?)
Along the way, we kept the vast majority of our code in-house. We didn’t want to pull in libraries or updates unless we understood their code.
Looking at the latest and greatest, we were often wondering if we did the right thing. Some developers (especially JS) used to chastize us for not using the latest techniques like “two way bindings” of Angular 1.0 or JSX of React
Then - lo and behold - Angular 1.0 is totally rewritten and all those concepts are redone. Over and over. And people come around to our way of thinking. Web Components and Templates appear. Shadow DOM.
Our way of thinking is: use standards for HTTP/REST, HTML, HTTP, JS, CSS as they were intended. Every concept should work well with all the others.
Result is at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform if you want to give any feedback. We have been using it for ALL our projects since 2011.
The goal is to allow for example a rural village to organize itself, make dinner plans, dating, doctor's appointments, and so on, using a local wifi mesh network and one computer. There is no need for all the signals to go to Zuck's FB or Elon's TW server farms in California. People need to have their own software. If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
If you want to try it yourself:
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…
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.)
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It takes care of everything from MVC to WebRTC to PaymentRequests to Web3 to Videoconferencing, and soon avatars and metaverse etc. You can literally build almost anything with it, quickly, and get it to MVP stage.
I architected it all. I had to hire developers to help me with it, and it took them years to get up to speed. My biggest source of loss and inefficiency in business was worrying that one of them would leave, after many years. Thus I constantly paid them their salaries and slightly increased them. As you can imagine, this was tough to do as an individual, so we took on projects, investors, etc.
Now, I am in full control of my two companies, and finally taking on VC and crowdfunding: https://wefunder.com/Qbix
Yes, the capital infusions can really take the company to the next level. But I can tell you that, had I been documenting (and making everyone else document) every component from day 1, we could have done a lot more, a lot more efficiently, and attracted a lot more people to our projects on GitHub. (Not that we tried, but all of these things compound and every step in the "conversion process" of a new developer would be more likely to convert). The following have helped a lot:
https://community.intercoin.org and https://community.qbix.com
https://youtube.com/c/intercoin and https://youtube.com/c/qbixplatform
This is just like when you make an app and make the UX good enough that users can actually onboard and invite friends.
Most other frameworks don’t include things like websockets and Web Push notifications, as well as support for WebRTC, payments etc. So where do you draw the line?
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It takes the best ideas from CodeIgniter, Symfony, Kohana, Drupal and Doctrine…
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Labor of love for a decade
We always got rejected!! I can share the application, if interested.
Actually, we never wound up raising VC. We did get a bunch of friends and family, and angels, made around a million dollars in revenues, and reinvested it all into the https://github.com/Qbix/Platform - an open source alternative to Facebook et al. Got 10 million users in 95+ countries to download our apps in the stores, translated the apps into 15 languages, and spun out another company called Intercoin.
We’re on the east coast and children of immigrants, so we didn’t have a strong network. Maybe that has something to do with it.
I guess the stuff we’re building (open source, decentralized social platforms) just isn’t exciting for VCs, who would prefer we focus on one application, getting a hockey stick and not giving away the source code. But we wound up “building things people want” and then some… the David Heinemeier Hansson / Basecamp way (anyone remember his lectures about not taking VC?)
PS: Okay, well… NOW it seems funds like Alexis Ohanian’s and Polygon team up and have set aside $200MM for decentralized social networks, which we probably have an 8-10 year head start on everyone else with.
PPS: In 2018 we spun out https://intercoin.org (much better looking site) same approach but in the Web3 space instead of Web2. Once again, people who throw money at NFTs and memecoins all day long wouldn’t give us a dollar. They at least considered us and told us our goals were too big. We still ended up raising over half a million dollars, but from individual angels who care about things like social impact and universal basic income. All the code is at https://github.com/Intercoin
Should we apply to YC again? We like YC, but it doesn’t seem to like us…
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It does a few things differently ;-)
Feedback welcome!
The open source code is at https://github.com/Intercoin
Documentation at https://community.intercoin.org
Interviews with economists and regulators at https://youtube.com/c/intercoin
Sound money, communities, similar to what this guy is talking about — but an autonomous and libertarian version of that.
Because if crypto doesn’t step up and become actually adopted and useful, then we are going to live in a world where megacorps like Amazon/Facebook, as well as your friendly Federal Government, issue the currency and know everything about you and centrally plan who can pay and who can be … shall we say gently excluded from the economy due to their rating.
This builds on my earlier work on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform to build an open source alternative to Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc.
EDIT: I am curious. For a decade, I do the work to prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome of centralized control, freely give away the code, document it publicly, make public interviews with standards bodies, regulators, economists to get it right, spend a ton of my own money and time to get it implemented (without raising any VC etc.) but then every time I would merely mention it on HN, would always get heavily downvoted by people who prefer not to say a single word as to why. I can understand if people give me feedback, but they prefer to silently downvote. OK, what's your better plan, what have you done to prevent this outcome? Why do you take actions to bury workable solutions to avert this situation?
But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:
If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here:
Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha
(If you want to contribute to the project, or get involved, you are welcome to get in touch also with greg at the domain qbix.com)
I'm talking about:
Wikipedia beating Britannica and Encarta
The Web beating AOL / MSN / Compuserve / Prodigy
Apache and NGinX beating IIS
Linux beating Windows for tons of apps & archs
Science beating Alchemy
But it will take time. Open source collaboration is the tortoise, closed source competition is the hare.
Please scroll down to where the globe image appears and click/tap it. Feel free to switch countries and click around. I would love to hear your feedback.
PS: We have open sourced all this stuff, so if anyone here wants to put a globe on their website, just load our Q.js from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and then render the Q/globe tool and Places/countries selector tool with your own options. Unlike the GitHub globe, you can also have users click on countries in the globe to select them, and if you need you can pull in the flags, languages and all the other stuff per country.
How do we submit here our open source platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Would be great to see your impressions as you dig into it and maybe record yourself on youtube. Any way I can be of assistance, let me know.
The DID spec has been the one big success so far, but implementations matter. Our implementation has been open sourced, and is compatible with oAuth and other specs like DID:
Push Notifications (engagement)
Web Payments (monetization)
Contact Picker API (virality)
WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
PWAs (add to home screen)
But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.
We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook, Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.
Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt (née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a free market:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...)
This is just how things work in the early stages before open source alternatives. Look at videoconferencing. Zoom grew a lot in the past couple months. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.
Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.
But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.
In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.
The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.
Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?
Web browsers already have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.
There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.
That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.
These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.
So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.
Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”
We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app
Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:
Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)
Q.Users.login(options)
Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()or with jQuery:
$(element).tool(name)
.activate(options)
If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com
Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.
Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconference in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.
Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.
But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.
In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.
The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.
Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?
Web browsers alrrady have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.
There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.
That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.
These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.
So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.
Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”
We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app
Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:
Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)
Q.Users.login(options)
Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()
Q.activate(
Q.Tool.setUpElement(
element,
“Streams/chat”,
options
);
);
$(element).tool(name)
.activate(options)
Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It’s totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done.
If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com
Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.
Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconferencd in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Just install it and video conferencing is one of the free features out of the box
All you do is call Q.Streams.WebRTC.start()
For example we built the software we use on https://intercoin.org/meeting or any website. It works across safari on ios and chrome and we even made a workaround for webviews:
https://mobile.twitter.com/qbixapps/status/11564841564250398...
But the sdp connections between the browsers fail and A can hear B but C can’t. Weird.
Zoom or Google Hangouts doesn’t have such issues because they always assume one specific environment. Cross browser videoconferencing is not easy
But hey ours is open source and not locked into Twilio or these guys:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Search for the string WebRTC
1. Before launching a marketplace, grow a community interacting around content you get from free sources (or via a subscription) such as youtube, the web, restaurants, books etc.
2. Then link to existing marketplaces of sellers via an API (eg Amazon affiliates, OpenTable, Ticketmaster etc.)
3. Once you have enough people, build a more vendor-friendly sales process, reach out to vendors and see if they would list on you directly. Sometimes their contracts don’t allow them (eg with ticketmaster).
Now if you are intent on building a community from scratch, you will still need:
1a. A policy of subscribing to interests during onboarding (eg like with meetup.com) and telling people that they’ll get notifications as things are posted.
1b. Initially showing infinite scroll of ALL matching group activities around the user, with filters to filter it down by categories that have at least 1 result, so it never looks like a ghost town in most categories.
1c. Have subcommunities based on eg zipcode or city and let people grow them. For an example see https://yang2020.app/communities
1d. Have a system of credits users can earn for referring new users to the app.
1e. Leaderboard system per zipcode / week, who has the most credits. The leaders get some badges (digital goods) or even some real world goods.
Disclaimer: at https://qbix.com we build software for exactly this. Your job is to come up with the community idea, get the content license, get the various subcommunities, and we do the rest. We built https://yang2020.app for example, for Yang Gangs to unite. It lets you organize a local event/rally, rides to and from the event, checkins, and also uses some of the later Web features that finally work on all mobile browsers, like PaymentRequest (to pay for tickets) and WebRTC (to videochat or even screenshare). If you’re a developer it’s open source so you can grab it at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and just build whatever on it.
I have been building it, writing about it and giving it away:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Every time I post this on HN, it gets heavily downvoted. But I don’t ever hear why. I can think of no better way than to show, link to the code, give it away. I spent over half a million dollars of my company’s revenues on this. Take that for what it’s worth. I intend to make this work.
If this inspires you, feel free to email me (qbix.com/about)
Our company (qbix.com) made $1MM selling apps for iOS and Mac, and reinvested most our profits over 7 years into building just such an open source decentralized social network. Here is a video about it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
You can find the entire general purpose platform here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
And even though we had done all this, we have not yet started to popularize it. We wanted to get the kinks out first.
Examples of stuff you should have at a minimum: user accounts, onboarding, pub-sub, transactional emails and sms, notifications on all platforms including web push, real time updates via web sockets, privacy and access control to content, multi user collaboration, one click invitations, easy installer and updater scripts, caching resources locally, indexing and relationships across domains, authentication across domains (github.com/Qbix/auth) with seamless experience across domains and more.
And then you should probably also integrate with local address books, support uploading and sync from gmail and other sources, support payments on all platforms eg applepay and androidpay, and so on.
I have met teams working on other projects including MaidSAFE and Solid by Tim Berners-Lee. The missing piece is all the user-friendly apps and components. It’s a bit like when the Mac and Windows came out, personal computers finally got much more massive adoption. Or like when the Web became good enough to compete with AOL. It takes time for open source to catch up to proprietary software, but once it does, it is a force to be reckoned with.
PS: If anyone wants to join our project to either contribute (design, development in PHP or JS, or grow the community) get in touch by emailing greg+hn @at@ qbix.com
I have emailed Jonathan Davis (web-evangelist@appl..) from Safari several times over the last few years asking when Push Notifications will finally be supported. Without this, websites need to rely on email as a retention mechanism.
But here’s the thing with all this. It’s a lot to build and support all these operating systems, where things constantly change. Even more to have an integrated unified solution.
Take for instance onboarding. New people click an invite link and go to your site. First you want an instant social experience. That’s easy enough: just have each invite have a unique link confirming that phone number or email, and when they arrive show them all the friends who uploaded hashes from their Contact list where they are found. And show all the content they have already engaged with. But wait, phone numbers only have 10^7 possibilities roughly, so that’s a trivially reversible space. SO now go read about the state of the art from Signal and others and figure out your own more secure solution.
And after this you want the user to download the native app so you can send notifications to them, they can upload their Contact list and find their friends, invite people easily etc. Seems easy: just redirect them to the store.
But wait. You want attribution for campaigns, and you want to resume sessions. How to do it? Well you could use SFSafariViewController to get the web cookies but that’s been deprecated in iOS so now you need to to use SFAuthenticationSession.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a project that would take care of all this shifting stuff for you so you can focus on building the core of your app?
Well that’s why I started Qbix initially. We keep adding free open source plugins to solve these individual problems:
https://github.com/Qbix?tab=repositories
Go ahead and grab them, we plan to maintain them as the OSes change since we use them in our ow apps.
But this is literally the tip of the iceberg. Most of the questions have to do with social and communty features like roles, permissions, realtime sync, offline notifications, user authentication across apps, payments, and so on.
If you want something that will let you develop new web based apps at record speed or support turning existing websites/apps into social apps with accounts (think turning git into github) without reinventing the wheel you are welcome to the code
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is licensed under AGPL so if you want to keep your code private and not open source it to your website visitors then you’d have to contact us for a license, which at this point is probably like $100 a year regardless of users. But for FOSS projects and weekend stuff it’s totally free, to promote the improvements of the ecosystem.
Here is the vision long term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
Oh also we aren’t happy with the state of mobile browsers when it comes to supporting content addressable routing, verification of resources, encrypted web push notifications secure access to contacts by websites, and so on. So we are building the Qbix Social Browser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
It is simply a platform on top of the Web same as Wordpress, that anyone can install. It can even run on local wireless mesh networks.
Oh and it’s totally Free and Open Source and any community or startup can use it to build apps to put in the store.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Contact me if you’re interested to be involved, or just have a question about how to get started. (Greg+hn, the at sign, then qbix.com)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
1. We started with the idea that actually social tools would let you get in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission: Empowering People.
2. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software themselves. The flipside of letting people actually get together on their own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them. Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their own time. (See https://qbix.com/communities). Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: Uniting Communities
3. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook, that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.
But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments. We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit, vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform). We don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)
It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the email is greg and the domain is qbix.com
See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:
Roll your own!
This is a hard problem to solve. We solved it at Qbix. We're still working on releasing our Platform to everyone, but for now it's already open source and we are dogfooding it in all our own apps.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are also working on an interoperable auth protocol where you do control your identity and keep your contacts private, but discover them across communities (venues and interests).
We started back in 2011, and managed to build a large open source system that anyone can install and builds apps on top of (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform).
(Video of what you can build quickly: https://vimeo.com/208438090?ref=em-v-share)
However, when I heard about solid, I reached out to Tim Berners-Lee and was interested in partnering with the solid team. Ultimately it is good if our system is just one of many that are interoperable because they all support the same protocol.
There were a couple things that needed to be added to this protocol to make it fully capable of handling our use cases, however. I like it when existing projects get together and design a protocol with everyone's voice being heard, as with oAuth with Twitter and the (sadly ignored) xAuth with Meebo back then.
So - protocols are good. But I have come to realize there is a lot of politics in this, and it's not as easy to collaborate as I had hoped.