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.
Seeing the writing on the wall, even Meta realized it needed 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-based developer behind the federated apps that challenge Meta’s social media empire, is seeking funds for continued development and support of his open social communities.
“Help us put control back into the hands of the people!” he said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter’s Thursday launch.
As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team.
Supernault wants his set of apps to become the first in the fediverse to reach a network of a billion people, but of course, there’s still a long way to go before they can meet that lofty goal. Though Pixelfed has been around for years, it just launched the 1.0 version of its mobile app earlier this month, for instance, and Loops is still in alpha testing on Apple’s TestFlight. Sup, meanwhile, has not yet been released but is said to be “coming soon,” per its Instagram page.
Both Loops and Sup will be released to Kickstarter supporters.
A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse.
It includes interactive tools and testing frameworks, allowing developers to mock popular activities on their service, set up an inbox for ingesting and debugging activities in real time, 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 stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers.)
If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future.
The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app’s launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB.
New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they’ll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need.
As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.
