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:

https://qbix.com/ecosystem

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.