For a long time I've been wanting a private, E2EE social media app for sharing pics/videos of my son with friends and family, but haven't found anything fitting that description. Like most people, we've just been using group texts; the closest alternative I found was shared photo albums, but we wanted the ability to make "posts" with a few pictures and some text. So I've been building it and using it for a couple months with some friends, it's a strange feeling to have the ergonomics of social media with none of the toxic nonsense.
Most people I know are using group texts for this, but I find that unsatisfying because my wife and I want to share stuff with ~20 people, but we don't want to be blasting all of them with texts all the time, or put those 20 people in a group text with each other. We wanted something pub/sub, but with the privacy of E2EE chat apps, and so easy to use our parents will use it.
It's a React app running on Cloudflare Workers, and there's an iOS app in the works using Capacitor; the E2EE is built on OPAQUE. There's a landing page/signup at freefollow.org if you'd like to learn more. I'm working on some demo videos.
This seems like a good time to mention that FreeFollow.org is looking for private beta testers for our app that combines the pub/sub model and slick UX of social media (posts, comments, following) with the economic model of webhosting (pay to host a group, not to participate in them) and the E2EE design of 1Password (but using OPAQUE which is actually the protocol used by WhatsApp, rather than SRP).
Our initial use case -- why we're building this -- is parents who are currently using text groups in Apple Messages or WhatsApp to share photos/videos of their kiddos with friends/family and want something less interruptive and more casual, but for whom social media is so toxic and untrusted as to be a non-starter.
You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.
Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.
The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.
That could definitely be it. They might also be trying to play it cool, and not appear to gloat before the corpse is even cold. Instagram is running a lot of ads on TikTok now though.
Thanks very much for the feedback and bug report, which I have reproduced on Ubuntu. I'll fix the bug shortly and put the feature requests on the list.
Everyone uses spreadsheets to manage small-scale tabular data because unlike a database they're usable by humans and let users immediately start entering data, but they’re not great at “staying out of your way”, in that you constantly have to resize columns to match the data width, style the header row separately and freeze it, maybe add a row count column, remember to sort columns in such a way that row integrity is preserved, etc. Doing that stuff drives me crazy. Also, launching a giant office application to manage a list of a couple dozen items feels silly. Or doing something in the cloud. It feels simultaneously like massive overkill yet still not having the right tool for the job, like using a Ferrari to haul lumber.
So out of pent-up frustration I built a simple free desktop app for editing tables that lets you just start typing like a spreadsheet, but actually knows what a table is and tries really hard to stay out of your way. So you can just edit your table rather than spending your time teaching an automatic infinite ledger how to be a tabular notepad. I’ve enjoyed having it in my toolbox so I thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone else finds it useful.
In the spirit of Show HN, this project is somewhere between a prototype and an MVP; there are obvious major missing features but it’s actively used by enough people that the quality isn’t terrible. If you have a use case for which you think TablePad is a good fit, I'd love to hear about it in the comments or you can email me at seth@tablepad.app.
Most people I know are using group texts for this, but I find that unsatisfying because my wife and I want to share stuff with ~20 people, but we don't want to be blasting all of them with texts all the time, or put those 20 people in a group text with each other. We wanted something pub/sub, but with the privacy of E2EE chat apps, and so easy to use our parents will use it.
It's a React app running on Cloudflare Workers, and there's an iOS app in the works using Capacitor; the E2EE is built on OPAQUE. There's a landing page/signup at freefollow.org if you'd like to learn more. I'm working on some demo videos.