foss alternatives for social media apps

It seems like only the frontend is open-source, correct me if you find the back end code and if it is under AGPL license

Trillian was just a UI that put all your contacts in the same window. You couldn't talk across protocols, or merge the same user contact across multiple protocols.

Think of Matrix as a unified protocol from which AIM, MSN, ICQ would have all been based. And so if someone is on AIM but you registered on MSN, you can still talk. And at the fundamental level, it looks like IRC. It is the opportunity to re-baseline everything on a standard that is open and supports end to end encryption.

So while bridges would be needed today, the idea is that some time in the future these services would re-baseline on the Matrix protocol, or be displaced for whatever market reason by a startup that chose to baseline on Matrix.

Thats a pretty awesome question imo.

I think Matrix only makes sense if you‘re already using instant messaging of some sort. Either discord, whatsapp, signal, what have you…

If you are using one of these services, there is a high chance that your data is sold, traded and used for all kinds of purposes, from training AI to manipulating your life choices (or as simple as selling something to you).

If a person is not using social media at all (and has an offline friend circle), then they should happily stay away from any of these products, federated/foss same as the others. Simply because social media is addictive.

But for those (like me) who don’t make friends easily offline, social media makes sense. And for those, it is far better to trust db0 or whatever the admins name is of an instance, than google,

has only one answer. Hell yes!

Element is a for profit company and therefore not the best idea if you want to go fully without data collection I assume. But then you also need to keep all smart devices in your home from calling home, you need a rooted android phone or similar, etc.

So I propose that we do our best, keeping the megacorps from collecting and selling our data without a penny of the profits going to us. In the meantime, we make compromises where necessary. If element is the only „usable“ client for you, let them have at it for the time being. Especially on ios, you‘re transparent to apple anyway and besides you don’t see the apps in development until they leave testflight (iirc).

Let me know if you have any further questions. Have a good one. :)

You are indeed misunderstanding some of the points about it:

You have to register for a home server, which essentially means trusting the individual(s) running that home server not to abuse that privilege.

Communication that happens exclusively via Matrix are always end-to-end encrypted. No one will have access to it. The only point where e2ee is "broken" is when/if you are using any of the bridges to any of the protocols where the messages are in clear text. If you are worried about having your messages read by a third-party, then you wouldn't be using the insecure protocol in the first place, right?

Not only that, but your data is then replicated on other servers where the other participants in your conversations are registered.

Not true. Data that goes to the other servers is always encrypted and only the intended recipients can read it. No trust required.

The (seemingly) most popular, Element, appears to collect a crap-ton of personal information - including user content!

Technically speaking, every client "collects user content", no? The question is what the application does with it. The code is open source and I'm yet to hear anyone claiming bad practices or security flaws in the client.

Most of my friends moved to telegram at some point, but attempts to have them move to signal, let alone matrix are futile.