Its interesting that they plan to profit off of the Fediverse but they aren't paying for running instances themselves. At least they aren't now.
The only thing that is actually valuable in all this is the data generated by Fediversers themselves though, lets say 90 percent, and a nifty container around the content to make it more viewable/accessible/prettier, 10 percent.
They want to make profit off of memberships and probably ads, off of Fediversers content, and then they can leverage and monetize their new "social network" by some astronomical valuation in the market.
Good playbook, its been done many times now by Reddit, linkedin, Facebook, and all the rest, and maybe they will pull it off, but after more than 10 years of Social Media abuses, the Fediverse is filled with people who no longer want to be exploited in this way anymore. How about just paying for some instances, or supporting some FOSS projects already in the works?
Pidgin was decent, but remember Miranda? The community around it was fantastic. The plugin system was an absolute blast. Not only there were plugins for any communication network you could think of, the UX was fully customizable.
At one point, somebody even bothered to implement the ICQ flash animations. There has not been anything like it ever since.
This takes me back. Y'all made me recall running Trillian Pro with a cracked loader. Oh, and what about DeadAIM?! I feel ashamed (as a current FOSS fan) that I didn't switch to Pidgin until after pirating all the popular AIM alternatives.
The pre-seed stage startup is backed by angel investors and NYC accelerator Wolf, which Openvibe attended last year.
Openvibe is available as a free app on iOS and Android, but plans to experiment with a desktop version. The app will later introduce a subscription plan to generate revenue.
Have any services like this managed to develop a sustainable business model, especially after taking on investment?
Doubtful. They always are optimistic how many people would subscribe, it turns out that nobody subscribes, and then it's either them folding or speed-running enshittification and spying.
Once they get Threads support, their target audience will be the non-Twitter universe. This would make it easier for businesses, governments, journalists, and non-technical folks like influencers and celebrities to switch out. That's how you get mass adoption.
I just tried it last week. Good start. Lots of promise.
I'm not sure something like this will be the killer app for the Fediverse.
I think its more a transition-app as long as we have protocol wars. Most people are good with having access to the majority of the Fediverse and probably dont even know about the others.
I use it on occasion between Mastodon and Bluesky. My initial reaction was that I needed to organize my follows better so content wasn’t duplicating in the merged feed.