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A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al.

Given the interest in alternatives to centralized networks right now, I have decided to post this. Every few years we hear about the problems with huge centralized social platforms.

  They mediate and moderate all our interactions
  They control everyone's data, identity and brand
  They concentrate all the data in one place
  They get hacked / feed data to spies / advertisers
  They extract rents, brands pay to reach them
  They track us across the Web
  They can exert huge influence over our democracy
And yet, we do not have viable alternatives to them, that would be good enough for people to switch to. I'm not talking about Matrix or Mastodon. It takes years to recreate a user experience that has all the features you would expect from these large platforms. At Qbix, we spent the last 10 years and reinvested $1MM of our revenues to do exactly this. It's now ready.

For those of you who want to back a project to see this actually happen, instead of just talking about how nice it would be, you have an opportunity to do so. Watch the video at the URL below to understand why there is a lot of demand for open, popular platform like Wordpress but for hosting customizable, communities with third party plugins. Especially now in the wake of the lockdowns and social distancing, every organization is looking how to connect their members online.

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

( 9 comments | 16 points | on HN )
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by EGreg on Monday January 11, 2021 @02:46PM (#25735251)
Here is the clickable link: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(If you want to contribute to the project, or get involved, you are welcome to get in touch also with greg at the domain qbix.com)

Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by nikolay on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:17PM (#25740370)
You should have invested some portion of that $1MM in UI and UX.
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by madamelic on Monday January 11, 2021 @11:16PM (#25742202)
You spent 10 years on this?

Was this like a side project that you paused on for years? 10 years is an absurdly long time to build in the dark.

Did you do any market testing or let people besides you, your friends or family use it? You could've just wasted a lot of time building something no one wants.

Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by bcrl on Monday January 11, 2021 @09:29PM (#25741483)
You need a better name. Qbix sounds like a breakfast cereal to me. Names like Facebook or MySpace in contrast are simple and obvious about what they are.
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by cdaringe on Monday January 11, 2021 @10:28PM (#25741888)
The github project offering is quite distant from the HN article title. Misleading.
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by EGreg on Monday January 11, 2021 @10:41PM (#25741971)
How do you figure
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by motohagiography on Monday January 11, 2021 @04:37PM (#25737591)
Interesting, is there an interactive demo using a webshell, a bootable VM, or a live environment available?
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by EGreg on Monday January 11, 2021 @04:50PM (#25737819)
Re:A decentralized alternative to Facebook, Zoom, et al. by clxxx on Monday January 11, 2021 @10:17PM (#25741811)
Is this just a demo? This site is dubious at best and the usability is questionable. Many of the accounts are “test”, and there’s no email verification, all while assigning me a random picture of a man as a profile picture leads me to question how many users are actually real.

This doesn’t seem like a useable implementation of your app. Do you have any other instance examples of the app?