Openbook could be the privacy and transparency-focused, ad-free, open-source Facebook killer
Facebook is trying really hard at the moment to regain our trust. The social media giant has stumbled from one crisis to another over recent months as it has become gallingly clear that the huge amounts of our data it collects are not in safe hands. Everybody from Russian-based analysts to democracy-defying deviants have been able to get their hands on a lot of Facebook user data and then use it to manipulate the public.
Accordingly, Facebook is now trying to tell us that it knows this is not what it is for, but popular culture has already started kicking back. HBO host John Oliver gave Facebook’s reconciliation ads a good kicking on Sunday, over $100 billion was wiped off Facebook’s stock value, and there could be even worse storm clouds on the horizon for the big blue, in the form of ethical competition.
Warning: Contains strong language
Openbook promises to be a social network that will not serve up ads, and won’t track users’ behavior or web habits. It isn’t the only privacy-first social network to hit the internet, but it does have a couple of things going for it that others like Minds, Mastodon, and Diaspora don’t. Openbook already has the support of some big names in the tech world, like the creator of PGP encryption (most widely used form of email encryption), and it claims to make it incredibly easy to transfer your photos, videos, and chats across from other social networks.
The design of Openbook does look familiar to other social networks, but it is completely bloat-free and doesn’t have any ads. The new social network will also appeal to people who feel they spend too much time browsing social media. Users will receive a lot fewer notifications than they currently receive on other social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
Until now, Openbook has been completely self-funded by the team involved and is not yet live on the internet. The next stage of development sees the team behind Openbook trying to raise $100,000 through Kickstarter so that they can look for a general release around next year. At the time of writing, they were approaching 25 percent of their target with 16 days left to raise the rest. The Kickstarter campaign accepts pledges of as little as $1, and everybody who pledges will gain early access in March 2019 and will have their name added to the Openbook Founders Book.
Once Openbook is live, the plan is for there to be an Openbook marketplace. The network will then take a cut of all transactions and use the proceeds to pay for the costs of keeping everybody connected.
This new type of social media project could be just the answer to the user data crises that have gripped the world recently. Anything that will put users back in control of their data seems like a good thing, and decentralizing vast troves of tracked user data means it’d be much harder for nefarious actors to get their hands on it. There are still questions that need to be answered, however, like whether a cut of marketplace transactions will be enough to pay for the huge amounts of servers that would be needed if Openbook took off.
For now, though, we feel that Openbook should be given a chance. For just a $1 pledge you could help it get that chance, and should Openbook become the world’s privacy-focused ad-free social network of choice, having your name in that Founders Book would be pretty cool.