If I go to a website and ask for a web page over https, isn't the request and response between my device and the web server, an end-to-end encrypted message? Because the endpoints are my device and the web server.
If I can't send my credit card details to a payment provider over an end-to-end encrypted channel, doesn't all commerce on the web just fall apart?
How can a ban on end-to-end encrypted communication even fucking work?
When you have a centralized system like ICANN DNS, the governments know which IP addresses the domain points to. They can go and serve them National Security Letters or shake them down to install secret backdoors.
WhatsApp and Facebook can lie to you that they’re end-to-end encrypted. There is nothing stopping them from shipping custom updates. In facg they’ve been caught red-handed spying on both your video and audio. The only way you can be SURE an app isnt lying to you is with open source software, then you only have to trust the OS and browser (the Trusted Computing Base).
(That is why I am a big fan of blockchain-based smart contaracts. But blockchains are slow, so the next best thing is hosting your business logic using open source software on servers you control.)
Why do so many people trust Big Tech? Simple. We have no other choice!
Where are the VIABLE AND USER FRIENDLY open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram backends?
No one seems to have built anything better or more efficient than, say, Mastodon.
Except us. It was a labor of love and cost me a million dollars to date: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
PS: If you play with it for a afternoon, post your experience or email me. I would be thrilled to hear about your experience, good or bad. And of course use it for anything you want.
I would be very happy to be proven wrong and see some more competitors being mentioned here, but if you do, make an honest assessment of how they compare! People need alternatives to the closed walled gardens, but having all these features working and up-to-date with browser tech is extremely hard: https://qbix.com/features.pdf
HN opinions on CloudFlare aside, CloudFlare Tunnels mean DNS records point at CloudFlare servers, and the IP address of the origin server isn't discoverable via DNS. Sure, it's a court order away from being figured out even with dynamic IPs and historical logs with ISPs, but it's an interesting thought.
Qbix certainly looks very interesting. How have you guys been around for ten years and flown under the radar?
The sad truth is, we were always low on money and bootstrapping. We spent a lot of time building, and very little time pitching.
We pitched about 10 VCs total in this whole time. I remember being at an event where Reid Hoffman spoke, he said he pitched 99 VCs before he got investment.
But we spent zero on marketing and PR, and 11 million people in 100 countries downloaded our Groups app. But the app is not that interesting, people don’t understand that most of our users are community leaders.
What people don’t get is that in this space, you need ALL THE FEATURES that Big Tech platforms offer before people will switch. It simply took us 10-12 years to get to this point. I picked a hard problem, but a very rewarding one in the end.
Look, MySQL and NGinX took 10 years before VCs funded them. But to be fair, they grew a lot whereas Qbix didn’t. Maybe I and my team simply suck at making things viral. But I believe this year will change that.
Networking is hard. I’m a guy who came from an immigrant family in Brooklyn. I never moved to the West Coast. We applied to HN with Qbix every other year since 2011. Never even got invited to the interview.
Now, I personally know Noam Chomsky, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Tim Berners-Les (see the photo at https://wefunder.com/Qbix), the Rohingya Project guys, Queen Diambi of a tribe in the Congo, the hed of United Nations Capital Development Fund, the head of CoinDesk, and many more randomly assorted people I met over the years. But it took years.
And I still don’t know very good VCs. And many VCs still look at our open source project as ”too big”. They prefer to invest in small feature companies, which we can now spin off from our accelerator.
If you want to introduce me, I’m very happy to take a meeting and demo on Zoom.
And if you want to support it, just go to https://wefunder.com/Qbix and kick in $100 or something. We are gearing up launch the 5th of November this year — and you’ll definitely not forget that :)