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.
Too many app devs don't know jack about the Fediverse. Or they didn't when they started developing their apps.
It happens again and again that someone jumps into Fediverse app development, maybe even claims to build a, quote, "Fediverse app," end quote. And then they build it hard against Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. Not even just the Mastodon API. Straight against Mastodon with both a frontend and a backend that only supports Mastodon.
Usually because at this point they still think the Fediverse is the Mastodon network, and there's nothing else in the Fediverse than Mastodon. Some 99% of all Mastodon newbies come into Mastodon believing that, the vast majority still spends the first months believing that, and my estimation is that every other Mastodon user still believes it.
And when you tell such a dev that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, and there's a whole lot of stuff that isn't Mastodon, but that uses ActivityPub, and that communicates with Mastodon like Mastodon communicates with itself, they're taken off-guard.
"What? What do you say? You aren't on Mastodon? How can you talk to me then? Like, black magic or what? Whaddaya mean, that's normal? There's other stuff connected to Mastodon? But Mastodon is the Fediverse. Whaddaya mean, it isn't? The Fediverse is not only Mastodon? So it's Mastodon forks? No? Is it extra stuff glued onto Mastodon then? Not either? Like, WTF? Yeah, sorry, no. I've built my app hard against Mastodon, and if I wanted to support anything else, I'd have to rip everything out and rewrite everything from scratch. 'Sides, it ain't worth doing anyway. Literally nobody uses that stuff. You're, like, literally the first whom I talk to on Mastodon who isn't on Mastodon. Everyone else I see uses Mastodon.* Over 99% of all people in the Fediverse are on the original, Mastodon. Ain't worth supporting those few others."
All this explains why you have tons of iPhone and Android apps for Mastodon that either only work with Mastodon, or that you can connect other Mastodon API stuff to, but only have Mastodon's features at hand. And at the same time, you barely have any apps that support anything beyond Mastodon's features. Exception: Lemmy apps, often written by people for whom the Threadiverse or the Fediverse as a whole is Lemmy.
*No, they don't. But Mastodon users can't see it unless either non-Mastodon users do something that's painfully obviously not possible on Mastodon, or they rub it straight into Mastodon users' faces.