About Whatever Social

I started Whatever Social in July of 2022, where I wanted to use some social media platforms privately through open-source alternative frontends.

Beginnings

Originally, the only hosted instance was Piped, hosted at "watch.whatever.social". Shortly afterwards, I hosted a Pixelfed instance on the root domain. Yeah, Whatever didn't start as a hub for frontends - just a few select platforms that I felt like hosting myself. It was partly because I was tired of downtime on Piped and wanted to start a reliable instance, but it was mostly because I wanted to say "screw it" and take the whole hosting thing in my own hands.

Now, I didn't have any experience with hosting things. In fact, I had basically never touched the CLI before, let alone Ubuntu Server. This is why I had plenty of help from James (the other Whatever admin), who did have experience with these sorts of things. In fact, I still get help from him for some stuff, though I try to learn myself first.

A little while after Piped and Pixelfed were set up, I set up another instance. And then another. Out of nowhere, James says he's gonna make a website to serve as the launchpad for the instances, and that it should be at the root domain to avoid confusion. So, that happened in August 2022 (archive here). The Pixelfed instance at the root domain was never meant to be. Turns out I didn't really care about using the platform, but it was more a middle-finger to Instagram. I like Mastodon better anyway. Maybe it'll come back some day, not sure.

Identity

The old launchpad lasted all the way until early 2023, when others and I thought the site was old and in desperate need of a refresh and an actual identity. That's when I found Penpot, a beautiful open-source alternative to Figma (balls). I brought on rens in hopes of getting some help as someone that's never designed a site before. He... didn't really help, BUT he's the one that told me that we should have a logo, and as he was telling me this he started putting together some placeholder thing. Thanks to Penpot and its live collaboration I stopped him when I saw 4 circles together. He was like "what no I didn't mean this to be a logo", but I thought it was perfect. It was careless, random, and had nothing to do with anything. In other words, the logo was the actual embodiment of "whatever". So I gave it some colours that I thought went great together, and it stuck.

I designed the rest of the site myself in Penpot, and a while later made a somewhat functional HTML-only version of the site. I got lazy for a few months, but we picked it back up in May 2023. James converted the HTML site to Sveltekit and fixed the broken parts. I also commissioned him to make the new launchpad I designed, which turned out great.

Since then, we've slowly expanded from just frontends to services like Vaultwarden and even our own hosted social media like Mastodon. Not only did the amount of services increase, but our network of servers has also completely shifted around (a LOT). Whatever also made its own mark when James developed AnonymousOverflow and Forcefield.

To federation, and beyond

Recently, frontends on Whatever Social have become more and more unstable due to big tech cracking down to force their invasive ads/trackers. Piped breaks frequently, Bibliogram shut down last year, Libreddit is heavily rate-limited, and Nitter... Well, we don't talk about Nitter.

Where do we go now? Well I've been using Mastodon for a while and wanted to have a little shared corner that I feel is more comfortable to be in. As more and more companies waged battle against alternative frontends, I thought it'd only make sense if Whatever expanded into the Fediverse and other open platforms. That's exactly what I did. We now have Orchard (Mastodon), and Matrix (for a small fee).

As we continue to build up our own corner of the privacy space, and as more people discover us, costs of running Whatever and its branches increase. We don't (and will never) run ads, and rely solely on donations to keep the service up. Soon, I'll post a public report of monthly costs. Thanks for using Whatever.