Shifting from Big Tech to Small Tech
When Whatever was started over a year ago, alternative frontends used to actually work. You could just visit and get the content. But since then, the devs maintaining the frontends have run into companies' realizations that "hey, we're losing a tiny bit of user data, and therefore money".
It's Joever, It's Bidone
One of the first frontends to go was Bibliogram, a frontend for Instagram. The dev was already fighting them for a while before finally getting tired and calling it quits. You can only do it for so long (and for free).
Piped has been a back-and-forth thing for months now. YouTube's recently gotten so bad that even the official instance goes down for days at a time. As someone that runs a pretty chonky-sized Piped instance, I can say that it's a total pain fighting YouTube - and I'm not even the one developing it. Their throttling and rate-limiting has gotten nearly impossible to get around, and it's unclear how Piped's future is gonna go. Personally, there's a very good chance that I'll be shutting Whatever's instance down, especially now that we're on Hetzner.
Nitter (Twitter frontend), well I shut it down last month. Despite Twitter throwing out rate-limits and blocking access to parts of the site left and right, it was still somewhat functional at the end. That wasn't the biggest issue though, it was the dumbass ruling Twitter with an iron fist. Moderation spiraled out of control and hate speech was rampant on the platform. The event that triggered me to announce the shutdown involved Elon personally reinstating an account that posted CSAM images (warning: it's a rough read). It's obvious that Twitter, now X, was putting not just us as the host in danger, but also risked the safety of viewers. Sure, Twitter/X had some decent meme accounts posting cringe videos, but the hate speech and harassment wasn't worth the risk. In other words, we're no longer hosting X videos.
The remaining ones are fine, but not great. ProxiTok (TikTok frontend) was kind of messy since the beginning but does partially still work. Dumb works but doesn't support some key features. Libremdb is pretty good but it's still missing some info pages. Point is, companies hated alternative frontends, and despite battling with them it's just not a fun experience.
Ok, let's just do our own thing
The idea of having to rely on a massive, multi-national corporation for your social media platforms is being proven wrong again and again. Federated platforms like Mastodon, Firefish, Kbin, Pleroma have been going for years with passionate userbases. So why not split off from Big Tech and do our own thing? First came Matrix for messaging, which I decided to make a paid service. A one-time $10 fee helps pay for Whatever's service and discourages using the instance for abuse. But after that, it was time to set up a federated social platform.
As someone that's been using Mastodon for 2 years (actively for 1 year), I was already comfortable with the interface and knew that it was possible to set up camp there. After some discussion in a private Matrix room, on June 1st I registered the orchard.social domain. A few weeks later, the Mastodon instance went online. Pretty cool.
What's Next?
Idk man. Probably some privacy-related stuff.
