Web Development 15th July 2024
The main social media platforms aren’t working for us. They’re addictive, manipulative and exploitative, keeping you scrolling for hours on end so you see as many adverts as possible. Posts made by family and friends are replaced with posts from strangers, and Facebook and Instagram (among others) are starting to become more like TikTok.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
In December 2021, I started building Gumdrop Social, a social media platform which solves these problems. It offers the following features not found on the main platforms.
Most platforms don’t let you choose how your home feed is sorted – and if they do, this option is hard to find. But not on Gumdrop Social! By default, your feed is sorted with the most recent posts showing first. It’s like the old Instagram and Facebook, where you only see posts from users you follow or are friends with.
When you use Gumdrop Social, it doesn’t track your every move. It only collects data needed for the platform to function (such as your email address, posts you’ve liked, etc.) and for no other purpose.
Gumdrop Social doesn’t have any adverts, and never will.
As well as removing an annoyance, it also means that (while I obviously want you to use Gumdrop Social) I don’t have an incentive to keep you endlessly scrolling for hours on end. Other platforms use advertising to make money, so they want to keep you on their platform for as long as possible – no matter the cost to your health.
I am currently working on the answer to the question of how Gumdrop Social will make money, but it will not be through advertising or using your data.
You can sign up and use Gumdrop Social for free with no ads, tracking or other nonsense. Gumdrop Social will never sell your data to anyone or use it to train AI models.
There are a number of other features (some common on other platforms, others not) available on Gumdrop Social, including:
You can sign up to Gumdrop Social by going to gumdrop.social/join, or by clicking the button below.
If you have any feedback, let me know in the comments below, or go to Settings > Send Feedback on the platform.