The social of today is broken. Apps like TikTok and Instagram are designed to maximize engagement on the app and keep users trapped there. Users on these apps have their data harvested and sold to data brokers. The apps are increasingly made less appealing to consumers in order to extract more and more value from their users.
But what's there really to do about it? Well, you can switch to a new platform. Something new, it looks like the old platform but it feels new and fresh. Maybe it's because it's not monetized (for now), and there's a fresh new energy. Maybe you'll go back eventually or maybe you won't. Let's say you stay, maybe you stay for years. One or two years down the road they start getting more aggressive about monetization, or their moderation starts aggressively censoring users. Five years in, they've become exactly the thing everyone was fleeing from. What do you do now? Just move again? Start over from scratch all over again?
It is precisely this situation that's made users of social media so distrusting of companies offering them a solution to the ills of social media, if only you join one more platform. "Just trust us! This platform, the one that I own and control, will be the one to finally fix all the problems of social media." It's no wonder when new platforms make big promises to be free of censorship or shadow-banning, it rings hollow for users.
Users need more than empty promises that can be broken when they become inconvenient. Users shouldn't have to trust a single company to facilitate everything on a network, from keeping their moderation unbiased to keeping their buttons in an easy-to-reach position. There is simply too much trust involved with using a new platform.
I. Open Social
We created Spark to provide an alternative to platforms like TikTok and Instagram on the open foundation of AT Protocol. AT Protocol provides users with the assurance that their use of a social network isn't dependent on the infrastructure, control, or even existence of one single company. If they get tired of that company's decisions, they can leave their servers or use a different app, while still being able to connect with all their friends that might still be on the company's servers.
Our goal was to sacrifice nothing, to create a user experience that rivals TikTok
This is already a huge improvement to the complete lack of any user control on Instagram and TikTok. Now we need to get it in the hands of real people.
II. Open Beta
In January we launched Spark in open beta on TestFlight and the Play Store's open beta program. This was a big step towards
Today, we're happy to announce that, while we are still in open beta, our open beta is now fully available on the App Store and the Play Store.
But to truly overcome the complete lack of trust users have for social platforms, we need to make using our platform demand none of it.
But there's one more step.
III. Open Source
Today, we're proud to announce that Spark is now fully open source. The source code of both the mobile client and the "App View" server are now publicly available for anyone to read, fork, or contribute to. This code is all available under the MIT license.
We encourage contribution and will do our best to foster it. If you encounter a bug, we hope you'll file an issue, and if you're inclined, a pull request. We will do our best to triage issues and merge pull requests in a timely manner but we can't make any guarantees.
Our mobile app is built in Flutter and our App View server is built in TypeScript with Hono and Deno. We are very grateful to all the open source developers who have built libraries we are building on top of, but we'd like to specifically shout out pro_image_editor, which powering our media editors, and atproto.dart, the AT Protocol Dart SDK.
All of this together allows us to approach users and for them to use our app without investing their trust into us as individuals and our decision-making skills. We are excited to hear your thoughts and feedback.