But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept. “I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I’ll set up a Kickstarter,” he tells us. Instead the tweet “just completely exploded” and he found himself raising $100k “in a single day” - with $50k paid in there and then. I’ve been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services,” he continues. “But by the end of the day - last Sunday, eight days ago - I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10M with $100k in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane.”Ĭapsule is just the latest contender for retooling Internet power structures by building infrastructure that radically decentralizes social platforms to make speech more resilient to corporate censorship and control. The list of decentralized/p2p/federated protocols and standards already out there is very long - even while usage remains low. Extant examples include ActivityPub, Diaspora, Mastodon, p2p Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Solid and Urbit, to name a few. ![]() Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down US president Donald Trump’s access to their megaphones - a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic. ![]() ![]() Kobeissi also takes that view, while adding the caveat that he’s not “personally” concerned about Trump’s deplatforming. But he says he is concerned about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape Internet speech - whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter’s trust & safety lead or Amazon Web Services (which recently yanked the plug on right-wing social network Parler for failing to moderate violent views). He also points to a lawsuit that’s been filed in US court seeking damages and injunctive relief from Apple for allowing Telegram, a messaging platform with 500M+ users, to be made available through its iOS App Store - “despite Apple’s knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten, and coerce members of the public” - raising concerns about “the odds of these efforts catching on”.
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