Platform Alternatives

Platform reviews and mentions

• Tech giants are hijacking the internet
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2023

  Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough.

  I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want:

  https://qbix.com

  Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub

  https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

  (And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).

• Cult of the Dead Cow Wants to Save Internet Privacy with New Encryption Protocol
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2023

  You might also like our platform that we’ve been building for 12 years and are preparing to launch:

  https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

• Google vs. the Open Web
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2023

  We have been doing it! Join us!

  It isn’t perfect but we are ahead of most others (Mastodon, Matrix). We have spent TWELVE YEARS building the free, permissionless open source platform for anyone to assemble and host their own community software with all the features of Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for their own community:

  https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

  We are about to roll out version 2.0 — I have never done this before but I would like to invite whoever wants to learn about it or build on it, to a Zoom webinar where I will demo anything and answer any questions. The next Webinar will take place on our own platform — no Calendly, no Zoom, no Google, just the free open Web.

  Anyway, sign up here if you want. Will do it every Sunday August:

  https://calendly.com/qbix/qbix-2-0-platform-demo

• WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs in the browser
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jul 2023
• Companies must stop using Google Analytics
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jul 2023

  This is true not just for analytics but pretty much all features.

  Imagine you are a great speaker and instructir and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a ting percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos!

  I say — opt out. Run your own everything! It’s hard to build an open-source alternative that is good enough (no, Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t — yet).

  Which is why (shameless plug warning) I spent 12 years and $1 million dollars with my team to build it. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

  Use it — as 1 of hundreds of features, you can have your own analytics on your own database on your own community site. The other features are here: https://qbix.com/features.pdf

• PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jun 2023

  I hope they don't do it.

  I've had a similar situation with PHP, where we had written quite a large engine (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform) with many features (https://qbix.com/features.pdf) . It took advantage of the fact that PHP isolated each script and gave it its own global variables, etc. In fact, much of the request handling did stuff like this:

    Q_Request::requireFields(['a', 'b', 'c']);

• The Fear of Shipping
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 May 2023

  I am the king of this. It has been 12 years and we had 6 million users — and we still have yet to ship Groups for Android for example.

  Oh wait I have you one better — it has been 12 years and https://github.com/Qbix/Platform is only now almost ready to be released, as v2.0

  Sure we “ship” it all the time, on github. We even released v1.0 but we didn’t announce it

  People who discover https://qbix.com are shocked that there is a decentralized open source alternative platform to Facebook and Twitter that is far more full-featured than Mastodon, Bluesky or even Matrix and they never heard of it.

  Well… the problem is that I picked a very complex space, one where no one got this far except for billion-dollar companies. People kept expecting everything to be real-time and rock-solid, and even when we finally got that done after many years, they still complain it “doesn’t look as good as Twitter”.

  Every time I shipped half-baked stuff, it didn’t actually take off. Now, I believe it WOULD have taken off if it had a low demand surface area (eg Bitcoin just stores value and transfers it, period). But I tend to build stuff that is similar to what people use EVERY DAY, and that kind of stuff accrued lots of features.

  Oh yeah my other project https://intercoin.org blockchain platform took 5 years to create. During that time we went from a crypto winter to a super bull market in crypto to another winter with super bear skepticism on HN.

  On HN we knee-jerk get lumped in with stuff that isn’t even blockchain, like FTX or Binance, or ridiculous shitcoins that have no utility at all.

  Our stuff is FREE AND OPEN SOURCE and you use it if you want, or don’t. Before complaining that it even exists to help people for free, or calling it a scam, at least click the link to https://github.com/Intercoin

  A word about regulations, because you shouldn’t “just ship” in violation of laws (unless you’re Uber or AirBNB lol). Even though we raised money in an ICO pursuant to Reg D and Reg S exemotions, filed Form D with the SEC, got people who worked at the SEC as active advisors, complied with laws in multiple other jurisdictions, innovated in many areas of securities law, and carefully developed tokens to fit the No-Action letters grantsd to projects like PocketFullOfQuarters, people on HN just assume that we are like most of the others who didn’t treat their tokens as securities. Which is understandable. (I am not admitting the token ARE securities, this is a matter of opinion that a judge would determine, merely that we didn’t want to take the chance that the original transactions weren’t securities transactions.)

  Btw besides securities there is also this FATCA, FINCEN and other stuff that many startups here should read even if they aren’t making web3 or crypto projects, but ARE dealing with money and payouts to people on their platform: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...

• Show HN: A typical weekend of coding for me, with links to commits on GitHub
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023

  https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/commit/704ee677a6937f0b20a26d6a3c56f6aff812ab47

  2. Implemented stream.ephemeral(payload) that can be sent to any stream now, and whole system of ephemeral is now working parallel to messages. Unlike messages, ephemeral isn't saved to the database, doesn't trigger notifications for subscribers, and the order doesn't matter. It's for things like "Typing..." indicators and other temporary things. Ephemeral is like UDP while Messages is like TCP.

• Go with PHP
  19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 May 2023

  For a framework that is radically different but also PHP-native (since PHP 5), would you like to spend an hour playing with https://github.com/Qbix/Platform ?

  If you do, please share your experience in a comment. I’d love to hear it. I architected this framework over the last decade :)

• The WAR on end-to-end encryption is here, and we’re losing it
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2023

  Author here. Happy to see this went viral.

  I have spent 12 years and 1 million dollars to date (no exaggeration) on a project to hopefully help people get a viable alternative to the Big Tech, and have choice where to host the infrastructure they typically expect from Facebook, Twitter, Telegram etc. It’s open source and it’s the only way you can make it expensive to backdoor everyone in bulk, or shut down a platform altogether:

  https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

  If you spend an afternoon playing with, I think you’ll feel like you’re discovering superpowers (like Batman or Iron man or something). It’s free to use. We’re launching https://qbix.com/ecosystem soon, with courses and certification so anyone who wants to learn, click on my profile and email me.

  And if you like what we do and you’re thinking of supporting us with $100 or more, feel free to do it here… November 5 we are launching, until then you can voluntarily put a “no-obligation” contribution: https://wefunder.com/Qbix

• A note from our sponsor - SurveyJS
  surveyjs.io | 26 Apr 2024

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