A social network off the grid – mobile and available on Android

Manyverse is a social networking app with features you would expect: posts, likes, profiles, private messages, etc. But it’s not running in the cloud owned by a company, instead, your friends’ posts and all your social data live entirely in your phone. This way, even when you’re offline, you can scroll, read anything, and even write posts and like content! When your phone is back online, it syncs the latest updates directly with your friends’ phones, through a shared local Wi-Fi or on the internet.

We’re building this free and open source project as a community effort because we believe in non-commercial, neutral, and fair mobile communication for everyone.

( Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux)

  • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
    2·
    19 hours ago

    I think the dev gave up on this when they learned about Nostr. I was really interested in Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) for a while, but it’s been a while since I looked around, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, I may be iffy on the details.

    SSB was a really cool idea, and I loved the idea of a gossip protocol. The implementation had its drawbacks, though. For example, users had a cryptographically signed and linked feed that helped ensure complete propagation of a user’s unedited content, but it couldn’t handle the consequences of a feed forking, which made multiple devices for one user on an offline-first protocol very difficult to work with because you couldn’t really guarantee that two or more clients for one feed were properly synced.

    So there was an attempt to develop an SSB v2 of sorts to address some of these shortcomings. I believe the author of Manyverse was one of the people working on that. The project was never formally named to my knowledge, but you can probably still find vestiges of it on github, particularly under the Manyverse author’s profile, for something with a name like PPPPP. At some point, though, it was discovered that another protocol had been inspired by SSB and had solved a lot of the problems they wanted to address in SSB. I’m pretty sure that protocol was Nostr. Last I knew, once that had been discovered, interest in developing PPPPP and maintaining SSB clients dropped off significantly. A bit of a shame as the SSB community was VERY different from the Nostr one. Probably still some of them left using it, but I don’t see it growing the way I wanted it to at this point.

  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zipEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    Last release was in July 2024. Last merge in August 2024. Not available (in the US) on the Play Store or F-Droid. Did not try downloading the apk from their website because no.

    I think this one may be headed down for the long sleep.

    I’m curious how the sync is pulled off without a central server. Unless you port forward to your phone, device-to-device sync is always difficult without something in the middle.

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      19 hours ago

      iirc it’s a shiny UI around Secure Scuttlebutt, so it can do either direct syncing, or use public relays.