There was a big discussion on Hacker News today on the article below which introduces the decentralized, open-source Scuttlebutt as an alternative to Facebook (privacy-respecting, no ads, no 3rd party data collection, etc.)
And the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603
There are still a number of issues:
- The selected encryption method makes handling some edge cases difficult
- Android support is being worked on, but not production-ready (and based on NodeJS probably a battery hog. Note: I’ve worked on this as well, trying to run NodeJS on Android)
- iOS smartphone support is in very early investigative stages
- The project was progressing slowly (but seems to get way more attention of late, after the FB/CA scandals)