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by jclay 2609 days ago
I agree and this strikes me as odd as well. I really want to like this product and it’s squarely in the area of a service I would pay monthly for.

But, the Social app looks exactly like a twitter screen shot, and the VPN looks identical to PIA’s iOS app.

The chat UI isn’t great, and the Mail app is even worse. They all look like apps you would find on F-Droid which are great, but I wouldn’t feel excited about paying monthly for an app suite that lacking in polish.

Their claims of millions of active users on each of the services also seem questionable. Maybe if they’re counting the total number of XMPP users I could see that.

Lastly, the framing of donating to what is by definition a for-profit company is off putting for me personally.
2 comments
seba_dos1 2609 days ago
Two things - you're not paying for apps in any way, they're FLOSS. You're paying for services - infrastructure, administration, "cloud" space etc.

Also, while Purism is indeed a for-profit company, it's actually an interesting case since it's a Social Purpose Corporation - it's not there to maximize profits, but to maximize its social purpose. It legally can't do anything that would be at odds with its legally defined social purpose: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/

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jclay 2609 days ago
I see your point, but as they’ve also created the apps under their brand it seems likely the monthly fee would also go towards (hopefully!) the continued improvement of those apps.
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seba_dos1 2609 days ago
Judging from my past interactions with people from Purism I'm pretty sure their goal is to have all their improvements going upstream, with forks focusing mostly on branding and cross-integration within the bundle and their hardware.
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jelv 2608 days ago
Millions of active users is for Librem Social only, that is the fediverse. See more stats on https://fediverse.network/reports/2018

With Librem One you get a Mastodon account on there own Mastodon instance. That instance can speek with all other instances on the fediverse with ActivityPub protocol. So yes, with Librem Social you can easy connect with more then 2 million people.

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