Privacy focus, but only on surveilance networks?

[Bugsbane]

Reading through the website, the promises all sound good. Open source. Privacy centric. There's something jarring, though. The only places to suggest features are through Microsoft Github and Discord, neither of which are any friend to privacy. The only places you have social accounts are on full on surveillance networks such as Google's Youtube, Discord, X(!), Facebook etc.

Now don't get me wrong. I understand the concept of meeting people where they are. I get the reason for also having an account or two on popular, if ideologically unaligned services. What I don't understand is a project aiming at people who care about privacy and open source, then avoiding any open source, privacy focused channels (eg Mastodon, Peertube, Codeberg, Forgejo etc). I mean, not even mirroring to more aligned alternatives, suggests a dubious commitment to the values of privacy and open source, especially when promoting so many alternatives that represent the opposite of these values.

Anyway. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm sure you have plenty of that already! I will say though that with many years in marketing, that I hate to see good FOSS projects hurt themselves with bad communications and that this is diluting your brand story and making your value proposition questionable.

Do with that as you wish and all the best.

[lanedirt]

Hi @Bugsbane, thanks for sharing your thoughts! I agree it would be nice for AliasVault to also be active on more privacy-friendly platforms. However, without a dedicated marketing person (or team), time constraints are real, and this has led me to focus on a few main channels for now.

You mentioned a few good alternatives like Mastodon, Peertube, Codeberg, and Forgejo. From your perspective, which one do you think should be the top priority for AliasVault to be active on as well?

I’ve also considered setting up our own hosted Discourse channel, for example, but I’m not sure if the time to set this up is worthwhile at this stage. Too many separate channels risk splitting the user base and making things even more time-consuming to manage. Right now, I’m more focused on meeting people where they already are (as you mentioned), to make it easier to get in touch and stay up to date, rather than requiring them to switch to a custom alternative. Still, I’m open to ideas if you have suggestions or examples of how other projects handle this well.

[Bugsbane]

In your shoes, if I was just going to focus on one other channel, I would add Mastodon. Yes, there are options like Bluesky, but in terms of market / audience match, you're not going to find a more concentrated reach for contributors, FOSS people and privacy geeks. You're not going to get anywhere near the sheer numbers of end users of somewhere like Facebook, but in the startup phase getting the most passionate core of influential users is key rather than getting a huge base of people who are kind of, sort of interested. These are the people who will submit merge requests, find security vulnerabilities and advise their schools / families / universities what services to use. "1000 True Fans" is really worth a read on the marketing philosophy of finding your core first if you haven't already. The other nice thing about Mastodon, is that it's very low barrier to entry. You can use services like Hootsuite with the Fedica app to post to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon all at the same time, and it's just short text and images, unlike trying to host videos on Peertube etc.

On a completely unrelated note, as someone looking to switch my org away from Bitwarden, my personal main concern is whether a small, less funded team can reliably maintain security on such a sensitive resource as passwords. You did well to mention that a(n independent?) security audit is on the roadmap. I'd respond to the security concern in the FAQ, too though. With privacy tools, it's all about establishing trust with a very skeptical audience (as I'm sure you've already encountered!)

All the best, from someone watching your project with interest.