On Sunday a crowdfunding campaign was launched for Junto, which is a new breed of social media designed to move beyond the restrictive norms of existing platforms and inspire authenticity. Its Kickstarter campaign will run for 30 days starting January 27th, and is intended to raise funds towards their official release this summer.
“Everything is in place for us to release confidently and at scale. We have over two years of product iteration and tangible feedback under our belts. Our designs are finalized and we are already in the process of developing our mobile and web applications. Holochain and Holo will also be in its beta stage by the time we release, so we have a real opportunity to be one of the first distributed applications to reach many people,” says Eric Yang, Founder of Junto.
Junto is a nonprofit open source project. Their new approach to social media will have no vanity metrics, like buttons or AI-powered echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs. They have replaced curated news feeds with the ability to discover information on your own terms. Junto wont own our sell your information and is completely free from advertisements.
“Our platform is built on Holochain, which is a biomimicry-inspired framework to build scalable, distributed applications. As a result, our members own their data. We don’t track or sell information and our platform is more private, secure, and censorship-resistant.”
– Eric Yang, Founder of Junto
Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it.
“Junto is setting out to deepen the discourse available in a social media setting. Existing social media sustains its centralized infrastructure via advertising revenue; they tune their content to be as addictive as possible, because they need your eyeballs on their ads. But on some level, most of us know that sooner or later we will have to reclaim our data and relationships from the social media corporations that have put themselves in the middle of so many of communications and social networks. Not only do we need to make these changes on a structural, architectural level by using social media on P2P frameworks like Holochain; we also need elevate our discourse. Junto’s orientation to these issues is refreshing” adds Arthur Brock.
