Hi all, I'm Martin, the founder of OpenFeed. Thanks for sharing it, and these are fair questions.

Is it Mastodon or part of the fediverse? No, and that's a deliberate choice. Federation deserves real credit, but when your data is spread across hundreds of servers, you lose track of it. A deletion request depends on strangers honouring it, and your account can vanish when a volunteer's server goes offline. OpenFeed has one operator, with a name and an address under EU law, who you can question, complain to and hold to account. If you prefer the fediverse, that's completely fine. We're just making a different trade-off.

Who's behind it? A small, independent team at a Dutch company. We host on Hetzner in Germany and publish every location and supplier that touches your data.

How does it make money? Right now it doesn't. We pay for it ourselves, with no investors and no ads. Over time the plan is optional paid extras and services for organisations that want their own protected space. The rule is that whatever is free stays free: we'll never put a price on a feature you already have. I'll be honest that the revenue model isn't finished yet, and I'd rather admit that than make up a confident answer.

What about Reddit and its API? That's a fair worry. The best protection I can offer is that leaving is easy: export and delete are in your settings, not hidden behind a support ticket. We also wrote our principles down publicly so you can hold us to them. [link to the manifesto]

It's in public beta and it could still fail. We think it's worth trying anyway, and criticism like this helps. Ask me anything.