🌐 Lambda: An open-source privacy-based alternative to traditional social media
NOTE: Lambda is currently a prototype, it’s for validating the idea, gaining traction, and testing purposes only
❓ What is Lambda ❓
Lambda is an Open-source privacy-focused social media app. It focuses not only on privacy but also on your well-being preventing you from excessive use of social media. It solves all the problems that big social media platforms have made, from privacy concerns to well-being to targeted advertisements, with just one solution.
With Lambda you can have an online experience like Facebook, X(formally Twitter), or even Instagram, but with no concerns about your privacy.
❓ Why Lambda ❓
But then why Facebook? Or why X?
Why do you use those? Why can’t you use a decentralized platform like Mastodon?
But Why only those?
There are multiple reasons why not to use Facebook or X, but if you value your privacy and want to make sure that you don’t get tracked and your data is shared with advertisers so that they can show you relevant ads and make you buy stuff you don’t even want to. Here are the reasons why to pick Lambda over traditional social media platforms:
Organic Feed
traditional social media platforms use AI models to show you the most relevant and most highly clicked posts. Lambda has concerns about that, Lambda wants to make your online presence as healthy as it can, to prevent you from spending too much time on social media, but not entirely give up on it, lambda generates your feed using nothing more than a list of followee, this is nothing more then a list of users you follow if you are not following anyone, lambda will not generate a feed for you and you would need to follow someone to generate a feed. Lambda simply takes your followee list and gets the latest posts from each user you are following and shows you those, thus making sure you are not given promoted content, high click rate posts, or any kind of other stuff.
Non-targeted advertisements(after incorporation)
Lambda believes that advertisers have too much control over what social media users can see on a platform, they are second in control after the company itself. The majority of social media runs on ads, which makes those platforms keep their advertisers more happy than their users, this leads to methods of using users as a way of making more money.
Lambda uses a unique way to advertise and make money. It uses a bidding system advertisement.
This is a simple system in which the advertisers bid a certain amount of their will, the total amount bid by every advertiser is taken, and whatever an advertiser bids, that becomes what percent of the total amount bid is how much the ad space the advertiser gets. For example:
In bidding if a total of $10M is bid, and an advertiser bids $1M, this means that particular advertiser gets 10%(1M * 100/10M) of the entire ads space.
What’s ad space?
All empty white spaces next to blogs on the right are ad spaces, each blog has an ad space on its right, it’s usually a small portion of the actual content so won’t be that distractive.
Time Limit(Not yet)
Lambda will be having a time limit once it gets the traction it needs to get investments. Lambda wants you to have a healthy time on the platform, for this lambda would be preventing you from using the platform for more than 2 hours a day, this limits you to a healthy amount of time to post, read, and do whatever you want for 2 hours.
🔍 Comparison: Lambda vs. Nostr vs. Mastodon
Decentralized platforms are great, individuals create them and are maintained by their users, this means that anyone can use a decentralized protocol such as Nostr or Mastodon and build a whole new platform that focuses on decentralizing social media.
But these have their downfalls and disadvantages.
Reimagining social media
Lambda: Lambda want’s to reimagine social media by making an all in one platform, that also focuses on privacy, well-being, no to censorship, human content moderators, and is community-driven.
Decentralized: Decentralized social media platforms aim to remove censorship, they are made to compete with platforms like X, and they don’t tend to focus much on large scale but act as small individual entities that can be used separately. They also don’t tend to add much features on the platform because each platform can have a unique feature but follows the same protocol throughout.
Moderation
Lambda: Though Lambda is currently a prototype for gaining traction and validating the idea, it is planned to implement a moderation system in which anyone who applies, with certain criteria reached, will be given moderation access, this would allow the community to moderate content flow in the platform.
Decentralized: Aim to avoid centralized content moderation, but because of this approach, it can be challenging to address illegal or harmful content. This can lead to the free flow of illegal content on the platforms.
Technical Complexity
Lambda: Lambda is for now as a prototype, but once it gains traction it will be made into a fully scalable platform with proper management of technical issues. Using Lambda isn’t that hard, it just requires your email, an even better option is to use an email service that creates fake emails for you to use.
Decentralized: To use nostr or any other decentralized platform it requires a high level of technical understanding. Users need to manage private keys, and wallet addresses, and understand blockchain technology. This can be intimidating and confusing for the majority of non-technical species of humans, thus limiting the platform’s accessibility.
Feature and user experiences
Lambda: As mentioned before lambda is a prototype of what the real product would be, it does not have all the functionalities of a fully functional platform. Though some features might be not available in the prototype, would be available in the production-ready version, such as community feature(from Reddit), short nuntius, Latin for message(from X), and many other features that would be added to the real product.
Decentralized: Decentralized social media platforms do not offer the same level of features and user experiences as more established, centralized platforms do. This can make it less appealing for users who are accustomed to the convenience and polish of mainstream social media networks. Also taking into account, majority of these platforms act as alternatives only to X and not the entire social media market.
Of course, there can be good reasons to use decentralized platforms, but if you want to feel traditional social media, but without needing to worry about your privacy or well-being, than lambda is your choice.
Lambda wants to make your online experience better, focus on the stuff you want, not what you don’t want but still keep getting.
How to contribute ❓
Lambda functions because of its users, you give the idea, we implement the idea,
its for the people, by the people, of the people
Abraham privacy
To get started just hope over to the issue tab and write down an issue!
If it’s a code solution that you might have, just use the contribute.md file
What’s next?
To make Lambda a reality, lambda is following this 3 month long milestone, in which it would aim to get at least 5K users.
Why does this matter?
It matters cause this would help in many ways.
Because Lambda is a social media platform, it means that it would be competing against pre-established platforms that have a large user base and can make their users stick on their platforms for a longer time.
Lambda must get recognition, for which it needs to gain traction, by getting 5K users, Lambda plans to get help and support from those users in spreading the word about a far better social media alternative, that benefits everyone.
How can you help?
First of all, if you are reading this section, thanks a lot for showing interest and wanting to help Lambda reach this milestone, Lambda is nothing without its users.
To help Lambda reach such a milestone, please go ahead and share about lambda to your network, share it with your friends, family members and co-workers. For every new sign up the prototype version of lambda gets, it adds more and more trust and support to Lambda.
It’s more the better.
If Lambda reaches at least 5K users before October, Lambda could easily get seed funding of $5M max easily.
Once again thanks for showing support 😃.
