“When you deploy Capsule right now - I have a prototype that does almost nothing running - it’s basically one binary. “That is kind of terrifying,” he suggests.Ĭapsule would seek to route around the risk of mass deplatforming via “easy to deploy” p2p microservices - starting with a forthcoming web app. He also points to a lawsuit that’s been filed in US court seeking damages and injunctive relief from Apple for allowing Telegram, a messaging platform with 500M+ users, to be made available through its iOS App Store - “despite Apple’s knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten, and coerce members of the public” - raising concerns about “the odds of these efforts catching on”. But he says he is concerned about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape Internet speech - whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter’s trust & safety lead or Amazon Web Services (which recently yanked the plug on right-wing social network Parler for failing to moderate violent views). Kobeissi also takes that view, while adding the caveat that he’s not “personally” concerned about Trump’s deplatforming. Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down US president Donald Trump’s access to their megaphones - a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic. Extant examples include ActivityPub, Diaspora, Mastodon, p2p Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Solid and Urbit, to name a few. The list of decentralized/p2p/federated protocols and standards already out there is very long - even while usage remains low. Completely insane.”Ĭapsule is just the latest contender for retooling Internet power structures by building infrastructure that radically decentralizes social platforms to make speech more resilient to corporate censorship and control. “But by the end of the day - last Sunday, eight days ago - I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10M with $100k in pre-seed funding, which is insane.
I’ve been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services,” he continues. Instead the tweet “just completely exploded” and he found himself raising $100k “in a single day” - with $50k paid in there and then. “I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I’ll set up a Kickstarter,” he tells us. But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept. The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10M, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype - hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1M-$1.5M) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps.įor now there’s nothing to see beyond Capsule’s landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). It will be lightweight, user friendly and secure.Īre you interested in funding its development?
These then connect to one another in a mesh, allowing following and sharing posts. I'm designing a decentralized social media solution where each user hosts their own microservice. The idea for Capsule started with a tweet about reinventing social media.Ī day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi - best known for authoring the open source e2e encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) - had pulled in a pre-seed investment of $100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J.
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