The French startup Mandala has launched the open beta of Humankinds.io, a new type of social network, with ethics, it is secure and private. This enables its users to meet and speak with their peers from all over the world.
While massive data reselling and targeted advertisements is prevelant, Mandala has at its heart the aim to connect humans ethically. For this purpose, they released humankinds.io, a web application aimed at giving back their privacy to its users whilst also allowing them to communicate with their peers.
Mandala won’t monetise its users the way most social networks, instead they will be charged a subscription at a marginal cost. This will make Humankinds the product rather than its users. The open beta will be totally free, but it’s not a viable long term way of doing business.
By letting users test the web application during the crowdfunding campaign that will begin in the first week of January, this will help fund the development of the final and redesigned version that will be officially launched at the beginning of March.
Humankinds was designed to find and exchange with humans easily thanks to an ever evolving hierarchical structure of characteristics with users votes. Everyone has the opportunity to personnalise their profile and choose hobbies, interests and values to facilitate connections with peers and posts of interest.
To avoid echo chambers, many features push users to connect with humans without common characteristics or to discover posts exclusively not part of the users interests. Naturally, the web application features will evolve during the beta and after the official launch.
The major difference between the beta version and the official version, is the limited number of humans with access to the application. Humankinds is designed to only host human users, so there will be no robots or spam. Everyone will have to pass ID verification during the registration process. It is also worth noting that by limiting the number of available places, this will allow all users to have access to quality services, based on moderation and perfectly sized infrastructure.
Mandala is a company founded by Baptiste and Marie, a French couple who did not find a solution that suited their needs. So they decided to create it.
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