Notice of service shutdown: qpost

qpost is a social network I started in Summer of 2018 when I was looking to build an alternative to Twitter. I spent a good chunk of my time on it between 2018 and 2020 and really enjoyed building it.

However, I have since come to realize that qpost is not going to replace Twitter and it shouldn’t. I no longer believe in the need for an alternative to Twitter. I believe the entire model of Twitter has aged poorly and should be replaced entirely. Neither do I believe in services that only exist to be “alternatives” to other flawed popular services.

Most existing Twitter alternatives are heavily politically influenced, which is something I never wanted qpost to be. The initial idea of a “censorship-free alternative with free speech” however seemed to make people believe otherwise. I often noticed people believing qpost was just another Gab or Parler.

The name did not really help either. I am not a marketing genius and didn’t come up with the name “qpost”, so I was upset to find out that it is mostly associated with Qatar Post and Q-Anon. It was incredibly hard to be seen and be taken seriously with a name like that.

These are all things that led to me deciding to shut down qpost. This is a decision I have made a long time ago and it is about time to follow through with it. I have moved on to other projects, and already shut down other deprecated projects of mine (namely Yoshino Chat Bot and Kostenlos-WLAN), so it only makes sense to do the same with qpost.

qpost will officially shut down on June 1st 2022. New registrations have been disabled as of the publication of this post and the Android app has been unlisted from the Google Play Store. After this date, all data including user accounts, posts, follows, favorites and anything else will be permanently deleted.

qpost allowed users to either create native accounts or sign up with Gigadrive accounts. Gigadrive accounts will not be affected by this shut down. Those who wish to convert their qpost accounts to Gigadrive accounts should contact support@gigadrivegroup.com.

The source code of qpost was published under the GNU General Public License v3.0 and will remain as an archive on GitHub and GitLab.

Thank you very much for supporting this project.

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