place4pals's mission is to create and operate a minimalist, non-profit, and open-source social media platform with an emphasis on protecting users' privacy.

Today's social media platforms have become plagued with advertisements that obscure community-generated content. Furthermore, privacy concerns have risen to the surface, with more customers wishing not to be tracked or have their personal data sold. We want to fill the gap and create a non-profit social media alternative where privacy is paramount and customers are no longer considered the product. Our incorporation as a non-profit entity helps ensure that our goals are aligned with our customers. We believe that the current monetization practices used in the for-profit social media industry have ultimately harmed customers and weakened their social media experience. The algorithms that operate modern social feeds push down the voices of the community and artificially prop up promoted content. By creating a non-profit alternative, customers can find respite in a platform that is not hell-bent on aggregating and selling their data. Privacy practices are also a rising concern, with end-to-end-encryption technologies becoming more widely adopted by many SaaS providers. We wish to incorporate end to end encryption where possible, including group chats and information kept solely by the individual (saved posts, personal notes, etc). The open-source nature of our project would also provide transparency to our security and privacy practices, a feature which is absent in many proprietary codebases from the social media giants.

We seek to utilize the latest web technologies available to create a platform-agnostic application built on highly-scalable infrastructure. Currently, we're using React Native on the frontend (which deploys to web, iOS, and Android), and NodeJS, GraphQL, and PostgreSQL served through AWS resources on the backend. Since privacy is paramount in our mission, we also intend to incorporate end-to-end-encryption technology where possible. We are currently in the alpha phase of development for our social media platform. At this time, users are able to register for an account, log in on web or mobile, make posts with rich text formatting and photo attachments, and comment on other users' posts.