Product Hunt Daily Digest
October 4th, 2021

Where do you go when Facebook is down?

Did you know that Facebook et al. was down yesterday? Thought so.

We hope you felt prepared. After all, we just told you about apps that aren’t Instagram Kids, introduced you to the Anti-Instagram, and explored ways to make social fun again.

The downtime across Facebook’s apps didn’t just cause boredom though. Some felt the moment was a wake-up call about how much they rely on Facebook’s apps to stay connected. Since businesses and health care providers have started using WhatsApp, going offline for hours at a time may have increasingly more serious consequences in the future, too.

When Facebook went down, millions of users reportedly rushed to privacy-focused messaging apps like Signal (which received a tweet endorsement from Edward Snowden) and Telegram. Telegram even reported slowing of its own app because of the surges.

Outside of Facebook shortages, Telegram users are often swayed to migrate because the company uses multiple data centers distributed worldwide and focuses on message encryption. Telegram’s latest iteration launched last month, bringing with it features like live streams with unlimited viewers, the option to remove captions from media, and the ability to hide sender names when forwarding.

The app has grown to 500 million monthly active users despite regularly receiving bad press, largely due to growth in misinformation on the app and Telegram’s moderation policies (it's sparked respectful debate in our own community, too.)

On the other hand, there are those broadly advocating for decentralized social as a Facebook alternative. We wrote about the concept of decentralized social with the launch of DeSo and Bitclout, but there are other players in this space.

Uhive is a creator-first social network, like Bitclout but with a metaverse layer, too. Similar to Bitclout, Uhive says its mission is to support its users, not a centralized entity (i.e. the company or makers who built it). Two of its features have appealed to users most of all: the ability to mint your user profile and its moderation protocol, which allows any user the opportunity to become a content moderator.

Uhive also uses its own token to enable the economy within Uhive, but unlike Bitclout, tokens are built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Twitter has weighed in. How are you getting ready for another outage?

Converse in the metaverse
TOLLS TAKING A TOLL

That moment you when you see a toll road coming up and you can't even.

Uproad launched yesterday with a solution to frustrations caused by unclear toll costs and paying your toll fees. The app enables you to get notified about the tolls you pass, know toll costs upfront, and make automated toll payments.

Hit the (toll) road
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