Hi! I'm Josh Ellis. I've written a brand new, free, open source social network called Kowloon that's focused on privacy, protecting yourself, and building community on both small and global levels. Kowloon has no ads, no data mining of any kind, and there's no corporation running it - it's made up of individual communities run by people or organizations that all link together so you can publish your posts and share them with whomever you choose around the world - a specific circle of friends or family, other people in your own community server, or the whole world. It's completely free to use as either a community admin or an individual user, and soon we'll be providing affordable hosting for anyone who doesn't want to maintain their own server.

Kowloon has a lot of features that other networks don't have,like different post types that you can use to filter your timeline - so you can only see short posts or images or links to other sites - and rich text in posts, as well as the ability to not only control who can see any post, but who can reply and even react. There's honestly too many cool things to list here, but it's all designed to make sure that your private posts are only visible to whom you choose, your public posts are visible to the world, and no one can spam or harass you. It's designed to do what people think social networks are for - share your life events, thoughts and creativity with whomever you choose - rather than what corporate social networks are actually for, which is capturing as much data as possible about you to sell to third parties. And it's free and open source, so you can ensure that there's no hidden stuff in there to spy on you.

I'm currently in the final stages of development - fixing bugs and tweaking the user interface for the Web frontend - and about to begin public alpha testing. Once I've made sure everything is working with the Web interface, I'll begin work on React Native-based mobile apps... and that's where you come in.

Kowloon isn't owned by a corporation - it has been a labor of love that has taken six years of hard work to build entirely by myself, building off of over thirty years of online community experience going back to BBSes in the late 1980s and my experience both as a full stack web developer and as a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and writer. But there's no company paying my bills. In order to write mobile apps, I need mobile devices to test it on. My personal Samsung Galaxy S24+ is fine for Android, but I need iOS devices to really test it properly.

So I'm asking the community to help me get an iPhone 17 Pro and an iPad Pro so I don't have to pay for them out of pocket. The 17 Pro is the most widely sold iPhone right now, and I'm also asking for the price of an 11" iPad Pro so I can make sure the iPadOS version is as rich and tablet-specific as I can make it. The total for both devices here in the UK where I live is around £2100 total.

All donors of any amount will get their names listed on Kowloon's site and Github repo as hall of famers. If you can't donate, you can also show your support by purchasing Kowloon merch like stickers and t-shirts at Redbubble!

Help me make sure Kowloon is as easy to use for as wide an audience as possible. Even if you don't have an iPhone yourself, if you're as excited by the potential of an alternative to corporate social media as we are, you know that iOS support is crucial for adoption.

I honestly believe that Kowloon represents a revolutionary idea in social media: an app that doesn't merely try to recreate corporate social media but is actually better than anything they have to offer - with more features, human-oriented relationships and powerful privacy and filtering tools that are designed to increase enjoyment and empowerment rather than engagement. I think it's gonna change the world. I just need a little help to get her over the finish line.