What is OpenCola?

OpenCola is a non-profit company building free, open-source software as an alternative to big tech social media. We're creating tools that put you and your community in control of your personal data and information flow.

Our toolkit enables people to build trust networks based on transparency, accountability, personal control, and security—values we believe are essential to individual freedom. The first application is a collaborative media tool that looks like existing social media but addresses its fundamental trust issues.

OpenCola is a reaction to the current Internet, where a handful of companies have extracted and exploited the value of our data and relationships. We represent a paradigm shift that inverts the power structure, returning to the Internet's original vision where everyone can participate and benefit equally.

How is OpenCola's approach different?

Rather than following the mantras that have guided big tech, OpenCola takes a different approach:

• Move fast and fix things: Where Facebook championed "move fast and break things," we prioritize rapid innovation that repairs and improves.
• Be Good: Rather than Google's "don't be evil," we proactively do good for people and communities.
• Think Differently: Building on Apple's "Think Different," we emphasize thoughtful innovation that meaningfully challenges the status quo.

Where do I get the application?

Sounds great, but what does OpenCola actually do?

Our collaborative media tool is an alternative to big tech social media. Here's what the feed looks like:

Beyond familiar social features, OpenCola offers:

• Local First Data: Your data lives on your device by default. You decide where it goes and can collect data from existing sites and applications.
• Personal Search: Everything you and your peers post is searchable.
• Personal Archive: Saved content is archived for offline access.
• Personas: Express yourself authentically to different audiences. Share with friends differently than family or colleagues, avoiding the "lowest common denominator" problem of traditional social media.
• Trusted Connections: Connect by exchanging tokens via email, SMS, or chat. You only reveal yourself to people you trust. No bots, scammers, trolls, ads, algorithms, or third-party manipulation unless you allow it.
• Information Centricity: Activity around shared posts and links is aggregated, enabling collaboration around ideas rather than personal celebrity.
• Community Moderation: Information flows only when you choose to save it, not because an algorithm promotes it. Mark content as untrusted to help peers filter misinformation.

What do you mean by trust?

OpenCola maximizes trust through four core principles:

• Transparency: Everything is visible—the code, who you interact with, and where information comes from.
• Accountability: Those who abuse trust lose influence and cannot regain it without rebuilding trust.
• Personal Control: You control how you interact, how you use the application, and how your information is used.
• Security: Cryptographic techniques verify identity, ensure data integrity, and keep information private.

Profit-maximizing companies minimize these principles. Our trust model enables freedoms essential to a healthy society:

• Freedom of Identity: Create personas for different groups, allowing authentic expression without the "lowest common denominator" problem.
• Freedom of Association: Interact with anyone you choose and exclude those who violate trust. No engagement-driven connection suggestions that lead to malicious actors.
• Freedom from Manipulation: Bots, trolls, and scammers can't infiltrate your network. People, not algorithms, control what information gets shared.
• Freedom from Surveillance: Only trusted people see what you share, minimizing third-party data collection.
• Freedom to Walk Away: You control your data completely. Disconnect the network anytime and continue using your data however you want.

So why should I trust OpenCola?

Fair question. We’ve all been burned too many times. Companies have been telling us what trust is and that we should just trust them for a long time.

We're a non-profit. Our code is open source and free to modify. Your data isn't visible to us. We can't extract value from your networks or information for profit—and neither can anyone else (unless you want them to).

While we provide centralized services for convenience, you can run everything yourself.

OpenCola is free in the freedom sense—take it, modify it, sell it. We can never take it away. It runs as long as your device operates.

True competition requires competing incentive models. We reject the notion that corporate profit equals consumer good. We maximize trust and value for users, not growth for investors and shareholders.

How does OpenCola address issues created by social media?

• Information Silos: Big tech wants your data to be locked into their platforms so that it’s hard for you to leave. This means that you can’t use your data for any purpose other than what companies allow you to do with it. With OpenCola, your data lives wherever you choose, on your local device by default. You are essentially “always migrated”, so there is no switching cost. You can use any application on top of your data.
• The Attention Economy: Companies profit by keeping you trapped. We don't use ads and have no incentive to lock you in.
• Privacy Abuse: Personal data is sold without your knowledge. Your private data is encrypted and invisible to us.
• Corporate Power Concentration: Large corporations suppress competition and change policies opaquely. OpenCola provides a viable alternative.
• Misinformation: Big Tech Algorithms promote content for ad revenue and manipulation. In OpenCola, information is traceable—bad and bad actors can be held accountable, be cut off and lose influence when trust is breached. Content flows only when trusted enough to save and can be marked as untrusted.
• Polarization: Engagement algorithms drive people apart. We don't optimize for engagement or promote sensational content.
• Stifled Innovation: Big tech focuses on features that generate revenue, and often leads to situations like having to pay to remove features. With OpenCola, anybody can modify the application to suit their needs, and valuable features that don’t necessarily generate revenue can be offered.
• Bots: Centralized platforms are easy targets for manipulation. Trust-based connections make bots impractical.

Who are you, and why are you building OpenCola?

We are people that are tired of the state of the Internet and would like to help fix it, because it’s a problem worth solving, even if we don’t make loads of money doing so. The founders of OpenCola all worked at the original OpenCola, founded in 1999, which was building something similar in spirit, but was unfortunately too far ahead of its time. We’ve all gained a lot of experience and seen what the Internet has become and would like to do what we can to steer it in the right direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you stop bad people from using OpenCola?

We don’t. Anything we do to monitor or control activity requires invading privacy and undermines our trust values. Every technology has unintended consequences. The Internet enables bad things, but if you’re reading this, then you’re using it, despite the fact that people can do bad things with it, likely because you believe that it brings more good than harm. Similarly, we believe that the world is better with OpenCola than without it, even if people use it in ways that we don’t support.

Does OpenCola address “Filter Bubbles”?

Yes and no. Since people, rather than algorithms, control the flow of information, algorithmic filter bubbles are not an issue. But people have their own biases and preferences, which can also lead to filter bubbles as well as “echo chambers”. These are social, not technical issues, that we believe cannot be fixed by forcing people to consume information that they disagree with. Who or what would even decide what people should see? Certainly not us. We believe that the trust environment provided by OpenCola, which is less polarized, is more likely to open minds than anything offered by ad driven, for profit companies or any algorithmic / technological solution.

How do you connect with people you don’t know?

Traditional social media has a loose trust model, which allows people to connect with or follow other people with little or no permission required. With OpenCola, because we’re focused on trusted connections, currently both ends of a connection need to agree to share information. As publishing is a useful activity, though, we intend to support a publisher model, where you can create personas that can be connected to by anyone.

Supporting publisher search introduces verification problems. Publishers would communicate their IDs outside OpenCola (like email addresses), and we'd host cryptographically verified details about where to retrieve their information.