Mastodawn

A quick note on Nolto.
On 15 March 2026 its creator Jonathan Tensetti intentionally closed the service and deleted his Fediverse account.

What he built - Europe’s second decentralised LinkedIn alternative on ActivityPub - was gloriously vibecoded but effective. It showed, with hard data and testimonials, that the demand for a sovereignty-respecting professional platform is real.

I had been working in parallel: detailed research on technical choices, product mechanics, business-model viability under distributed/FOSS conditions, and how to test everything in practice for such a product. Nothing yolo — but nothing yet proven in production either. Jonathan precluded me by just yolo'ing the Nolto MVP. Thanks for that.

To move from proven demand to a solid, maintainable product I need proper capital, runway and possibly 1-2 additional people.
I'm looking for European-aligned funding - preferably from Germany, Poland or Denmark - networks that value independence and data protection without the usual bureaucratic overhead.

If you know the right people in those circles, please connect me with them before the current momentum fades.

Serious replies and boosts appreciated.

#Nolto #noltosocial #ActivityPub #DigitalSovereignty #Fediverse #linkedin #opensource #foss #networking

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JTI 5d ago

2 days later the first attempt at professional networking on ActivityPub, Flockingbird [2] archived their repositories.
Nolto states a similar reason for stopping their efforts:

"As the platform grew, the criticism grew too. Some of it was fair and helpful. Some of it was not. Some of it became personal. Projects like Flockingbird have gone through similar experiences. Small, independent efforts can quickly be treated as if they were fully staffed institutions.

Nolto was never that. It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen.

At this point I have decided to shut it down." [1]

We should learn from these two great prototypes and start the third one right to finally deliver on the idea proven by them. It should be possible in a sovereign, proper FOSS and economically viable and self-sustainable way.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Tensetti/Nolto/src/commit/d4020977444922374916715031af486d1a8981c7/src/pages/Index.tsx
[2] https://github.com/Flockingbird

Nolto/src/pages/Index.tsx at d4020977444922374916715031af486d1a8981c7

Nolto

Codeberg.org

JTI 2d ago

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JTI

Looks like Nolto found a future - just in a different field.

https://github.com/Jtensetti/fediverse-career-nexus/blob/c0ed249ca3422a4af09b254f0dfe4109d564e395/.lovable/plan.md

I reiterate my point on "this needs appropriate amounts of capital to execute as federated professional social network". Especially if it's supposed to not instantly fall into the extraction-business-model-trap / surveillance-capitalism-trap.

#nolto #noltosocial #linkedin #linked #surveilancecapitalism #extractivecapitalism

fediverse-career-nexus/.lovable/plan.md at c0ed249ca3422a4af09b254f0dfe4109d564e395 · Jtensetti/fediverse-career-nexus

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