Episode 1
· 23:57
Hi, I'm Mark, the creator of Mosslet.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Isabella. I'm the head of marketing.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being with us today. Big news in the world of Mosslet. First of all, we're in beta. We're officially in beta at mosslet.com. If you join now, you get 60% off your subscription for life with the Friend60 coupon code.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. What's the biggest thing that's happened? We've changed from being metamorphic to Mosslet.
Speaker 2:Yay.
Speaker 1:You might be wondering, what is Mosslet? Mosslet is a privacy first social alternative. Basically, it's a private social network. It is the answer for everything that's wrong with Facebook
Speaker 2:And Instagram and Google and all of the social media platforms that track everything you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's no dark patterns, no data mining, just simple, easy, back to basic sharing and lots of privacy and security. Cool.
Speaker 2:What are dark patterns?
Speaker 1:Basically dark patterns are things like an infinite scroll, maybe something that's hard to find in your settings, like you have to click through a million different things and it's difficult to get to super complicated terms of service or privacy things that none of us read because it's just like Buried. Buried and insane to read. Okay. Essentially it's a design of the website or the application that you're using that either makes it really difficult to do something, like delete your account, or makes it really easy to do something you maybe don't want to do, like give up more of your information, like your personal information or something. Or it's something that tricks you in some way, so like tricks you into staying on longer than you maybe wanted to.
Speaker 1:So all of that kind of falls into what they call dark pattern designs.
Speaker 2:And is that really common across most social media?
Speaker 1:It is like the standard. Yeah. You find it in every single one. Yeah. And I think right now, like for our terms of service, we're using this service called IUBENDA to generate them.
Speaker 1:And I tried to make the most basic one possible, and I think it still kind of like hurts your eyes a little bit. So probably that'll be a future update to like make that even simpler. But our privacy policy, I like hand wrote, and that is super easy to read through and understand. It's not crazy.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Okay, so it's social media that's privacy first.
Speaker 1:Boom, yep, exactly right. Current features for Mosslet. You can have a profile which starts out as private by default, so that's nice. Then you can choose who you want to share it with, if you want to make it open to all your connections or public to anybody regardless of if they have an account or not. Then you have connections, which is your people page.
Speaker 1:It's how you manage people that you're connected to. You make requests, you can give them little labels. Instead
Speaker 2:of followers, they're connections?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nice. Yeah. The main difference there is that you can't With a follower, you could have someone following you that maybe you're not following yourself, but a connection's actually like a connection, like a real relationship in a sense. You have to be connected to someone in order for them to be connected to you.
Speaker 1:Someone can send you request and you're like, I don't want to be connected to that person. You can either just ignore it indefinitely or you can decline it privately and then they can't see any of your stuff anyways unless your stuff's public.
Speaker 2:Right, so there are public
Speaker 1:profiles. Profiles. So So there there are are public public profiles. Profiles. Okay.
Speaker 1:There's public posts and there's public memories. Then depending on your visibility setting of your profile, people who are connected to you or not can see things or not. Perfect. But so the whole idea there was to give you some sense of security over really who you're interacting with online. You kind of, in theory, have to know the person you're connecting with.
Speaker 2:Right. Okay, cool.
Speaker 1:Then you have posts and that's kind of very similar to what you think about posts on Twitter or X, which I'm just gonna call it Twitter because it just sounds inappropriate to use the other name. So like Twitter, only it's very simple right now because again, we're in beta and very streamlined and simple. So it's just like you can just make a thought post like words, text. You're not gonna send videos and images right now on your posts.
Speaker 2:Right. And I saw that you can actually edit your text posts, which I think is really cool because you can't do that on Twitter unless you pay for I think, their mid level premium Yeah. And even that, it still has ads, they just boast that it has less ads.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so could you talk about
Speaker 1:No
Speaker 2:ads ads on on
Speaker 1:There are no ads on Mosslet whatsoever. The biggest thing is that you are not being advertised to when you're on Mosslet. You're free, your brain is free, your mind's free, you're just getting on to connect and share with people and then you are getting off and back to actually living your life or thinking about something else. That's Posts. That's posts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can edit them. It's in real time, so like if someone's looking at your post and you edit it, boom. Their edit will be right there.
Speaker 2:Boom. You
Speaker 1:don't have to refresh the page or anything.
Speaker 2:I That's
Speaker 1:think that's cool. Same with deleting your post, gone in real time across the board. Then we have groups, so you can make groups of people and within the group then there's a live chat, so you can be having a little live chat or you can also make posts and make memories that are shared just with that group. In the group, it's possible that you're in the group with someone that you're not connected to, kind of like you would be if you went and hung out with your friends and they had some of their friends there that you hadn't met before.
Speaker 2:A friend of a friend.
Speaker 1:Exactly. In a group, it's possible you could be interacting with someone that you're not necessarily connected to. So we have different little ways of identifying people with little pseudonyms to work with the encryption. Then I guess in theory you could exchange information with someone through the group and then connect with them to have a connection outside the group as well. Okay.
Speaker 1:Then we have memories, and that's photos. It's kind of like Instagram. So your memories are you sharing photos of people that you're connected to. Similar to posts, all in real time, the picture is completely encrypted, so we can't see what it is unless you were to be like, hey, and share it with us, for example. But like someone who's working at Mosslet or something like has no ability to decrypt your picture, your image, and look at it without you being aware of it.
Speaker 2:Okay. And can people react or comment on the photos or memories?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. So right now you can do, right. What we call them remarks right now, and so you can leave a remark on a memory and you can do a little reaction emoji. We have several that you can pick from, and then you can also, like, leave a
Speaker 2:comment and stuff. Can you repost photos yet? No. Okay. Got it.
Speaker 2:Then
Speaker 1:next you got settings. Our settings are super simple and in your settings, really easy to read and understand and that's where you can do everything from update or cancel your subscription to full on just delete your account. It is all immediate and in real time. Yep, super easy. Those are like the biggest features and check us out, really excited.
Speaker 1:We're in beta so these are going be little bugs and stuff, but
Speaker 2:we want you to start using it and let us know
Speaker 1:what you like. This is basically your chance to be into the ground floor with us and shape the future of MOSFET. You could actually reach out
Speaker 2:to us and be like, Hey, I'd
Speaker 1:like to see X, Y, Z feature and we'll actually wanna hear from you. We'll be like, Yeah, we love that. We're gonna work on that right now. So probably much different experience than you get from somewhere like Big Tech where you reach out to someone if you can even find how to contact someone.
Speaker 2:My gosh. Yeah. Because Instagram doesn't even have real customer support. They just will let your account get hacked and then they don't care or anything like that. It's so frustrating.
Speaker 1:That's insane. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really. Oh, yeah. I lost my Instagram that I had for fourteen years because it got hacked, and Instagram didn't believe that it was me even though I had to scan my face on the app several times. They still were like, sorry. We don't believe it's you.
Speaker 2:So some scammer in Nigeria has my Instagram.
Speaker 1:That's insane. Yep. And I wonder what they're doing with your face.
Speaker 2:Datamining. We don't wanna know.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so we wanna hear from you. If you reach out to us at supportmosslett dot com or even directly to our head of marketing, Isabellamoslett dot com or selfmarketmoslett dot com, you will get a response from us.
Speaker 2:Please Okay. Go for have some questions.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:Sweet. Okay. So my first question, why is it called Mosslet? Because it's really cute and the logo's really cute, but I don't know why. So Pretend I don't know why.
Speaker 2:I'm the average person now.
Speaker 1:Okay. So our
Speaker 2:I'm parent speaking for the people.
Speaker 1:Our parent company is called Moss Piglet Corporation and I formed that with my cousin and my dad. It's a family owned, just little small tech company. Moss Piglet is a water bear. It's a nickname for a little water bear.
Speaker 2:Oh, like the things that you would see in a microscope. Like in seventh grade when you go and you collect dirty pond water.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. We thought about It's
Speaker 2:so cute.
Speaker 1:I really like We thought about calling it dirty pond water, but that sounded like a production studio for the latest great movies, so I was like, okay, maybe a water bear. And then mosslet, it just kinda sounds like a little moss piglet, like a little baby moss piglet.
Speaker 2:Perfect, and we love moss, so that's exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We actually kinda have a little mascot that we call moss now.
Speaker 2:Aw. Okay. And so you said anyone who signs up now gets the 60 off discount for life. So what does that monthly bill look like for 60%?
Speaker 1:Well, normal price monthly is $15 a month. So just to possibly botch the math off the top of my head, think it's around like $7.
Speaker 2:That's what I thought loosely too. Okay. So
Speaker 1:And then if you sign up for an annual subscription just normally without the discount, you're saving like multiple because it's $15 a month normally and it's only $99 a year, so you're saving a big amount. Then on top of that, you get 60 percent. Right now, if you sign up, you could basically get the year for, I think, under $40 I think it's like $39.5 or something.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. That's beautiful. Then when the thirty day free trial is over, because I can't remember if we mentioned that, but you, no matter who you are, have a thirty day free trial before we charge you anything so you can make up your mind.
Speaker 1:Correct.
Speaker 2:When do I find out that I'm about to be charged? Because I know a lot of free trials make their money by, you know, just forgetting to tell you that the trial's over and they rely on you totally forgetting so they can take your money. I don't imagine that Mosslet is in the business of that.
Speaker 1:No. We're not. So you get a notification seven days before your free trial is about to expire. A week before it expires, you'll get an email to the email that you use to sign up for your subscription. We use Stripe, which is our payment provider.
Speaker 1:They handle all the payment data. We don't handle any of that. Stripe's like the industry standard, super secure and private and safe. They will send you an email and then they'll also send you an email after you've subscribed every time you're three days before it's to renew being like, hey, your subscription's about to renew, and you can cancel at any time.
Speaker 2:Cool. So every month, three days before the thirty every twenty seven days, Stripe will email me saying I'm gonna be charged.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Unless people just let us know that they unless people let us know that, like, actually, they don't need to have that notification, in which case, like, we can change that so that you can
Speaker 2:Right. Because that we are in beta, so if you find yourself, you know, just getting grumpy over the email, then please let myself or Mark know at our Mosslet emails, then we can change that.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I just thought that, like, I you might wanna think it's nice if you sign up for the annual because then it's, like, only, you know, once a year, three days before the year's up, you'll get reminded that you're about to subscribe again. To me, that seems nice.
Speaker 2:Cool. And it does feel like less of a subscription model if you just pay for the year. You know? Yeah. Because you're paying security, for the peace of mind, for the, you know, not being advertised, everything.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And Okay. Cool. And you're getting it for, like, $39 instead of a 100, so huge huge incentive, I feel like.
Speaker 2:Okay. So why should people wanna pay for it though compared to Instagram and Facebook being free and already readily available?
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. So basically kind of I try to think about how to explain this in a really simple way, but really like Okay, maybe what you're asking is like why should you I mean, can you What are you really asking?
Speaker 2:Okay, we'll cut this part out.
Speaker 1:Because like the question isn't one of these questions.
Speaker 2:It is one of these questions.
Speaker 1:It's little different.
Speaker 2:You gotta think on your feet. Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, why would you pay because people already have free. Right?
Speaker 2:That's Yeah. So I guess my next my next question is why should I care what happens to my data in terms of paying to have privacy? Why is data privacy important?
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. So few ways to think about this. I guess, well, is important to these companies in a sense, the easiest sum up is because that's where all the money is, right? So twentieth century, it was oil.
Speaker 1:Oil was everything. And you control oil, control everything. Now it's data, you control data, you control everything. So data, that's why they say data's the new oil. And why is it important to us is because that data is actually like really data about every single individual person on the planet.
Speaker 1:So it's it's a Okay. Massive scale, and that data is used to control you.
Speaker 2:And does that apply to Google as well as Facebook and Instagram?
Speaker 1:Yes. And so yeah. And they Google's like credited with pioneering everything. And then Facebook copied them into their social network and social network turned out to be a great way to kind of copy Google. And now you have Instagram and all these other things, are all under Meta or Facebook.
Speaker 1:And it's all about yeah. It's all about getting more and more data on you and then using that data to control you.
Speaker 2:Okay. So yeah. I asked about Google because something crazy happened. So I wanted to search something. I'm trying to stop saying Google something because it's like it's like it's rotting my brain.
Speaker 2:But okay. So I was but I'm also guilty of having the Google app. I don't use Safari or the Internet or anything on my I straight up just have the Google app.
Speaker 1:Although you're looking at DuckDuckGo more now, I think.
Speaker 2:I do use yeah. So
Speaker 1:Sounds amazing.
Speaker 2:Privacy thing. But okay. I don't remember what I was supposed to be looking up on Google. But with the search bar empty, there's a bunch of, quote, unquote, trending searches, which I already know, like, that can be just totally made up. Is no, like, real proof that those things are trending.
Speaker 2:It can just be stuff that they think you'd be interested in. And one of the things that it said was trending was Shrek five. And so it sounds so silly, but Shrek was a really big part of my childhood, and I see memes about it pretty often. I engage with the Shrek content.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I clicked on it, and I got into a pretty big rabbit hole about Shrek five and when it's coming out and who the actors and I actresses are gonna texted everyone I know about it, literally, and they were all excited. So then they were all researching it. And by the time I was done doing the research that I never even wanted to do in contacting all of my friends, twenty minutes had gone by. Totally forgot why I picked up my phone in the first place. And then I was just kind of it all wrapped up, and I was like, oh, that was that was a moment where my brain was just controlled by an algorithm, it felt like.
Speaker 2:So it was weird because it's information I am interested in, but it took me away from my own ability to control what I wanted to do. So that is what made me uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:Perfect
Speaker 2:Okay. So is this a dark pattern, would you say?
Speaker 1:This isn't really a dark pattern, but it is an example of what's actually happening. And this is a great example because in your description of this, not only are you shown this thing and steered in a certain way, but then it literally leads through all the steps to where you're taking actions in the real world, texting people in the real world, and then they are changing what they're doing in their life. It's a benign example because you're just looking up Shrek and it's advertising Shrek and now people are thinking about Shrek five and then they're talking to people and then they're sharing things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, was looking up a recipe or directions or something about school and then it popped up before I could even type anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so that's kind of how it works. It's designed to know exactly when to do that for every single person. So what's interesting about that is it did a few different things. It hijacked your thoughts. Knew how to manipulate you emotionally.
Speaker 1:And then it steered your actual behavior in the real world.
Speaker 2:The Shrek five ad essentially is what it is got there because let's say it's DreamWorks, they paid for it to be there. And so the whole thing with Mosslet is that we don't have anything like that that will influence your thinking. It's really just your friends and whoever you connect with share what they want to share. Yeah. And then they go on and live their life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So essentially, nowadays, that model and all these kind of data mining pipelines are all feeding back to these giant companies, to Google, to Meta. That's why you read about maybe in the news, a healthcare provider now has been sharing everyone's health data secretly with Facebook, or with Amazon, sorry, I couldn't believe I forgot Amazon, and Microsoft now. So on Mosslette, you're free of that.
Speaker 2:Yay.
Speaker 1:Oh, so can I give one more example on kind of what happens with this stuff now?
Speaker 2:Yes, please.
Speaker 1:So Shrek five was amazing. I think another thing example is personalized pricing. Have you heard of that?
Speaker 2:Right. I saw an article, I think it was last week about how Walmart is starting to roll out digital price tags on things and the CEO came out and said, yeah, you know, when it's hot, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. Kind of thing where it's just constantly using data to make people feel destabilized or whatever.
Speaker 1:That's awful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gross and awful.
Speaker 1:So one way we protect against this is with encryption, because at the end of the day, it's about trust. It doesn't matter if you can trust me or not, because I can't get into your data. We designed it with this encryption so that it's safe even from us who run the service.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And you can't see anything because it's all encrypted.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So you keep saying that word, but I'm not totally sure what it means. Can you encrypted see the jumbled or anything? No. Okay. So right now, it's only a website.
Speaker 2:Can we expect an app?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So making an app is so important to me. And so if anyone's listening to this can help us make an app, please reach out to me directly at markmoslett dot com because I would love to make an app. We are gonna have one whether it happens sooner versus later, it just depends on how quickly I can get help with that.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. Alright. So you get 60% off for life with the code friends 60, is that right?
Speaker 1:Yes, friends 60.
Speaker 2:Awesome. The feature I'm most excited for is being able to reply to posts. And then my second most excited for feature is being able to crop my profile picture. Because right now, the way profile pictures are is you just upload the photo, the photo is the photo, that's your profile photo. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But sometimes I'm far away in the photo and I wanna be the photo, not have the whole background and everything be in it. And then, let's see, how often can we expect other updates would you say?
Speaker 1:I think I'd say monthly. I I feel like Oh. We have a Substack that we
Speaker 2:can What Substack?
Speaker 1:Substack's like like an online newsletter, a place you can sign up and you can follow us for free or you can, you know, subscribe to it to donate and support us. But you can follow along for free, and that's where I believe Isabella is gonna be making, like, a monthly update on how things are going. And then
Speaker 2:also you
Speaker 1:can reach out to us anytime again with any questions and you'll hear back from us.
Speaker 2:Right and we are active on MOSFET, we're gonna be using it to talk about updates, talk about fun stuff going on, and then also just share little things about our life. Because it is supposed to be a place to connect, we don't want it to become a business hub. That's, we're not No. Trying to make this a place of e commerce or anything like that, like Instagram and Facebook have very and TikTok now have really heavily become a place of online shopping
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In which it, you know, tricks you into buying things just because it shows you it a million times.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. And that's it. Thanks so much for being here Awesome. Sign up for Mosslet today at mosslet.com.
Speaker 2:Yep. Friend 60 for 60 off brings it to like $7 a month for your privacy to be nice and secure and for connections to just be there. You're not being sold anything on Mosslet. Woo. Yay.
Speaker 2:Bye. Thanks for listening.
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