We want everyone to use the solutions that work best for them; Market dominance is not our goal. That is why we talk openly about alternatives to Reunicorn and under what circumstances they can be useful.
We love the emphasis on meeting up in person that Beer With Me has. Reunicorn extends this emphasis on drinking together here and now, to alcohol unrelated gatherings right now as well as scheduled in the future. Also, Reunicorn makes it even easier to be sure that you can reach who ever you would like to meet with, providing up-to-date contact information. And while the three Swedes behind Beer With Me seem like nice folks, we hope that you can sleep even better knowing that Reunicorn could not even sell information about your drinking, meeting or other social aspects even if we changed our minds.
If you are just looking for sharing your current location with others, Glympse, MyGrid, and Paralino are aimed at that and at least offer end-to-end encryption. However, all of them leak meta-data to the service provider(s) and are therefore less privacy friendly than Reunicorn.
Reunicorn shares the focus on social connections with other popular social media platforms. However, we want to enable people to reach out to each other and meet up, instead of trying to bind them to their screens, endlessly browsing content by themselves to show as many advertisements as possible. The most striking difference is: With Reunicorn you are not the product. But if you want to share photos or videos, they are the better place to do it.
Find My and comparable offerings are great for finding lost things. You also need to trust large corporations to keep their promise that they will not mine and/or monetize your data. If that does not bother you, they can be good options as well. We are particularly excited about having all four aspects of location sharing integrated into one map for you with Reunicorn:
CardDAV is an excellent companion for making sure that the contact details that Reunicorn keeps up-to-date on your phone are also available on all your other devices. To complement Reunicorn’s strong privacy when using CardDAV on the side, EteSync can be an interesting option.
On the level of peer-to-peer frameworks, we use Veilid instead of libp2p or IPFS because Veilid provides IP privacy, which is very important to us to prevent leakage of social graphs, i.e. the information of who of our users are connected.
Are you still left wondering, for an alternative we have not listed yet, why or in which scenarios Reunicorn is the better solution? Then send us an e-mail to alternatives|at|reunicorn.app and we will try out best to add it here.