Last month we introduced you to Mastodon, just in case you were getting shitty with Twitter: The Elon Musk Era. Maston since took off, but just like Tumblr, Reddit, Cohost and CounterSocial, it has its limitations. Then, Hive Social, the next platform given the blessing (or curse) of being a Twitter alternative was on the rise, hitting 1 million users in 24 hours.
Over the last few weeks, Hive has been booming, with many flocking to the platform that promised an alternative to Twitter. But, as many have since pointed out, the team at Hive Social is tiny. They’ve suddenly had to scale for millions of users, with the capacity previously to handle a few thousand.
What is Hive Social?
On its website, Hive Social says: Two college students with a new approach to social media. Sounds very Facebook-y. The platform was developed in 2019 by 22-year-old CEO Kassandra Pop.
Hive is a social media platform that wants to create a better experience for its users through a chronological feed (literally Zuckerberg should just do this and make everyone in the world ever happy). It combines other features from other platforms like Instagram, Twitter and even MySpace, such as photos, videos, status updates, it has a music section and you can also monetise posts. In addition to the chronological feed, which is enough to sell me on it, Hive Social also lets users post links. This is actually because it does away with personalised algorithms, which only TikTok seems to have actually nailed.
It’s more like an Instagram-Twitter hybrid, if we had to simplify it.
But there are a few security concerns.
German cyber group Zerforschung has issued a warning that doesn’t beat around the bush. The blog post detailing its concerns with Hive Social is pretty to the point: Warning: do not use Hive Social. We thought we’d take a look at what they’re saying.
Warning: Do not use Hive Social ⚠️🐝
We found multiple critical security vulnerabilities in the App, leaking private messages, posts, images and user data like phone numbers, emails and birthdates.https://t.co/r02xXr4fQR
— zerforschung (@zerforschung) November 30, 2022
According to Zerforschung, there are a number of critical vulnerabilities contained within the Hive Social platform.
“The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages. This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login,” the security group wrote.
Attackers, they said, can also overwrite data such as posts owned by other users. Like an edit button, but for posts penned by not you.
Zerforschung said it has a tonne of other security concerns but for privacy reasons, it won’t be sharing them. It recommends using Mastodon. We recommend staying vigilant.
This article has been updated since it was first published.