The Dropon privacy page immediately makes it clear that your data isn’t shared. Not with governments, not with data brokers, or any third parties. That sounds a little like something Ello says in their privacy policy, except for one part:

Ello does not have any affiliated companies right now. But if we do in the future, we may share information with them, too.

That’s a bit worrying.

Dropon also mentions that it encrypts in-transit data using SSL, something I found no mention of on Ello. It’s a little odd that a social network like Ello, that seems to boast about its privacy so much, doesn’t encrypt data which can otherwise easily be snooped by the NSA.

Another thing that Dropon seems to do right is giving the user complete control over their own content. For example, when you click to delete your content, it’s gone forever (i.e. removed completely from their servers). Or that you’re able to share content with specific groups of people, whether it be the public, just friends/followers, or privately (just yourself).

This is all great news for Dropon, however, the biggest difference in privacy between Dropon and Ello is that Dropon is based in Canada as apposed to the United States. This is good news for a few reasons:

The Canadians don’t have a rampant organization trying to get its hands on any data they can (i.e. the NSA). Your data, stored in Canada, is not subject to the US Patriot Act. The Patriot Act allows the US government to search for data, without notice to the owner.

All of this is great news for users looking for a place where privacy is respected, but what about Dropon’s design and features?

Design

If you haven’t already read the Medium article “Ello: a design disaster”, I’ll lay it out simply for you by quoting part of the article:

Its design is awful. This initial screen is emblematic of Ello’s problems. It is taking modern, fashionable design trends and applying it to a web application without any thought as to how it impacts usability and readability.

Dropon, on the other hand, seems to get both design and user experience right. There is not a single page that I felt could be improved in a major way, nor did I have issues finding the things I needed to find.

Best of all, the site seems to be completely responsive and works on desktops, tablets, and phones.

Dropon not only trumps the design of Ello, it is one of the most beautiful social network I’ve ever seen, period. From the colour palette to the meticulous attention to even the smallest details, I simply could not stop staring at the site.

User Experience

Design is one thing, but what about the user experience? Navigation through the website, readability, and putting content first makes the user experience of Dropon extremely enjoyable. The responsive web design makes it easy to use the website across all viewports, including on mobile.

One of the biggest issues I find with other social networks — like Facebook or Twitter — is that user content experience is stuck in the year 2009. If you’re like me, you hate browsing content on Facebook when it’s limited to such a tiny space when today’s photos and videos are shot in resolutions that deserve more page space.

If there’s one thing I like most about Dropon it’s that the user content experience has (finally) been modernized. Content is placed dead center, allows for responsiveness, and most importantly allows for much larger content.

For comparison, here’s the content view space of Facebook vs Dropon for a YouTube video:

So What Makes Dropon Different?

We’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, …, and now Ello and Dropon. So what makes Dropon special? What does it do that others don’t? Surprisingly, in a market that previously seemed so saturated, Dropon does quite a bit to put itself forward.

Having used Dropon for a few days now, I definitely see its potential. In brief, Dropon is a mix of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Its difference lies in the use of tags. You’re able to create posts that can be shared to specific tags (one per post). So a post relating to a news article might be posted to the WorldNews tag, while a post relating to a YouTube video might be posted to the Videos tag. You’re able to follow these tags and then get updates on each of them on a single page. The real magic happens with Dropon’s trending algorithm.

You have the option to Like, Repost, or Reply to a post (this isn’t anything new), however, each action has an immediate effect on that post. The algorithm then ranks each post in relation to its “Trendiness”.

For example, a post submitted yesterday with 100 likes might be ranked lower than a post submitted 30 minutes ago with 10 likes. What this allows for is constantly evolving and adapting pages, even for specific tags.

Still don’t see why this would be useful? Let’s say you’re interested in keeping up with the news, but only have time for brief snippets of articles. You start following the WorldNews tag so that you can get the most trending news stories. Dropon lets you view the most important articles, sometimes almost immediately after the event happens in real life, on a single page that is always updating (thanks to other users).

This tool can be used for pretty much anything you can think of, whether you want to keep up with sports games, videos, pictures of places around the world, or even niche topics.

That being said, Dropon does have its issues. Most notably, it lacks users. Having launched a little over a month ago, it’s understandable why, however, Dropon’s true potential can only be imagined when you consider it having the same following as other social networks.

Conclusion

Dropon has shown to have many advantages over existing social networks — like Ello, Facebook, and Twitter — both in privacy and in content and features. Only time (and people) will tell how well it fairs in such a competitive market. I for one will continue to use Dropon in the hopes that it will one day join the ranks of the big guys.