Does anyone know what this thing is? Some kind of decentralized, open source, anti-establishment, etc platform aiming to be an alternative to twitter, but we plebs aren’t allowed to see or participate in the development process or even see any source repositories yet.
To me there’s a bunch of red flags, but I can’t put my finger on what I reckon they’re flagging. It’s that combo of roll-your-own-crypto and promises of decentralization and secret-open-source-development-model all tied together with node.js and blockchain.
No mention of other decentralization efforts, their envisaged place/relationship with the fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon, possibility of extending their new blockchain protocol ideas with other platforms. Nothing even about how they’re better than the fediverse or whatever.
They were banned from twitter tho so they “must be legit”? The slides on the “tech” page mostly have this “COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE - NOT FOR UNAUTHORISED USE OR DISSEMINATION” watermarks, which is pretty weird.
Buzzword grifting. Nothing particularly new. They’ll take donations and never deliver a final product. Probably stay infinitely in development before being swept under the rug.
When I lead the dev team we had a clear pipeline and delivered weekly - it was the initial stages but the mandate was to write all our own code starting from scratch - to make things work I pulled in a few frameworks to bootstrap ourselves into existence — ActvitiyPub for one was something that wasn’t a thing until me and my connect all the things and integrate with everyone mentality won out. It was very much UI first, front end heavy at the start so making it work and plumbing the skin was the fun to come.
After I left I did watch with interest the first network tests and the early demos - but when I left there wasn’t much more than a hello world in a blockchain test and some network messages in testing.
Things seemed to have slowed down after they got funded - but during the startup daze it was epic to have crypto architectural discussions with the likes of Bill Binney and we had a humming dev team with some great talent. Shoutout to those that left before me and those that got paid for their time — I’m still hanging out for the promise that it is. Someone has to make it better than a twitter clone.
Thanks for the insight. Always interesting to hear when people with an inside view can chime in.