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.
Let’s start with the fact that the only way to participate currently is to make a “donation” for which you then receive a passphrase which will allegedly give you access once this thing releases. That release presumably depends on them receiving enough of these “donations”. They then instruct you to go hype this to your social network, no doubt with the goal of convincing them to donate.
Then once you move past that there’s the fact that they’re claiming this platform operates on a “custom blockchain”. If I’m to take that at face value it means they’re spinning up their own chain for which there will be an incredibly limited number of nodes. Even if you have users running their own nodes this is going to result in centralization out of the gate and would only be anywhere near decentralized if enough active users of the network (which isn’t out yet) decide to turn into network operators. In other blockchains this is done using economic incentives because running these types of networks is neither financially or technically trivial. This no doubt means there would eventually be a Panquake token. 🥞🚀🌙!!
We’ve seen this model before and if the network gains any traction it results in a handful of supernodes controlled either by the central entity or a cabal of entities associated with them.
They could have saved themselves a ton of time and engineering hours by docking themselves to Ethereum either as a rollup or even by using existing Layer 2 networks. Then they would have inherited the decentralization and security guarantees that network provides and additionally opened the opportunity to market to the participants of that network.
Then setting all of that aside there is the more obvious question of why a social network needs to be built on a blockchain. What part of an append-only ledger of immutable records aligns with the operational requirements of a social network? The only overlap between the needs of the two is decentralization, but ActivityPub already exists.
Every single part of this looks like people trying to create monetization from a solution that doesn’t solve the problem it claims to address, while going about all of it in the worse way possible. And all of that assumes this will ever see the light of day rather than just running off into the sunset with those “donations”, which conveniently creates a form of legal protection since you gave that money under the pretense of supporting an effort without a clearly defined expectation of a deliverable.
TLDR: Avoid
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.