Speaks about buying Twitter at 11:18. In the context of today's main event, the US election, I think it's interesting that he frames a win for Kamala as an end of free speech on platforms like X. The context for us as decentralized Twitters and Hacker News is that a Kamala win probably gives more relevance to our visions as "non-shutdown-able social medias" because, according to him, there's more chance of repression of speech if she wins. I'm sure you could make the argument the other way too of course. Somehow especially Farcaster really only has a mainstream appeal if you find a net new use case that X can't and won't copy (deep crypto integration that is consumer friendly?), or if you somehow position as an anti-X, anti-Elon network (Bluesky). There's a risk that when you position that way you also tighten the funnel of who could potentially use the site. There was probably even a time when X was so badly managed by Elon that people who were pro Elon went to Farcaster. Now I almost feel like this channel for distribution is gone. X isn't visibly "mismanaged" anymore. Many people will still come up with reasons for why it's unusable, but there was a time when it was worse. Anyways, this greater context in where we're positioned as a social media platform is uniquely visible today, more so than on other days. The question remains what we can bring to the table as a "decentralized" version, especially when the incumbents are actually doing an OK job at managing their platforms.
I have many loose thoughts here. I think we can look at decentralization from many angles. One angle is being non-shutdownable. But being a non-shutdownable comes with the prize. Yes, the Pirate Bay guys have survived but they had to go through years of legal threats, server raids, domain seizures and so on. Their founders eventually even served some time in prison. So have Tornado Cash devs. Of course I don’t think that Kiwi would be a target for governments - we are a small project focused on a very niche crypto subjects and don’t deal with money so probably no one will care. But if we follow the ‘non shutdownable’ path and we grow beyond our niche, it can be a stressful journey. Another angle is that decentralized networks are typically more influenced by the users. I have been a Facebook user since 2009 but Zuck hasn’t asked me if I want to watch the ads or would I prefer to pay for the app. With decentralized social networks, the theory is that users can influence the course of the project quite a lot. I think this is true for Kiwi - we have been pretty attentive to users’ needs and trying to build something people want. But not sure this value proposition is enough because most startups do it anyway. There is also a more skeptical angle. We could say that for decentralized social, the 'decentralization' value proposition can be important for the early believers but not really for the marginal users. So if we wanted to reach new users, we'd need to focus on believers. And I think it kind of happened. When I look at our community conversations - either in the comments or on Telegram chat - most people there really believe in OG crypto values. And it's amazing we are building a place for people like that. And as much as I think decentralization wouldn't be important for marginal users, it could be important for the marginal developers. And that's because no one wants to be rugged like Zynga was on Facebook and in crypto being interoperable opens many paths to building apps. In other words, I don't think the user #10,000,000 would need to know that the network is decentralized, they just need to be able to use an app ecosystem of the network. I think this was the bet that Farcaster took but because of their approach and growth slowing down, some developers stopped building there. In our case I think being decentralized and principled already paid off - I think that’s why freeatnet built kiwinews.lol and operates RSS feeds and Rainer built Search without us even knowing he has been working on it. They trust us and the tech. So all in all, I think our strengths are proven dedication to openness and Ethereum OG values. How to communicate it better to the outside world without being annoying and overly virtue signaling is an open question :)