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André Staltz Profile picture
André Staltz
@andrestaltz
Creator of @manyver_se and core maintainer of the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) network. @staltz@mastodon.social
Mar 28, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A problem that is endemic to the whole developer community is the urge to "rewrite everything". It is the one of the most harmful practices in software engineering.

Why? (thread) Most software in production out there is complex. Some are spaghetti code nightmares, but I believe most are somewhat decently built. Sometimes developers joining a project confuse a "complex" codebase with a "spaghetti" codebase, and they feel like throwing it away.
Sep 14, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Technology needs an alternative narrative. It has had enough influence from the culturally bankrupt empire of plastic and burgers. RE "cultural bankrupt": you can't produce culture without free time, and north westerners are overworked so they delegate culture making to specialized companies such as Disney.
Mar 9, 2021 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
What modular open source can teach us about unlocking explosive collaboration 💥

(Thread ⬇️) It might seem that corporate work requires managers while open source does not, but that's not true. Often, open source has management in one form or another.
Aug 7, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
In acquiring services, Microsoft is a different type of tech giant than Google and Facebook.

Microsoft is a meta-platform Google and Facebook are (mere) platforms, so when they acquired competing platform startups, they wanted to either integrate them into their platforms or shut down their services.
Aug 5, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Wikipedia's active contributors are 128k while total registered users are 39 million, so it's merely 0,3% which produce content for others. Arguably many more people read Wikipedia without logging in, so the actual percentage is probably even smaller. Image On Tor, 6000 relay servers support 2,5 million users, just 0,24%, a quarter of 1%. ImageImage
Jun 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
DATA ACTIVISM
Open the data, either by reverse engineering closed APIs, or crowd-sourcing the collection of evidence. Then, build frontend apps and public dashboards for that data. I'm really impressed by this 2020 trend of putting up data on GitHub which started (?) with COVID-19 github.com/CSSEGISandData… then recently spread to covering the police abuse events in the US.
github.com/2020PB/police-…
Jan 5, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Since I forced myself not to share anything about iOS development while I was working on Manyverse iOS, now I can finally tweet some stuff.

TL;DR Apple is excessively picky about everything. This is a good thing and a bad thing. When I made an Apple developer account, I received a literal PHONE CALL from an Apple employee who had some questions about my account and my intent. So weird.
Dec 11, 2019 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
So it turns out Twitter's new open source effort for decentralized social media (@bluesky) is NOT what we were hoping, unfortunately.

Thread First, it's a "change of backends" for Twitter, so by design the new decentralized backend would have to support all current Twitter needs, and specially business needs.

This rules out a lot of current protocols, I'll explain why...
Dec 6, 2019 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
It's important to be positive about the future. Not as wishful thinking. Not as blind optimism. But as actual constructive bets and contributions to the good that exists, and it certainly exists. Societal collapse is what happens when we lose our north and just start panicking. About politics. About climate change. About big tech.
Nov 28, 2019 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
The rise of dystopian entertainment, or dystopia-as-entertainment has gotten me thinking, and while I think it's sometimes educational or insightful, it tells a lot about the hopelessness and nihilism of today.

(Thread) I think since circa 2014 we have entered a triangular crisis, consisting of: the fall of democracy (politics), the fall of neoliberalism (economics), and the fall of humanism (ideology/religion).
Jun 18, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
What I think about FB's new cryptocurrency, Libra:

At F8, Zuckerberg hinted that payments would be a big thing in their apps. FB is going for Fintech to replace or phase-out ads. Very important to recognize that two things were launched: Libra (the cryptocurrency), Calibra (the wallet). Libra is open source, decentralized, co-owned as an association. Calibra is closed source just like WhatsApp is, and gives them a lot of leverage.
Mar 26, 2019 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
The Web, 3 decades from now

Yesterday @jaydson was interviewing me and asked me a really difficult question: how will the Web look like 30 years from now? (Optimistically)

Thread ⬇ To give a realistic answer, I had to split up the years in decades, and take some insight from the past.

🎨 The first decade of the Web was characterized by an artistic exploration of how far we could take the idea of static HTML pages with hyperlinks.
Mar 11, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Ownership of data works very differently to ownership of physical things.

You can't actually own data, but you can own a *copy* of data. Data copies have three ownership properties: distribution, dynamism, and legitimacy. 🚚 Distribution

In what format does the data come in (image? JSON? CSV? Text? HTML?), and through what mechanisms does it propagate (centralized? centralized + mirrors? decentralized via DHT? decentralized via gossip)?
Jan 14, 2019 • 35 tweets • 5 min read
Decoding Zuck's doublespeak

A thread in which I try to interpret his new year's resolution for 2019 ( facebook.com/zuck/posts/101… ) First I was surprised how nice Zuck seemed and willing to ask good questions. Then I looked carefully and saw the strategic public relations stunt they were pulling off, like in the previous years' resolutions.
Nov 26, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
My comment on this incident, since Dominic is getting a lot of blame and I work closely with him.

1/ Yes he did a mistake (with huge proportions), but you have to understand Dominic has 700+ packages and this one is just one more. Each package has several issues and comments. 2/ This means Dominic simply cannot afford *time* or *attention* to each tiny issue. Think about all the other tiny issues he has handled well so far, which have gone through unnoticed and (important!) unpaid. And he'll still get issues daily for years to come.
Nov 24, 2018 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
What you can do to prepare for climate change:
Reduce economic activity.

In your lifetime, the planet will most likely *collapse* under the weight of economic growth. It's not a mere possibility, it already began. Brace for impact. ⚠

THREAD: If you're still debating whether climate change is real, you're too late. It's quite simple: a finite planet cannot take an ever-increasing demand for natural resources. In the OECD, everything we do, from travelling to commuting to electricity and consuming, costs the planet. 🌍
Nov 1, 2018 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
It surprises me when people think #Scuttlebutt is for privacy, freedom of speech, and anonymity. That's very far from what characterizes the technology and the community.

Scuttlebutt is about putting "social" back into social networking.

(Thread:) We're not motivated by privacy, individual freedom, and anonymity. Don't get me wrong, though, these things are good to have, in contrast to a system like Facebook with privacy invasion and real world identities. Privacy is like water, I need it daily, but it's not my motivator.
Aug 1, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
At #DWebSummit, @nicopace notes that "people in remote communities want to connect with each other, not necessarily to the internet".
@nicopace There is a unique value in keeping these communities "disconnected", to preserve their cultures against the monoculture on the internet.

This is the opposite strategy of what Zuckerberg wants to build in the Global South.
May 10, 2018 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
The business model of the Internet is intermediation.

Google Duplex (Google Assistant capable of making calls on your behalf) is branded as an "assistant" but it's in the long run a middleman: something that both consumer and producer will consider a necessary evil. Consumers will consider the assistant necessary because they'll be dependent on it, either because they forgot how to research info on their own, or because they are time deprived.
Feb 19, 2018 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Computer Science and why it's necessary even for web developers

I know that in some countries a degree in CS is expensive or unattainable, and that some companies do unnecessary algorithm interviews.

This thread is not about degrees or interviews, it's about CS itself. CS is important because of general concepts and patterns that you will find everywhere when programming.

It's vital to have some knowledge which is *indirectly* applied.

E.g. trees, graphs, data structures, graph search (breadth-first, depth-first), languages