timdaub on Warpcast

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This is unnecessarily hostile to, for example, our go to market strategy - which exists for mission and vision reasons. Both iOS apps and PWAs exist at the mercy of Apple and Google embracing or extinguishing. We have big ideas for Kiwi News, as much as @dwr.eth has them for Farcaster. But, opposed to the Merkle Manufactory team, we actually believe that to truly build a credible neutral social media protocol, this also means walking the talk. "Raising the capital," and having your "team build the consumer DAU iOS app" with investor's money - this is obviously going to come with strings attached. For example, we all know the character of Marc Andreessen. He's not known for his "neutrality," especially since he's an ex Facebook chair. We're building a PWA over shipping three different native apps because we're bootstrapping Kiwi and that is because we truly think that this is the ONLY way to build a neutral social protocol. What MM did doesn't work for us, so excuse our browser lag.

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That said, I think @dwr.eth is here also epistemically wrong as many other frontend devs could confirm. The "browser lag" he's talking about is a 300ms delay that browsers have added in the past to distinguish between a zooming action and any other interaction on the page. I'm actually not sure if this "browser lag" still exists in modern implementations of browsers. Also, the "making a website with notifications" is straight up misleading. I'm pretty sure that Warpcast on iOS and Android is also just a react native app and so its UI is as much rendered in a browser engine as are PWAs. That said, my main point here is, however, that I think the main hurdle for PWAs is the encountering of pre-existing neural path ways in consumers's brains, or, "will a consumer know how to "install" a PWA over a native app?" That and whether Apple and Google will further embrace native apps over webapps are ultimately what really determines the faith of approaches. But these qualities aren't impossible to overcome

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I also take issue with the "fig leaf" comment of @dwr.eth's original cast. App Store policies are actually really opinionated and they can perfectly control distribution/content of who becomes famous or makes money. This is why I think committing yourself to App Store policy is fundamentally against the principles of crypto and against hence what we want to achieve with Kiwi News. There is a good reason why our frontend is open source and Warpcast's isn't. We truly want to build a protocol and so we intentionally marking our product's value to zero every time we push the tip of the git chain to GitHub. The protocol shall acrue value. Now, you can say that this is unwise and destroys the equity value of our project and you're probably right. Merkle gains an economic upside from raising the capital on a closed source client, we don't. But in my view, and to take this back to the "fig leaf" comment, it is really important how we design our projects' incentives to arrive at the right outcomes.

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IMO there are different ways of looking at @dwr.eth's commentary. Obviously he's right in many ways and denying that running on a native app doesn't bring growth benefits is naive. But I see the PWA thing and being irresponsible to Apple as a challenge and an opportunity. They say that constraints promote creativity and so exactly because we don't get a tool box of retention devices delivered to us in the form of being able to ship a native iOS app @macbudkowski and I are thinking about retention and the app's quality every single day. We're decomposing what it means to retain users and how to build a lasting relationship with our users. If anything, I'd say that we're finding each day that the tech and the design and the "how the app feels," almost doesn't matter, or that the various platforms one can ship on all have very nuanced differences, which aren't easily aggregated into blanket statements like "PWAs don't work, but iOS apps do work."

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