I am the king of this. It has been 12 years and we had more than 6 million users — and we still have yet to ship Groups for Android for example.

Oh wait I have you one better — it has been 12 years and https://github.com/Qbix/Platform is only now almost ready to be released, as v2.0

Sure we “ship” it all the time, on github. We even released v1.0 but we didn’t announce it because we aren’t great at PR.

People who discover https://qbix.com are shocked that there is a decentralized open source alternative platform to Facebook and Twitter that is far more full-featured than Mastodon, Bluesky or even Matrix and they never heard of it.

Well… the problem is that I picked a very complex space, one where no one got this far except for billion-dollar companies. People kept expecting everything to be real-time and rock-solid, and even when we finally got that done after many years, they still complain it “doesn’t look as good as Twitter”.

Every time I shipped half-baked stuff, it didn’t actually take off. Now, I believe it WOULD have taken off if it had a low demand surface area (eg Bitcoin just stores value and transfers it, period). But I tend to build stuff that is similar to what people use EVERY DAY, and that kind of stuff accrued lots of features.

Oh yeah my other project https://intercoin.org blockchain platform took 5 years to create. During that time we went from a crypto winter to a super bull market in crypto to another winter with super bear skepticism on HN.

On HN we knee-jerk get lumped in with stuff that isn’t even blockchain, like FTX or Binance, or ridiculous shitcoins that have no utility at all.

Imagine if I shipped https://intercoin.app and announced it on HN lol. At best it would be crickets, at worst I would be berated for somejow being a scammer by… working 5 years and putting all my money into making these blockchain solutions for the world. Most people wouldn’t even bother looking past the title.

Our stuff is FREE AND OPEN SOURCE and you use it if you want, or don’t. Before complaining that it even exists to help people for free, or calling it a scam, at least click the link to https://github.com/Intercoin

A word about regulations, because you shouldn’t “just ship” in violation of laws (unless you’re Uber or AirBNB lol). Even though we raised money in an ICO pursuant to Reg D and Reg S exemotions, filed Form D with the SEC, got people who worked at the SEC as active advisors, complied with laws in multiple other jurisdictions, innovated in many areas of securities law, and carefully developed tokens to fit the No-Action letters grantsd to projects like PocketFullOfQuarters, people on HN just assume that we are like most of the others who didn’t treat their tokens as securities. Which is understandable. (I am not admitting the token ARE securities, this is a matter of opinion that a judge would determine, merely that we didn’t want to take the chance that the original transactions weren’t securities transactions.)

Btw besides securities there is also this FATCA, FINCEN and other stuff that many startups here should read even if they aren’t making web3 or crypto projects, but ARE dealing with money and payouts to people on their platform: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...

Not to mention that if you make your software available in Europe, you have to comply with GDPR and soon might be forced to comply with the draconian new CYBER RESILIENCE ACT. If it passes then we will have to honestly change our OPEN SOURCE license to no longer allow Europeans to legally access our software:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/in-letter-to-european-comm...

So yeah. Shipping at scale is complicated !!