It’s been an interesting period in the Status community following our token launch and the massive growth that went along with that. As of this morning, there are 13 857 people in our slack channels, a lot of whom seem quite upset that Status is not engaging more actively in the sort of viral marketing that other companies working in the crypto space are doing.

We are changing some processes to reflect this feedback, but before we dive into it, let me say that — personally — I think that the quieter social media presence is a good thing. I find it more than fairly scary that there are so many people jumping on the hype generated by token sales and the crypto bull market, and selling things that cannot be delivered. I am involved with the Status team precisely because they are unerringly honest about what they can, and have, delivered. Our marketing is done mostly through Git commits, and this is how it should be for open source software communities, of that I have no doubt whatsoever.

What Status can, and has, delivered is the first mobile Dapp platform built entirely and truly on Ethereum. The team have produced a piece of technology that lets you access a blockchain from your pocket, using nothing but mobile data. I mean, I can send the tokens I have made to people who rock up at our meetups across Africa using nothing more than my phone. Sure, it’s still in alpha and prone to be a bit buggy, but this should blow your mind.

And it should blow your mind because it is representative of the very cutting edge of what is possible right now with the decentralised technologies like Ethereum. Even Bitcoin is still, relatively speaking, an immature technology with a long way to go before it is usable in the global, permissionless and easy ways most of its most ardent rhetoricians have bee claiming for years now.

This brings me to the present concerns about Status’ admittedly lackluster social marketing since the token launch, highlighted most frequently in our slack by those who have been trading SNT.

I, unlike some others, have no problems with speculators. I think they get a bad rap because of their general attitude and desire to get rich quick, but these people actually take real risks and provide much needed liquidity to all sorts of markets. We are happy enough to include the speculators and ‘trolls’ in our community, because that is what community is fundamentally about — taking people with you wherever you go, no matter who they are.

However, that said, it has been fascinating to watch the change in how people approach our community as we have grown. In the early days, people would come in and highlight the issues they saw, but — in the same breath — would offer a possible solution, or pitch in and help to fix it because they recognise that identifying a problem is equivalent to identifying an opportunity in an open source setup like ours. Of course, this is a feature of small communities that are easier to manage and coordinate that has been well-documented in great books like The Art of Community.

Our general channel now has the feeling of a customer complaints facility, rather than a communal gathering place where like-minded people discuss weird, high-minded, esoteric principles about the future of technology, value and human interaction. I think this was inevitable, and see no point in mourning that which is bound to happen, but I do want to use this obvious shift in the nature of our interactions to make some important points about some of our more social, abstract, qualitative goals.

I have always maintained that what we really need for decentralised, privacy-protecting, self-sovereign technologies to succeed is not just better technology, but the sort of technology which creates social structures that allow people to be better people. The sort of technology that actively encourages people — through specifically designed and externally verifiable economic structures — to interact in new ways (and therefore encourages them to be new people).

This fact that how we choose to interact with people defines who we are is also a well-documented phenomenon:

“Is it not, therefore, an obvious fact that what I am in my relationship to another creates society and that, without radically transforming myself, there can be no transformation of the essential function of society?”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

I’ve written elsewhere about the “pied pipers of our age, people who understand that who we are emerges only through encounter and that participatory data architectures and p2p networks amplify such encounters exponentially”. The Status team is one, really exciting, example of such pipers even if the channels we choose to play in are not currently as mainstream or noticeable as some in our community might want them to be.

We are hiring a few more people (our team has already grown to over 20, almost all of them hardcore developers) to help us manage better our social campaigns as we take seriously every suggestion offered by our community, no matter it’s tone.

That said, our focus remains very much on building out the best product we can, without promising that which is not yet possible, or adding unnecessarily to the hype cycle that surrounds much of our current work.

If you see a problem, please feel free to come and discuss it with us and we will do our best to rectify it. Even better, find a way to help us fix it yourself and begin to fall down the rabbit hole that is open source software, Status, Ethereum, and the mobile world. Because that, too, is what community is really all about.

It’s the original vision of the web itself, resurrected by secure distributed computation. We are here to encourage creators, contributors and curators of value (as widely defined as possible). We are not here to create a new cohort of consumers.

However, if you do just want to consume and speculate, that is absolutely your right. We will accommodate you, too, because that is also a part of building the techno-social structures required for fairer distribution of value. It is a part of potentially educating and certainly including those who know no different way of being in a world dominated by material things.

Thank you to those who offered constructive suggestions over the last month, and especially those who participated so actively in our first fireside chat about the the new wallet designs and functionality.

There was some invaluable feedback which we are already implementing, and we look forward to finding more ways like this to interface constructively with our ever-growing community. Watch out for a YouTube series in the near future…

If you’d like to help out now, take our survey and get a TestFlight invite!

*As always, please be careful about clicking links from our slack notifications as we have been a big target for scammers and currently cannot close down that attack vector. Just goes to show how badly we all need decentralized solutions ;)