Wavelength

I'll combine the best of these approaches in my new messenger Harmonics.

I have great respect for your current work and assurances on the business model. But what you are asserting is only _currently_ in your gift.

If you keep controlling equity stakes in the business and don't need to raise significant outside investment it will work out as per your business model.

If you get into enterprise selling, you'll need a sales workforce and significant cost of Sales/Goods/Administration. If you want only organic growth, you'll be ok. But what will happen is that investment from, or selling to a large corporate, will turbo boost such sales; the temptation proves irresistible to many. If you are in a land-grab dynamics with other companies, growth may actually mean survival.

There is a scalability tier above the best subscription businesses, which is mass-market consumer adoption. The twitter experience demonstrates this. The ad revenue across billions outweighs a tidy subscription revenue from a small highly engaged subscription crowd. Any significant co-investor will find the lure of this irresistible. If you gain private equity investors, you will become ad based with high probability.

I welcome your contribution to the field of messaging apps and wish you well. I hope that this can inform your judgements about business models going forwards. If you think this is incorrect, please follow up with your alternative thoughts.

Group creators can disable history sync if they wish, and when you join a group someone else created, you can see whether it’s enabled or not on the group details screen. I have it disabled in a bunch of my small, more intimate, groups for exactly this reason: so that nobody has to worry about someone else adding a less-trusted person to the group, who automatically gets a copy of history. But in larger groups that already include people who don’t know each other in real life, history sync makes threaded chat much more useful for new group members. And even in the absence of history sync, most people will already rationally treat these large groups as semi-public, knowing that any of the members you don’t already know and trust could easily leak what you’ve said to an audience outside the group.

All this talk of native however Catalyst on macOS is a dead end transitional tech. Apple wants you to use SwiftUI for Mac as a native target without catalyst.

I'm not a fan of forcing civility, myself, as the forcing, itself, is uncivil.

But I do feel that it's OK to establish a community/context, where a set of rules governs the decorum, and allow people to either join, or leave. If people don't want to abide by those rules, then it is OK (incumbent, even) for the community to sanction them; but only in the context of that community. I'm not into calling up a troll's workplace, and trying to get them fired. I think it's OK to ban them, though.

They'll vote with their feet. If they like it, they'll stay. If they don't, they'll leave, and it will wither on the vine. Elon Musk is doing exactly that, with the new Twitter. Personally, I don't want to play in that sandlot, but a lot of others, do. I won't go and try to stop them.

I've spent most of my life, in a mutual support community that has a very specific culture and set of rules. We don't have a police force to enforce them, but we also won't change them for any rando that insists that we do so, for their convenience. We've been doing things this way, since before I was born, and will continue to do so, forever (hopefully).

It's like walking into a Jewish Temple, or Islamic Mosque, and saying "I love pork, and it is my right to eat pork. I also want to join your organization, so I insist that you start allowing the eating of pork."

Even worse, in the organization that I'm involved with, there are commercial interests that would like us to change, and we can get some very strange pressures. Sort of like paid pork-eaters, showing up at synagogues, and demanding pork reform.

Just let the dervishes whirl. If it's meant to last, it will. If not, it will become another footnote in history.

It may also change, but that's no guarantee, and I have watched changes destroy good things. Good ol' Chesterton's Fence...