When the end comes, I don't want to linger. No—I'd rather be taken down by a hungry bear or lion, or meet my demise on some stupid and inspired adventure.

Unfortunately, Peepeth, my quirky little decentralized social network, lingered well past its prime. I only gave it the ol' coup de grace a few months ago, after years of it lying fallow.

I want to share the story of how an ordinary engineer solo-built this unlikely platform. It's a story of how focus let me punch above my weight to create something cool, and of the challenges & lessons along the way.

What was Peepeth?

• On the tech side, it was the first usable social network on the blockchain.
• On the human side, it was an experiment in mindful speech and positive impact.

Imagine if Twitter had an immutable database (no edit, no delete) that anyone can read from or write to without going through Twitter (although the blue bird could control what it shows you).

And also imagine if Twitter nudged you away from posting hateful content and political rants, and encouraged mindful discourse and positive, real-world impact.

That was the Peepeth experiment.

Beginnings

Peepeth's existence was due to luck and bleeding fingers. Let me explain.

I made the original Peepeth in a week or two, because I wanted to learn smart contract development and get a job.

Version 1 worked, but slowly, and you had to pay a few cents' worth of cryptocurrency (Ether) to post. It was pretty janky.

Still, a decentralized social network on a public blockchain was a cool concept, and a decent portfolio item.

One day, my buddy introduced me to his unicorn-founder boss. I showed him the Peepeth prototype–he was impressed, and suggested I keep plugging away.

So plug away I did. I put months into Peepeth, readying it for a proper launch.

Discovery: We Weren't First

Days before launch, I got some news that walloped me in the gut. I found another site, called Leeroy, that already did exactly what Peepeth was doing. Leeroy had been live for months.

Mein Gott. How had I not found it earlier?

This was terrible. Those months of effort were now wasted. I couldn't launch Peepeth, knowing that Leeroy did the exact same thing.

Decision Time

I had two options: quit, or double down.

• Quitting would suck. But it wouldn't be a total loss, because I'd learned a lot and had a portfolio item.
• The thought of doubling down made me sick. Because I realized it would be more like 10x'ing down. (Going from prototype to decent product would be brutal.)

Going For It

After a day or two of psychic pain, I decided to keep going. So I saddled back up for the long road ahead.

I figured I could make Peepeth much better, but it would take some elbow grease. Because at that point Peepeth was still borderline unusable. You needed to be extremely nerdy just to work the damn thing, and it looked like shite.

Making it my own

I decided that I'd also make it unique and fun, not just a "decentralized Twitter clone" (*shudder*). So I gave it some quirky features, which eventually included:

• Mosquito badges: donate at least $25 to the then-most-effective-charity-in-terms-of-lives-saved-per-marginal-dollar-received, The Against Malaria Foundation, and you'd get a badge on your avatar image that elevates you in follower suggestions.
• The Terms Of Use was adapted from the Buddhist doctrine of Right Speech. I took a literal page from a Thich Nhat Hanh book "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" (see below).
• Monetize: creators could receive cryptocurrency tips (Peepeth would take 10%)
• You can "pin" a Peep (our word for Tweet), but it can't be yours.
• The convention was to tag political peeps with a "#politics" hashtag, which hides its contents beneath an interstitial, with a humorous message suggesting that a 140-character platform isn't the best place to have those kinds of discussions. This was a "nudge", not a requirement.
• Reminders to consider the effect of your peeps on the world.
• More features like Peepstreaks, and others I can't remember.

Launch

Months later I started rolling out Peepeth v1.1 to friends and random people I solicited on Twitter. People seemed to like it. I got some feedback, iterated, and kept at it. Eventually, I opened it up publicly, and people started trickling in. Slowly at first, with big spikes as people would post on Twitter and elsewhere.

Avoiding the GAB effect

One worry I had for Peepeth was that, since it was potentially the only truly "uncensorable" social network, it would become overrun by the "bottom 0.1%" of sociopaths who'd been kicked off of every other platform.

This was a real danger. I'd seen other "free speech" platforms become cesspools that repel the other 99.9%.

Blockchain was already becoming synonymous with questionable ICOs, definite scams, and the Silk Road. I definitely didn't want to pile "vile content" on top of that, or to deal with that myself. Hence my decision to not lead with "uncensorable" in marketing, even thought that would have been a strong hook.

The Community

We had a great community for awhile there. New friends from all over the world would check in daily with life updates, insights, photos, cool articles.

We had our fair share of characters come through. Some tech stars, various influencers, and even a mainstream celebrity or two, including a country musician who brought it up on Joe Rogan and they talked about it for five minutes.

The big star, however, was Vitalik, who both Tweeted and Peeped in support of Peepeth several times and bought more mosquito nets than anyone else.

Later, in the tail end of Peepeth's life, a major crypto influencer popped in, bringing thousands of his wonderful followers. At that point, I was managing an engineering team at another blockchain startup full-time, and I couldn't capitalize on that fortuitous opportunity.

One community highlight was #buidlbali, a trip that a small group of us peepers did in Bali. We did fun stuff during the day, set aside time for hacking, and presented projects at the end.

The ugly stuff

Thankfully, there was only a small amount of "really bad" content (I'll leave that up to your imagination, but I can understand why Facebook mods need therapy), and no apparent illegal content. But for awhile there, I was looking at new images through squinted eyes.

There wasn't a huge amount of porn on there (it would be hidden behind an informative "nsfw" interstitial), although one or two sex workers posted personal brand content and were normal members of the community.

Competition

Every now and then a new similar project would be announced, backed by some huge pool of talent and funds.

These announcements were a little disheartening—how could Peepeth compete with those researchers and ICO money?

I was sure they'd sink my battleship.

But to my knowledge, those projects either never shipped, or were very janky and sparse.

Maybe their ICO money was a curse since they got the payout up front. Money and team size don't guarantee success.

Investors

I was doing all this myself. People graciously offered to help, but I declined for various reasons. I felt weird about it being a nominally commercial product (that never really got commercialized, unless you count a $20k-something kickstarter), and just getting free labor from people.

A lot of the ideas and innovations came from the community, though—in particular, the idea to just have people sign messages, so that they could post for free, came from @abcoathup. I probably should have listened to user feedback more.

I also decided not to seek investment, despite a lot of apparent interest. This was because:

• I thought it would entail some strictures I wasn't excited about.
• The perceived time requirement.
• The idea that I'd get a higher valuation once I implemented the next major feature (which would enable anyone to use Peepeth without a blockchain wallet).

In hindsight, another reason was that I lacked the confidence to lead a team, never having had that role before.

It's too bad, because after a well-known investor blogged about it early on, a ton of VCs started reaching out.

I even had a surreal call with a well-known entrepreneur who I'd kind of idolized as a kid, who offered to lead a funding round (maybe they all say that, though?).

Pressures of life

Eventually, I ran out of runway.

So I put together a tangentially related product, which analyzed your personality based on the content of your Peeps (or your Tweets). Turns out there's scientific literature backing up the link between word choice and the Big Five personality traits, and IBM even had an API for this.

This was an entirely separate product, which I charged for.

Long story short, it didn't pay the bills. So I had to get a real job.

Why did the peeping stop?

Ultimately, the Peepeth experiment didn't work at scale.

There's a lot of reasons for that. I think it could have blown up more if I'd done some things differently. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that could have increased the odds:

• Seeking funding and building a team (duh)
• Could have gotten rid of the "you gotta use Metamask" requirement earlier (by implementing hosted keys, which I eventually did).
• Made a mobile app.
• Better content discovery / feed.
• Not many people seemed to care about the mindfulness + positive impact brand. I think making it "free speech haven" would have gotten a ton of passionate users, but at the cost of enduring the "Gab effect", as discussed above, which wasn't my jam. There was always tension between the free speech nature of the underlying database, and the mindful brand I sought to cultivate on Peepeth's moderated "front-end". I think I veered a little too strongly on the mindfulness front for most peoples' taste, and it might have given the platform a bit of an anodyne vibe at times as people followed the "positivity" cues a little too much.

There's a ton of experiments large and small I wanted to try, but was unable to for various reasons (namely, running out of runway).

TAKEAWAYS

Even though Peepeth didn't "blow up" beyond a core of crypto enthusiasts, I was pretty stoked, as someone who doesn't identify as a brilliant engineer, to build something that people found technically and socially innovative enough to talk about. Here are a few things I learned:

The value of focus

Peepeth showed me the value of focus, as cliche as that sounds.

It's one thing to build a product for a month or two. You get a usable product. But it's merely functional, if you're lucky.

Going the extra distance, and making many 1% improvements can make a qualitative shift in how your product is received.

Of course, there's the risk that nobody cares at all. So some form of early validation is important. But really going for it can make you stand out.

Side note: if I'd known Leeroy existed, I may not have even started. The amount of effort to make something better may have seemed too daunting. Which is why I said that Peepeth came about through luck.

Tech / swag dichotomy

If you wanna build something that people think is cool, it's gotta either be really good (tech), or have great brand (swag). Ideally you have both.

The tech aspect is obvious. Building new capabilities is valuable.

But it can "work" without being a technical masterpiece to be successful. Brand is probably the more important lever. This is especially relevant as software creation becomes more accessible with LLMs—as the barriers to entry to crafting the same software solutions goes down, swag becomes even more important.

Vitalik was one of the few who seemed to understand that Peepeth was less about the tech and more about the social experiment stuff. Unfortunately, that particular combo of technical innovation and brand experiment didn't work out, but it was a wild and nonetheless fruitful ride for me.

After Peepeth

I met a bunch of people through Peepeth and cool opportunities arose from that. Including a consulting gig or two, and a job managing engineering at Async.art with a great bunch of people, which I did for a few years.

THANK YOU

If you were part of the Peepeth experiment, thank you. I was the one at the keyboard, but you were the one with the feedback, the ideas, the content, the sense of humor when Peepeth would take a nap. I hope Peepeth was a fun place to be.

Looking ahead

I'm working on Strawberry for YouTube now. It's a Chrome extension for YouTube which helps you learn what you need to, faster, using AI. If you watch stuff at 2x speed, this is for you.

And lots more features like "subscribe to summaries", chat with channel, etc.

I lead with the time-savings benefits in the site copy, but it's really about safeguarding your attention, over which the modern spiritual war rages.

I'd love your help. Could you try it out and let me know how it could serve you better? Here it is: https://strawberry.tube