SkateSpots Drop #007

• What shipped
  • Unread dots, remembered joins, and a doorman with a key package
  • The menu stopped eating the login dialog
  • A public room with a bot doorman
  • Zero critical npm advisories
• The week in nonsense
  • The funding-to-adoption pipeline remains undefeated
  • Fiat’s greatest hits, now with a subscription model
  • VCs and influencers: two faces, one bag
• Wires from the timeline
• Go outside

§What shipped

§Unread dots, remembered joins, and a doorman with a key package

Private chat. The Private chat tab now tells you when someone said something while you were reading Events or Chat. A pending join survives a reload, founders get a request dot, and a new phone can be linked by QR instead of another approval round trip. We also added member removal and copy/reply.

§The menu stopped eating the login dialog

Sign-in. Signing in from the burger menu used to open a dialog behind the sheet, which is a fancy way of saying “nothing happened.” Auth now lives above every menu, closes the menu first, and survives signup from any card. The desktop welcome prompt no longer races you to the login button.

§A public room with a bot doorman

Community. The new SkateSpots Community room is end-to-end encrypted, auto-approved by a small bot, and linked from the menu/About. Short links: skate-spots.org/community for humans, skate-spots.org/c for Cordn/Staircase people.

§Zero critical npm advisories

Security. We pinned the vulnerable protobufjs path used by the on-device translation runtime and updated sharp. The only remaining high is xlsx, which this app only writes. Translation still never sends your messages anywhere.

§The week in nonsense

Satire/opinion. No financial advice, no factual reporting, no one’s lawyer approved this section.

§The funding-to-adoption pipeline remains undefeated

Somewhere, a deck with 47 slides just raised another twenty million to build a marginally different timeline for the same nine users. Jack, buddy, we love the protocol, but at some point “decentralized” has to mean more than a seed round and a Discord with twelve people. The product is not the network… or is it?

§Fiat’s greatest hits, now with a subscription model

The money printer goes brrr, the grocery bill goes “that’s not the price we agreed on,” and your salary auto-renews at a higher price every year. Your savings account is a subscription to a currency that gets worse. Bitcoin fixes this, allegedly, right after another eighteen months of sideways. Until then: buy the dip, sell the rips, and never check the chart while skating.

§VCs and influencers: two faces, one bag

Publicly: “we’re here for the users.” Privately: “we’re here for the exit.” The influencer says “not financial advice” while holding a bag the size of a mattress; the VC says “long-term” with a vesting cliff shorter than a TikTok. The only thing decentralized is the accountability.

§Wires from the timeline

• Genie 4 — Hacker News

• [VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more] — Scam Crunch

• [Treasury’s Bessent sees crypto as America’s next tool for keeping the U.S. dollar on top] — ShitCoinDesk

§Go outside

The map is still the point: find a spot, add a photo, join a crew, or ask a question in the community room. Everything private stays encrypted; everything public is yours to fork.

SkateSpots is AGPL-3.0-only, self-hosted where it matters, and funded by people who skate (or tried to 555) — not by a token, a VC, or a guy with a laser-eyes profile picture.