Blanket statements like this from core contributors are a big part of why people in our industry do not like Zcash.
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Daira-Emmaās response was perfect, I just wanted to express my agreement with it.
What is happening in USA and Twitter is one of the reasons why we need Zcash in the first place.
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I understand the objective and I support having ideas to generate momentum. Iām not sure if broadcasting the Arborist Calls will achieve it because:
- The scope of arborist calls has high specifity.
- Not beginner friendly
- content tends to be somewhat rabbit-holy/ hard to grasp if you donāt are up-to-date with the latest developments.
We already have ZecHub, Zcash Brasil, Zcash EspaƱol and others doing weekly high level newsletters to X. How are these doing in terms of metrics? how can we help these community media initiatives be more and more popular?
Notes on what X has become:
There is something that is not negligible. X is not a safe space for many people. We should stand by our colleagues and support them. And by ānot safeā I refer to things scaling from the usual Internet trolling to online militias paid to spread hate, death threats and install the idea of eradicating (as in āFinal Solutionā) diversities, migrants and different collectives.
I understand anyone that chooses not to expose themselves to that and I believe we shouldnāt take any decisions that put our colleagues in a position where they have to choose between the risk of exposure to such environment or withdrawing themselves from a space.
Unfortunately, X is in fact both āthe place where crypto industry public sphere happensā and āthe reason why Zcash is more important than everā. I donāt have an answer on how to deal with that.
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What a coincidence that you should bring this up now!
During the first Lab of Zk Av Club Foundry weāll teach everyone how to restream live broadcasts to webrtc endpoints (discord, free2z, zoom) using only Brave browser and to rtmp endpoints (youtube, x, twitch) using OBS. Just in time for Zcon Vi 
Stay tuned for this new livestream before the end of the month!
Just saw this thread and thought Iād jump in to share this impromptu but on-topic note.
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wow. speaking of Near. they did sth super crazy, funny and nsfw in a dev weekly livestream 
watch on your own risk
1.4million impressions. unheard of for dev calls.
hard to replicate
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Already down, but its clearly a data point. 
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The AI training without consent if we stream on Twitter/X is an important issue. I do not consent to that (and have opted out of my data being used for AI training on other platforms). I donāt have any illusions that xAI wonāt illegally scrape content from YouTube and other platforms anyway, but they will have to do it illegally; I wonāt help them.
I also agree with @januszgrze and others that Twitter/X is a poor medium for technical discussions.
Thatās debatable. Why is using a platform not, in some small part, encouraging its use?
We already build in public. Streaming on Twitter/X doesnāt add to that. In the specific case of Arborist calls, itās hard to argue that YouTube is not already as public as it needs to be.
If my position toward Twitter/X were only a matter of distaste, I wouldnāt press my opposition to streaming the Arborist calls on it.
But its owner is a fascist, Nazi-saluting white supremacist, who is actively waging a hate campaign against the trans and queer community (in part using Twitter/X), spreading absolutely vile lies that are trying to get us killed, and is deeply involved with setting eugenicist policies that deny trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people livesaving healthcare.
Frankly, I do not understand why anyone would at this point not grasp the existential threat that this poses and the need to take a stand against it, or think that āengagementā is more important than that.
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Can you offer an alternative medium that also supports more growth? Iām open to explore any options that work.
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Bluesky.
(10 char padding)
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Speaking for myself, I would be willing to try Blusky but Iām afraid they might not have support for streams yet? I will investigate 
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They donāt, but itās well worth building up a presence on Bluesky IMHO.
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This.
Iāve been trying to convince people to get out of the Xitter bubble for a few years now.
Weāre making slow progress, more members of the community are posting on federated alternatives.
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In the past arborist call it was argued that Zcash should remain āpolitically neutralā in reference to the anti-trans hate that is spread out and encouraged in X.
I want to push back on that argument. Hate speech entangled with politics itās still hate speech. Hate speech exists with the sole purpose of normalizing hatred against something. Being against politicians spreading up a discourse that dehumanizes migrants, minorities and various collectives is not āgetting into politicsā.
Should Zcash stay āapoliticalā if politicians start implementing the panopticon and prosecuting privacy activits to erradicate them?
I agree that itās a loser move for projects in general to actually side on electoral discussions because pickin a side is choosing to lose a portion of the available market. But I guess we as a commnity, will have to draw a line somewhere.
As I said:
And we will also have to decide if withdrawing Zcash from its hostile environment is a good idea. X is now an unsafe environment for transgender people, migrants, human right activists and many other collectives, but it has always been unsafe for Zcashers. Although it has lessened, you canāt post without getting targeted by FUD troops that are consistenly spreading out lies about Zcashās technology and its founders. Shall we withdraw from X and continue to let them be the only voice about ZEC?
What Iām pretty sure is that we have to take care of our colleagues and be mindful of the risks some exposure can mean to them. X is āthe place where crypto industry public sphere happensā and āthe reason why Zcash is more important than ever", we have to find out how to deal with that.
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I tried BlueSky itās like tweeting 10 years ago. So lame. Personally, I like good technology, not political maximalism. I donāt give a shit who X shareholders are, zero care at all. And the whole domestic political agenda of the US doesnāt give a shit to me. Absolutely zero attitude.
But even if they were equal in terms of technical environment, I know that right now Twitter has 10,000 times larger Russian-speaking audience than BlueSky. And thatās the only thing that matters for Zcash, aside from the things I may or may not like personally.
Do you want me to spread the word about Zcash as effectively as possible? Or do you want me to block just because I donāt agree that Musk made an ambiguous gesture? Thatās so weird.
Developers can choose what they like, I have no problem with that. But Zcash and the main community activists should be where our main target audience is. Let it be Viber, Facebook, whatever. All that matters is efficiency and effectiveness. And thatās why I agree with Musk on many of the governance parameters.
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To find a balance in all of this, I think thereās no point in having meetings right at X. But we definitely need to translate AC from complex technical developer language to simple and clear user language. 99% of Zcash users just canāt understand half of what is discussed on Arborist Calls. It is impossible to simply present it as a useful source of information. All this juggling with terms like ZIP number XXX. Zcashd depreciation - āWhat is that anyway?ā People donāt understand it, itās just too complicated stuff that you as developers canāt notice. Because itās your ocean and you are the fish or sharks, who likes it, that are in it everyday. So the offer is good, but it doesnāt matter as much as good, short and most importantly accessible summaries in X at the end of every Arborist Call.
Zcash development and Zcash mission distribution are two parallel tasks, the approaches to which may differ for obvious reasons.
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This is already being done by Ambassadors. How can we improve it?
This is being done by @squirrel, can it be enhanced in some way so that it has a more āgeneral public approachā?
I understand what you want to convey. You would like some ādown to earthā version of the arborist calls. But I also feel you are taking this the wrong way, like if Arborist Calls were a ādeveloper supremacismā gathering.
Developers need to communicate unambiguously, otherwise, big problems arise, things donāt work, or stop working.
LORE: At the beginning of the 70s there was a āSoftware Industry Crashā, every project failed disastrously, billions of dollars (that were worth much more than now) were lost. Libraries of software engineering books were written about this as lessons learned to future programers and software engineers.
It is good that arborist call participants adjust to methodology when working on a protocol than handles a market cap of 586,131,407 USD. (source Dashboard). It would be irresponsible not to.
Example: If you look at ZIPs you will see this section
Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED", and "MAY"
in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 1 when, and only when,
they appear in all capitals.
This is not āoh Iām going to use this words because Iām a core developer, so above of it allā. Itās āI need to write this document in a way that is the most unambiguous as possible so people reading it to implement this specification on a machine I know nothing about can understand what is the desired outcomeā. ZIPs are āboringā to most people. They take time to draft, exhaust people who have to take care of reviewing them and crafting them but they are worth every zenny (pennies of ZEC) invested because when things are not defined that way in a decentralized ecosystem, things donāt work. (centralized systems have this problem too)
This level of detail (as you correctly point out) is not necessary if you are not implementing anything and itās also not very welcoming to newcomers. We should focus on how to achieve that and what are the best approaches to do it.
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Absolutely. And that needs to continue. I am in no way criticizing the current model. I am in favor of politics remaining politics. Itās up to each developer to tweet or not, but ambassadors and local communities should represent all popular platforms regardless of any political aspects. Crypto-twitter is very important to represent Zcash to its fullest potential.
Jason is doing a wonderful job. And he intuitively understands this stuff and simplifies the information as much as possible. I wrote this because I want to emphasize the importance of an accessible and compact presentation and keep it that way in the future.
And Iām also in favor of the community not dictating to developers how and where they should gather to discuss their tasks as they wish. And thatās tantamount to saying that I also want activists to be able to choose platforms based on their popularity and demand, not based on how politically aligned or non-compliant they are with Zcash. If someone thinks the X-atmosphere is hostile to the ideology of Zcash (although I donāt, because Iām more focused on other Twitter trends as a non-American) - well thatās fine, then weāre working behind enemy lines.
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(Speaking for myself.)
You can work behind enemy lines if you want to. Personally I am finding it hard, already, to work with metaphorical knives drawn at me and my family by the same people who run Twitter.
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Daira I respect Your position and Iām against any coercion of anyone. I emphasize that Iām all for creating the most comfortable environment for developers so that they can not think about unpleasant things and do the conversations the way they want to do it.
My posts are not addressed to anyone personally. Iām just against making the active Zcash community look like reclusive people. I encourage all Zcash ambassadors (unofficial) to be present wherever any crypto community is. If we want to catch fish, we have to go to the pond.
Devs do their job, ambassadors do theirs.
And thatās fine, but livestreaming to Twitter is effectively making devs into ambassadors beyond what weāve (or at least Iāve; Iām not trying to speak for others) consented to.
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