SkateSpots Drop #006

It's a WEEKLY newsletter and we ship whenever the f*** we want — and this one took seven weeks, which by our standards is basically punctual. Meanwhile the wider Nostr ecosystem celebrated another round of heroic funding by shipping… another timeline. For the same nine users. Congratulations to everyone involved. We, being broke and unhireable, spent the week fixing a Directions feature that had never once drawn a route and DMs that were being posted to relays nobody was listening to. Different tax bracket, different priorities.

What shipped

No, this release does not include a new Nostr Twitter Clone*

Not Financial Advice

Let's get ahead of the press release: SkateSpots #006 does not ship a microblogging client. There is no new timeline, no quote-post button, no blue check, no 'For You' algorithm deciding you should see a stranger's breakfast. We appreciate this is a controversial product decision. Somewhere out there a team is closing on four years and twenty-something million dollars of development and 'adoption', and the flagship deliverable is a marginally different way to post 280 characters to the same nine people. We wish them every success — we simply can't compete with that kind of focus. We spent the week making sure the map draws a line. Someone has to. (*Someone did build the Nostr Twitter clone. It just wasn't us — we were busy making the map work.)

Directions actually work now — yes, they never did

Directions

Here's the confession: the route map was never being drawn. The code ran, the dialog opened, and then it showed you a beautiful empty void — the map was stillborn, mounted before its container existed, then gave up forever. Meanwhile every travel mode was quietly returning the SAME numbers, because the routing server only really has a car profile and ignores which mode you picked. So 'walking' and 'driving' were identical lies. Both fixed: routes draw, and walk/bike/moto/car now give genuinely different answers — on one test trip, 13 min walking, 5 biking, 2 driving.

It follows you now (no, there's no voice — we're not magicians)

New

Tap Start and it tracks your dot, highlights the step you're on, and tells you the next turn plus how far is left. The steps list gives you the actual streets, and you can tap any step to jump to it on the map; 'Whole route' zooms back out. The map is a lot bigger now, with a scale bar and proper distance / time / arrival stats. There's still no voice guidance and we're not going to pretend otherwise — we'll leave the shouting at you to the apps that enjoy it.

Route from wherever you like — and it survives a dead spot

New

Going somewhere first? 'From → Choose on map' sets your start point instead of routing from wherever you happen to be standing. And your last route is now saved: lose signal mid-skate and it keeps showing the line, the time and the steps — clearly labelled as saved — instead of gasping out an error message.

Sasquatch went Pro — and started doing actual work

Sasquatch

The Sasquatch is the AI guide in the corner of the app, and it got smarter and, more impressively, quieter. Free forever: trick and term lookups, plus finding spots, events, crews, shops, tours and gear straight off the relays. Sasquatch Pro — paid in sats over Lightning, from seven days — unlocks real AI answers, streamed as they're written, plus personal tools that can draft your posts and listings and read your Stash and Crews in chat. Why sats? Because the AI costs real money, and we'd rather you spend a few sats than have us sell your data, run ads, or pretend a free model is free. It also stopped nagging you for permission: one signature per session instead of an approval screen for every message.

The Marketplace got a proper home — and ratings in decks

Marketplace

Every listing lives in one place now: Browse, Selling (your listings, with one-tap Mark sold), My Trades and Reputation. And instead of a thumbs up/down nobody believes, you rate a trade 1–10 skateboard decks when you confirm it. Ratings show on both profiles with an honest average, and every confirmation has to be with a real human — so two accounts can't sit there pumping each other's reputation like a crypto group chat.

Mints got its own section — and stopped throwing JSON at you

Mints

The Mints directory is Cashu mints with health, latency, NUT support and whether a mint is actually online, so you can pick one that's breathing before you trust it with ecash. It's now reachable from the phone menu too. We also fixed a genuine embarrassment: inside the app the page was throwing 'Unexpected token < … is not valid JSON' at you, because it was asking the phone's local shell for data instead of the real site. Browsing mints stays free and read-only.

Amber stopped asking permission to exist

Fix

Amber was popping up on basically every screen — navigating, reading notifications, switching a tab — which isn't security, it's a hostage negotiation. The app was silently decrypting its own settings on every page. Amber now only opens for things that genuinely need your signature: log in, messages, your Stash, trades, invites, publishing. Browsing is free again.

Your DMs were being posted to relays nobody was listening to

Fix

One line of settings-validation code was deleting your DM inbox relays every time the app loaded. DMs are private and use dedicated inbox relays — so with that list gone, the app published them to your normal relays, where the other person was never listening. Which is exactly why DMs looked like they went nowhere. Fixed — and sending and loading no longer choke on one dead or login-only relay in your list.

Small stuff that was quietly annoying you

Polish

The desktop 'More' menu stopped vanishing when you pinned Marketplace, and Marketplace is now in the phone menu. The newsletter page stopped melting your CPU. The logo stopped elbowing the nav in the ribs. And yes — we shipped a newsletter feature that didn't reliably deliver the newsletter; issues and subscriptions now publish to the community relay plus yours, instead of into the void.

Community

Thanks to everyone who reported the 'no route' screen, the vanishing DMs, and the app buzzing like a phone in a washing machine on the newsletter page — nine of you found our bugs faster than we made them, and we love you for it. No spot of the week this time, so go add one and you're in the next drop. Everything syncs through wss://goskatespots.nostr1.com. Keep your keys, distrust anything that asks for a signature to show you a map, and keep skating.

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Read every drop at https://skate-spots.org/#/newsletter