Bas' Take on Tech: Serverless or VPS? - Telegram Founder Arrested
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🩴 “Level” Up Your VPS Game?
Big News: Pieter Levels, known as @levelsio and creator of NomadList, PhotoAI and other successful single-man startup operations, travelled to Austin. After tweeting a lot about his experience in the States, last week the reason for his travel became clear: He was interviewed by Lex Friedman on his podcast.
Pieter, always known as the index.php and jQuery guy, raised some controversy with his tech stack choice and him operating more or less everything on a single Digital Ocean VPS. Let’s take a deeper dive into his insights.
Level’s operations
The “early” levelsio startups, like NomadList, HoodMaps, and RemoteOK, were conceptually very close: A data source narrowed down to a specific niche, built from public sources, crowdsourcing, or selling ads. Some interactivity like message boards, or direct messages, and you’re there. Technically, these sites are quite simple, from a software development point of view. No real-time data, no large datasets, no media encoding, no Single-Sign-On, and not even close to large Social Media sites in terms of concurrent users. The frontends are not complex, either. Basically, they just display tabular data on server-side generated HTML.
The newer startups – all in the realm of Generative Artificial Intelligence – like PhotoAI, TherapistAI and others, are not complex either. Basically, those are just frontends to paid APIs that offer AI models running on cloud GPUs – an opportunity that levels saw in 2022.
Besides the technical similarities, all of Level’s operations are low-cost products, where nobody seriously gets hurt if they go down – even for a longer period of time.
Level’s choices
While you could still debate the choice not to use a framework at all, Levels just used the tools he felt most comfortable with. I started my first Internet projects with PHP as well, and luckily discovered Django quite early (way before the 1.0 release back then). Implementing stuff like Auth (yes, including Social Auth) was always something I considered available out of the box. I don’t feel that Auth services like Auth0 are making me more productive than – for example – using django-allauth. For servers, databases, and other infrastructure services, there a lots of cheap alternatives to cloud based offerings. Even a 1GB VPS from DigitalOcean or Hetzner can already handle an impressive load of concurrent users (Here is my benchmark from December 2023). If you really need geo-redundancy, hot failover, and other cool stuff, really depends on the use case. “Not trusting” his products because of the tech stack is a bit a far reach given that those products only provide access to a simple database.
Levels questions the marketing of cloud providers.
Maintainability vs. Reusability
His technical choices must also be seen in the light of his business choices: Levels does not want a VC involved (a point which is discussed at length in the podcast). He also wants to work on his own and go to market very early (in the early days of PhotoAI he used a TypeForm and sent out generated images by hand).
At this point, Levels most likely has built a collection of libraries or code snippets that he can reuse in upcoming projects. Given that his projects are similar to each other, it’s also likely that those code snippets are feature-frozen making them vastly reusable for himself.
Under maintenance aspects, however, the index.php + jQuery combination seems far from optimal. In the podcast, he also mentions that he has a hard time finding someone who wants to work on his codebase without rewriting it.
Conclusion
What can we learn from Pieter Levels?
Starting with a simple stack in which you are comfortable, seems like a good way to start. The knowledge and experience that you will gain using “vanilla technologies” will also help you evaluate SaaS/IaaS/PaaS offerings: You will know what they offer and when and why you need them or not.
Some use cases, also used by Levels, such as web-scraping or AI, can be built on paid APIs. For my scraping projects, I rely heavily on ScraperAPI, for example.
In a team context, relying on a framework is beneficial. Even if the framework is bloated, there is most likely one way to solve particular tasks, like routing or Auth. Not having to discuss those with a team drives productivity a lot.
⛓️ Telegram Founder Arrested
Access on the tarmac: French security forces arrested Pawel Durov, founder and head of the chat app Telegram, at Le Bourget airport in Paris on Saturday evening after he landed on a private jet. Since the emergence of messenger and social media platforms, there has been no known case in which Western authorities have arrested the operator of a service used by millions.
However, the French authorities took their time to explain or even confirm the arrest. An official statement on the arrest was released as late as Monday afternoon.
The National Cybercrime Unit and the Anti-Fraud Office are investigating Durov, a police spokesperson said. He is accused of failing to cooperate in cases of online crime and financial crimes that took place on Telegram.
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that Durov had been arrested as part of legal proceedings and that it was “in no way a political decision”.
Telegram was also said to be doing too little in the area of content moderation and cooperating insufficiently with the authorities. The police are also apparently accusing Durov of glorifying terrorism. The terrorism offence would allow the authorities to detain the Telegram boss for 96 hours without charge. This four-day period ends on Wednesday evening. Durov's interrogation is still ongoing, according to reports.
Pressure on Telegram has also increased at EU level in recent months. However, according to a spokesperson, the EU Commission was not involved in Durov's arrest.
The strictest requirements of the DSA only apply to large online platforms, so-called VLOPs with more than 45 million users. Telegram claimed in February that it only had 41 million users in the EU.
By comparison, X has around 360 million users worldwide and more than 130 million in the EU.
Who is Pavel Durov
In December 2011, Russia experienced the largest anti-Kremlin protests since the end of the Soviet Union. 10,000 people also demonstrated in Durov's hometown of St. Petersburg against election fraud and Putin's return to the presidency.
At the time, Durov was still head of the social network VKontakte, his Russian copycat of Facebook, which had more than 100 million users at the time. The fact that opposition groups were calling for demonstrations via the network displeased the Russian government. The FSB domestic intelligence service ordered Durov to close the groups. Instead of complying with the order, he published the letter from the intelligence service on Twitter. Three days later, armed members of the Omon special police were at the door of his apartment. “They seemed to want to break the door,” Durov later recalled in an interview with the New York Times. He watched the officers through the monitor of his intercom system and did not open the door. After an hour, they disappeared.
Since then, Durov has been largely unreachable, just like the Telegram team. 25 to 30 people reportedly work in Telegram's core team. Former employees who still have connections to the team confirm this; few names are public – for security reasons.
The investigation into Durov, who is critical of the state, is also likely to focus on “Ton”. Telegram users can use the Ton coin to buy various things directly on the platform, such as vanity usernames, and the service also gives channel operators a share of the advertising revenue. In the meantime, the Ton Coin has risen to the top ten of all cryptocurrencies – and the Durov brothers have effectively achieved what Mark Zuckerberg failed to do with his Diem project.
Over the weekend, however, it became clear that the markets also find it implausible that Durov's fate is not closely intertwined with Ton. Immediately after news of Durow's arrest made the rounds, the value of the coin plummeted by almost 20 percent.
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