Ned will have a Q&A session tonight

To be honest, I wouldn't be able to write about a different topic even if I tried. It's something that's on a lot of our minds, especially after Ned dropped the bomb two days ago, without as much as a hint prior to that.

In fact, I remember in his previous live broadcast there was a Q&A at the end and the question "What do you think about the current crypto market situation?" popped up. At first, Ned seemed that he was willing to answer that, but then he dodged the question and moved to the next one.

Maybe he couldn't speak his mind before the layoffs were carried out. But maybe it would have been better if the community understood the struggles they were in before that point, and alternative solutions could have been found. Who knows, it's way past that point now.

Anyway, in yesterday's post I wondered how the layoffs will affect the developments for various projects.

Seems like I didn't pay much attention to Ned's announcement. He says:

The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments.

That does sound a lot like all development projects (including SMTs) are on hold and practically the only real focus is survival mode and cutting costs further.

Speaking on cutting costs, something @inertia noticed and I quote from the same announcement:

We have conducted our first all-hands meeting and are prioritizing all the cost reduction solutions we can accomplish in the near term, including [...] pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb

I didn't know what "pitchforking" is, but now I have an idea, thanks to inertia's comment/question:

A pitchfork is when you restart the blockchain from block #1, then import things like public keys and set the balances, and abandon the old chain.

and his question(s):

My question is, do you see a pitchfork as a last resort? Or is it just a tool to pick up if the time arrives? What circumstances would make pitchforking a certainty?

I would also be very interested to find the answer to this question and how they think on implementing it, if they want to drop some types of content from the pitchforked blockchain, what types, etc.

Well, the Q&A should be interesting. And it must provide more information, this uncertainty doesn't help at all.