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I love the goals of this, but I have two hopefully constructive criticisms: (1) The on-ramp involves downloading and installing a bunch of stuff. Very few peop

by api 7y ago

I love the goals of this, but I have two hopefully constructive criticisms: (1) The on-ramp involves downloading and installing a bunch of stuff. Very few people are going to do that. Is there any way I can try it in a browser or via a tiny download? I'm talking just looking around. WASM is a thing, so even a fat slow WASM app that let me test things out would be a good way for me to see what this stuff is really like. (2) I feel like this and a lot of other similar projects are too monolithic. They feel less like the WWW and more like Project Xanadu. This one is actually not the most complex I've seen, but it's up there. Projects like this either never fully ship or have steep learning curves. Lastly... (3) Anything like this is going to need a killer app to drive initial adoption. Unfortunately a lot of the P2P killer apps in the past have been black or grey market related, which has tended to pigeon-hole them as that and harm more widespread adoption later. You should look for something this can do that other things do not currently do well. It doesn't need to be some massive niche like social media. It could be a small niche with a small group of users who would be enthusiastic about it. In fact sometimes that's better for initially bootstrapping something.

happybeing 7y ago
1. This is a fair point right now but it is only temporary. There's a SAFE Network App which will be the key to the network, providing a single point of contact, installing other things, seeing up a vault if you want to farm, create a wallet, updates etc. Most people will just download that and go from there. 2. Is also a reasonable point to make, but the nature of the goals here means it has to do a lot more than just sit on top of the existing protocols. It's a secure, decentralised, autonomous network/platform, which needs to be built from the ground up in order to solve the many problems we have with the existing web. I'm not sure what you mean by monolithic. The ideas are new and can take a while to grasp but it's worth it. 3. The community have had long discussions about this so many will agree with you. But the best response I've heard to this point was from Tim Berners-Lee when he and David Irvine were at the Decentralised Web Summit in 2018. Someone said something similar to your point 3 to David and Tim jumped in and answered that it wasn't necessary by saying: and what was the killer app when I invented the web? Or something along those lines. I'm not dismissing your point and many of us aren trying to come up with ideas for such killer apps. Personally I suspect we already have some - take a look at the SAFE fundamentals for example. But it may well be something nobody anticipated. It's fun thinking them up though :-)
- api 7y ago
  Here's a thought: podcasting. Podcasting has the vibe of the early DIY web. It's largely independent and isn't "owned" by an oligopoly unlike social media. Indie podcasters sometimes struggle with distribution if they get popular. Lastly, it has a major vanishing content problem when old orphaned podcasts disappear from podcast hosting services but may still be interesting. It would also be fairly easy to write a web-to-SAFE bridge server that allowed people to add podcasts hosted on the SAFE network to regular RSS podcast players. People could run this themselves or run open ones on the web, with the latter amounting to a community run CDN.
  - SotRos25 7y ago
    Great suggestion. Podcasting would definitely be a great and feasible use case. Given that SAFE provides a perpetual web, it could very well be a killer app.
  - nkot2020 7y ago
    I ‘know a guy‘ who decided to build a music platform for the network and podcasting would be an easy addition. ;) Although a dedicated and native recording and podcast publish app would be better and that idea has rolled through my head a few times. Have a good idea on the branding and interface already. Excellent suggestion and reaffirming for sure.
jimcollinson 7y ago
I'm part of the team working on this thing, so I hope I can help out. On (1): keep an eye out in the dev updates on the forum for the Safe Network App, this will fit the bill for what you are describing. Although remember, the network isn't complete yet, but we are on the trajectory for launch, so a fully featured version of the Safe Network App is on that same timeline. On (3), I see what you are getting at, and this has been discussed a lot over the years. I'd make the distinction that there are killer _features_ of the network which will blow up, and enable all manner of amazing individual apps to be built on top. There are a lot of features to highlight in that regard, as it's such a multifaceted project, but one I've aimed to highlight in this YouTube video is the 'Perpetual Web' which will have some pretty big implications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJZYS7ZJYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJZYS7ZJYs And then there are some other really cool aspects that get me personally very excited, such as the serverless, infrastructure free nature of it (from a web dev pov), the possibilities for it to be a middle-man free ecommerce platform, and that's not to mention the private communications strand too.

by api 7y ago

happybeing 7y ago

1. This is a fair point right now but it is only temporary. There's a SAFE Network App which will be the key to the network, providing a single point of contact, installing other things, seeing up a vault if you want to farm, create a wallet, updates etc. Most people will just download that and go from there. 2. Is also a reasonable point to make, but the nature of the goals here means it has to do a lot more than just sit on top of the existing protocols. It's a secure, decentralised, autonomous network/platform, which needs to be built from the ground up in order to solve the many problems we have with the existing web. I'm not sure what you mean by monolithic. The ideas are new and can take a while to grasp but it's worth it. 3. The community have had long discussions about this so many will agree with you. But the best response I've heard to this point was from Tim Berners-Lee when he and David Irvine were at the Decentralised Web Summit in 2018. Someone said something similar to your point 3 to David and Tim jumped in and answered that it wasn't necessary by saying: and what was the killer app when I invented the web? Or something along those lines. I'm not dismissing your point and many of us aren trying to come up with ideas for such killer apps. Personally I suspect we already have some - take a look at the SAFE fundamentals for example. But it may well be something nobody anticipated. It's fun thinking them up though :-)

api 7y ago
Here's a thought: podcasting. Podcasting has the vibe of the early DIY web. It's largely independent and isn't "owned" by an oligopoly unlike social media. Indie podcasters sometimes struggle with distribution if they get popular. Lastly, it has a major vanishing content problem when old orphaned podcasts disappear from podcast hosting services but may still be interesting. It would also be fairly easy to write a web-to-SAFE bridge server that allowed people to add podcasts hosted on the SAFE network to regular RSS podcast players. People could run this themselves or run open ones on the web, with the latter amounting to a community run CDN.
- SotRos25 7y ago
  Great suggestion. Podcasting would definitely be a great and feasible use case. Given that SAFE provides a perpetual web, it could very well be a killer app.
- nkot2020 7y ago
  I ‘know a guy‘ who decided to build a music platform for the network and podcasting would be an easy addition. ;) Although a dedicated and native recording and podcast publish app would be better and that idea has rolled through my head a few times. Have a good idea on the branding and interface already. Excellent suggestion and reaffirming for sure.

jimcollinson 7y ago

I'm part of the team working on this thing, so I hope I can help out. On (1): keep an eye out in the dev updates on the forum for the Safe Network App, this will fit the bill for what you are describing. Although remember, the network isn't complete yet, but we are on the trajectory for launch, so a fully featured version of the Safe Network App is on that same timeline. On (3), I see what you are getting at, and this has been discussed a lot over the years. I'd make the distinction that there are killer _features_ of the network which will blow up, and enable all manner of amazing individual apps to be built on top. There are a lot of features to highlight in that regard, as it's such a multifaceted project, but one I've aimed to highlight in this YouTube video is the 'Perpetual Web' which will have some pretty big implications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJZYS7ZJYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJZYS7ZJYs And then there are some other really cool aspects that get me personally very excited, such as the serverless, infrastructure free nature of it (from a web dev pov), the possibilities for it to be a middle-man free ecommerce platform, and that's not to mention the private communications strand too.