A roast of Colony: why it failed and what to do next?

Development
21

Before the new regime we had various attempts - by MaidSafe - to do this. They were promising and some good things came from them (such as funding of Safe Browser development which in turn lead to a new MaidSafe Tech Lead) but as the network was not ready, they were premature and stalled. Early attempts at Developer Pods went similarly.

Now Autonomi just have IF and I think it is half assed. The half it has is publicity, but the half it hasn’t is support to build an ecosystem. As it stands, devs will I expect for the most part come and play and then give up.

We certainly need publicity and it was great to see developers emerge or be attracted and create really promising stuff. But it is only part of what I think is needed right now.

3 Likes
22

I’ll repeat this.

I hate to admit that I haven’t tried Colony or many other IF apps. Only Friends and Atlas, and that’s because @Southside was so vocal about them. On top of those I have tried direct up/downloading with CLI. @oetyng ‘s Ryyn is something that I expect to become possibly the first app that I’m going to use “for real”, to backup some files.

The reason for my passivity:

  1. On technical / nerdy front I’m interested in how things work when I connect to the network straight from home, no proxies, no caches… I want to get a feel of how data moves or not. But I’m not technical enough to see under the hood, what apps are “pure” in this sense.
  2. So the whole landscape is a bit foggy. I don’t know what apps to choose to try things. I would really like to get away from using CLI, because it’s so clumsy to me, but until DAVE that was the main way to get a feel of network working - you know, time safe files upload etc. (I haven’t tried DAVE yet, though, cause I hate the idea of having to use mobile wallet. Will do that sooner or later though.)
  3. I kind of want an UI that is GUI geared towards a normie, that I very much am. On the other hand there is not enough content on the network to do any “normal” things. So mostly I am just prodding and taking half assed measurements of how things work. So, I don’t want an UI that gives me a “smooth experience” by caching data for example. But I would like to have an UI that give me raw experience with less hassle.
  4. All the problems with the network itself have also made me push all the use to a later date, that might be soon here. I’m still waiting them to do away the relay functionality on nodes. Before that is done I don’t feel we are there yet. Also I’d like to get a clear view, where are we with pointers and scratchpads? Not that I would understand much of those, but I’d just like to know are we running or limping?

In my opinion, probably the best thing / site on the network so far has been the Billboard. It’s a sort of a thing that I haven’t seen anywhere else and for some reason I just like it. It’s very much on a POC level, and impossible to know if it will become something more. But with Billboard I have been doing something that I have not done before. There is something fresh there.

3 Likes
23

Here is an idea for a mobile app. It is called The Sixpack or maybe Cheers! and this is how it works:

  1. Its an Autonomi website, that presents 6 photos in a sixpack arrangement. Anyone can update any of the photos anonymously. (Much like Billboard is now, but with photos.)
  2. The idea/goal is that there are always 6 different photos of a beer. Anyone is encouraged to take a photo of their beer when having one, and uploading it there. No text, just a photo of a beer jug, bottle, can… A celebratory thing.
  3. On the other hand, no one has control if people play by the rules or not. It’s an open playground, but the intention is set as above.

That’s it, nothing more.

There are some grand and serious endeavors cooking by many of you and dirvine, but I’d like to have something silly too.

***

Another option would be a site that is just two images side by side, and anyone can update them. That could easily become the most loved and hated site in the World, probably updating so fast it would just flicker through a stream of images. A battleground. ← That could be it’s name.

8 Likes
24

I think this would be cool. They’ve done similar shared space things in the past, like on reddit when they did the r/place thing. At a high level, a single user could edit only one pixel every 5 minutes or so on this large canvas. Super cool concept, maybe we can duplicate that here as well:

image
image1920×1958 1.38 MB

5 Likes
25

I wasn’t aware of that one, but an earlier one by a young UK guy who sold pixels on his website. IDK it if is still up.

@Toivo keep going, ideas like this are great and you should figure out a way to make one happen.

6 Likes
26

To add, there is the cost, this has been a major drawback for uploading by many people. Just small amounts to start with. I did upload a private pod with private video/file. The video was over 100MB from memory and it worked fine.

@zettawatt It is a success in my book, maybe rough on the edges, but worked. With more people who also want to upload, even with fees, and it will gain traction. As with all early projects it will take some time. Even Microsoft Windows it had a slow and bumpy start, and for all its flaws it is the most used OS by individuals.

I remember back in the mid to late 80’s looking at an early release of windows being sold and it was cute to look at, sold very little. DOS was still the leading OS for the PC market, linux didn’t exist yet. I was using mixtures of Unix, DOS, IBM (mid/main/&ibm-unix), my-own, and some other little known variants of Unix and this MS Windows 1.0, 2.0 were basically unused in the industry/home.

Take heart, don’t let go of colony and let it bloom over time as people provide feedback on what they want in it.

9 Likes
27

This I believe is the original (from 2005):

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels

I remember the TV reports.

5 Likes
28

I’ve tried most of the IF apps, Colony was one of the easiest to use. I like it a lot, just not much to experience through it, on the network quite yet.

It is far far too early to call anything a success or failure yet.

Colony like other IF, and dweb, anttp, Dave, are all excellent.

But creating an app, like any other product, needs some heavyweight marketing behind it.

Building the app, as difficult as it is, is often the easy part. It is even more difficult to market it.

It starts with what problem are you solving for users, and then letting them know you have the solution.

If apps on Autonomi are wanting to tell people they are solving a problem they did not know they had, hence creating a brand new market, that is even harder to sell.

But stay positive!

Your work is great, your ideas sound, keep at it.

No one knew they needed the internet either.

You are a pioneer, like many here. This is all just the early beginning of something sublime.

It’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey. Zen out.

7 Likes
29

Thanks for the link, sounds very nice!

@happybeing would it be possible to combine mutable and immutable data in such a way, that we could make a version of r/place, where every change would be an independent version of the whole? Then you could traverse the whole history and enjoy watching the process unfolding.

With this kind of truly open, uncensored and anonymous platforms, there would probably be some very objectionable content sooner or later. Imagine for example some images of extreme violence suddenly appearing in the midst of beer photos. The whole site might turn into something I’ve been thankful for not having ever seen. But also, it might not and I would like to see how it goes.

Also, because of deduplication, it would be free for anyone to change any photo to something that has been up before. One possible extreme result would be people running scripts fighting which content would be visible or invisible. Sort of an open competition to moderate the place. Who knows.

Thanks for your kind words:

3 Likes
30

I think this does illustrate the varying expectations of folks consuming the apps.

Personally, with IMIM, I wanted the performance experience to be as close to the clear net as possible. My rationale is that people have the current thing as the minimum expectation of the new thing. If it is much slower and/or unreliable, folks will just switch off, imo.

While the technical performance of autonomi is fascinating, I’m not convinced it sells the network to new people. Maybe it would to some devs, but they probably also want to know how fast it can feel with appropriate efforts.

For example, modern browsers cache heavily, as the clear net is relatively slow (even with today’s hardware and connectivity). Servers tend to compress content (e.g. gzip) too, before transmission, to keep the data as small as possible. They also use cookies, browser storage and other tricks to maximise performance. There are often caching layers in modern backends too.

So, to demonstrate an app without the above, we are hobbling the experience, even with the clear net.

Personally, I want to see how fast we can make it feel. I want the app to feel just as responsive to a clear net app. I want it to look and feel just as good too. I suspect most users are similar, as they have no care or clue as to what happens under the hood - they want it to be pretty, easy and responsive.

Ofc, we have payments etc to worry about and there are many internal advantages of autonomi, but people compare to what they know. That bit we need to nail, imo.

7 Likes
31

Yes why re-invent the wheel, there are plent of UI/UX experiences ou ther for Dektop and Mobile that are excellent, and should be used as baselines, and in fact depending on the terms of the their copyright claim and licensing choices, actually you will find some projects want you to copy/re-use their front end. Pragmatism rules when your community size is small.

3 Likes
32

combined with self-censorship/filters like whitelists and black lists to become your own ‘net nanny’ and that of your children or wards, such a hybrid r/place refactored in such a manner is a good baseline capability to add into the Autonomi Network to encourage use,

The above ‘Autonomized’ hybrid r/place idea would likely get traction in the masses

IF latched to some capacity limited incentive, for private use only, where any user sees their own view of r/place map…

maybe adapted to be an easy to ready tag cloud where uploaders create their own tags in their own language?

Maybe the capacity limit is 20 GB free, something like that, with some easy upload compression for text, image and video files?

Remember we are competing with MANY free upload capacity limit schemes out there, Google, Zoho, etc…

Having an Easy UI/UX is really key here, like click on upload file and tag it for their personal 3D cloud tag that rotates (there are FOSS projects out there for this ..), where the modified Dave app does the compression and decompression so they get the most out of their free space?

I guess that 20GB free would translate to 60GB (3 copies on average) from every noderunner system, which amounts to the cost of marketing the network out there to get people’s attention hay here is 20GB of free storage that with compression averaging say 50% is really worth 30GB of free space to use? Imo that will get people’s attention. The 20GB limit is encrypted in the Dave app and reported to the user every time they upload files?

2 Likes
33

I tried it a few months ago, but I think uploading failed and that was the third time I had tried uploading on the network and failing so I just gave up. Even if that is fixed, I think the ‘real reason’ is that there is nothing on the network for anyone to really be useful rn (like videos or internet archive etc), and for that to happen the upload costs are still way too high

1 Like
34

Hi,

Apologies I have very little time to interact with the forum or the network at the moment, but I have been reading posts and keeping as up to date as I can, and everything I’ve read about Colony and how you’re approaching the problem of indexing and searching data sounds really interesting, and I think it could be a fundamental part of Autonomi remaining decentralised.

I was looking at this area in a similar way a few years ago, and although I never got to making anything, the main problems I anticipated were very much the ones you are now talking about, in terms of getting people to add metadata to their data.

I expect there will be many apps to upload data, so I wonder if the best chance of success would be developing an indexing module that other developers can plug into their app. I wonder if a lightweight specialised AI agent running locally would be a good approach to making this automated so that users don’t even have to think about it? Then I guess the next step would be developing a structure/protocol to store the metadata in that makes sense for the human user to interact with if necessary, but is also easily and efficiently navigable for another AI agent (also run locally by each user) that would be needed to traverse the network for public pods (this would be the Google equivalent from a user perspective.)

As far as the UX challenges you’re talking about go I guess one thing I would say is that although I know it comes from some of the more serious efforts at linked data, I’ve never liked the term pods, because I think it is too vague, and could equally apply to any kind of data. I think it is clearer to think of things in terms of indexing.

Again, sorry just to chime in out of left field, and I hope what I’m saying doesn’t sound completely nonsensical or irrelevant, but just thought it was maybe worth throwing a couple of ideas out there in case they were any use to you - I’d love to interact a bit more fully with the developer coop etc. but just at the moment I haven’t got any time at all to promise to it.

Good luck!

David

7 Likes
35

Interesting, thanks for spelling that out.

Yes, I think I’m an outlier having the interest into tech side with lack of ability.

I’m sure caching and other tricks you just described are the things to do, when thinking about general public. Though on the other hand I would like for apps to have an incognito mode, where nothing is saved after use.

3 Likes
36

@zettawatt You definitely shouldn’t give up on something you’ve put so much work and commitment into just because it’s at a very early stage and, as @Tom1 rightly pointed out, there are only a handful of active users here at the moment. You can develop Colony in your spare time at a pace that suits the development of Autonomi, but don’t abandon the project.

This is a very valuable comment. I myself worked on a certain idea before IF, but life changed my plans and, as a result, I didn’t even start a thread on the forum to discuss it, not to mention participating in IF.

I believe that without a Native token, Autonomi is at the stage of a working PoC, and for any application to be used by a wider group of users., one of two directions should be taken:

  1. an application that, thanks to the unique features of Autonomi, solves a very specific problem, and the recipient is willing to pay for it and agree to use a complex crypto solution (i.e. the current data storage payment system),

  2. a solution that combines the existing solution used extensively in Clearnet with the Autonomi network in a way that provides the end user with a new, better user experience and specific benefits, while Autonomi ensures that critical mass is achieved and a wide group of users become ambassadors for the network.

This is my humble opinion as a non-technical person (I am not a programmer), based on my own experience and my own research into the opinions of a wide range of Internet users. I was going to bring up the second option in your thread about the cooperative, so if you would like to hear my point of view and a certain crazy idea, please let me know.

4 Likes