This topic is dedicated to all the various critical views and questions about the Autonomi network project.
Why this kind of topic?
I have recently gotten more and more skeptical whether Autonomi is going to reach it’s goals or not. I have expressed my concerns in various topics in this forum, but I feel that they are more or less off-topic in other threads, as my concerns are often of a more general nature, than the existing topics - so I think a topic of their own is a better choice. I think that in this way, my concerns would also get a better scrutiny and thoughtful replies, which would help me in judging if my concerns are valid or not. And of course, this thread should not be about just my concerns, so I invite everyone else to share their views as well.
Why now?
There are a few reasons:
At the end of 2025, Maidsafe got funding to secure their functioning for 3 more years, which is great. Knowing that the cash flow is thus much less dependent on token price broke an unhealthy pattern in me, by which I had felt the need to try to “stay positive” about the outlooks of the project, in order to somehow keep it going via the connection of perceived value potential of the project and the actual token value and by proxy the finances of the company. Even though I have stated some negative views before, this changed something, and let me have a broader look.
After the drastic diminishing of the participation of the team in discussions on this forum since about 2 years ago, I think the role of this forum has changed. I no longer view this as a support forum for the Maidsafe team, or place for co-ideation, but more of a support forum for the community, and individuals in this community.
The above points have lead to a situation, where (at least in my mind) we can have critical discussions with less reasons to worry about it’s effect on the project itself. I see the separation of the professional team and the amateur community as a healthy divide, in the end - though I can see the downsides of it too. But basically I see the situation now more or less as “Team does what it does, and we talk what we talk.”
On February 19th 2026, we are going to get a detailed update and deployment plan for Autonomi 2.0. From the information available now, it seems to me that Autonomi 2.0 is expected to become a major change. If we get our critical views out and discussed now, we have better capabilities to evaluate that plan right when it is published. This will be good in deciding how we relate to it, when thinking about our investments, for example.
What is the goal of this discussion?
The goal is to help the community members to have informed views about the project. Personally, I am not able to evaluate if my concerns are valid or not. So you can also view this as me asking help in making my mind.
Another goal is to keep the discussion as objective and non-personal as possible - and to form a bit more detached perspectives.
What is not the goal of this discussion?
The goal is not to try to affect the choices of the team in any way, nor to demand answers or anything else from the team. When we ask critical questions in this thread we don’t ask them from the team. We ask them in general, we just put them up. This is not to say that the team members would be excluded, but I sincerely wish they would not feel any pressure in participating here.
Especially, the goal is not to find solutions to any of the perceived problems. The discussion of the possible solutions have often led to paths with endless branches. Let’s just narrow it down to trying to figure out which problems might be valid or not, instead of trying to solve them.
The goal of the network is to become autonomous, not relying on any central party to deliver the future upgrades. In my mind, this would require a development of open, clearly defined protocol / rules, according to which anyone can participate with software from any possible source. I think that this kind of conceptualization would be helpful in guiding the technical development, too. But I have not seen steps to develop that kind of protocol on any plans or roadmaps.
Am I right or wrong in my view about the need for open network protocol?
Autonomi needs to be bullet proof before they can get to that point. No point documenting the protocol in very fine detail when they are still working through issues that may end up changing the protocol itself. Documenting is the easy part.
The big concern I have is can they deliver? Maidsafe is getting closer, but its that last 10% of work that takes most of the time. It gets much harder when there isn’t a good way to test it. It needs to be tested at scale, which is where we are now.
I will say though, from my experience with networks of common blocks, whether software or hardware, you keep fighting it, hammering bugs one after another, it seems like you’ll never get there, and then BOOM, it just works. It isn’t like a standalone system where each bug fixes a problem and you move on to the next. Everything interacts with everything else, you fix one thing, it breaks some subtle interdependency you didn’t know was there. It is much harder to see the finish line and gauge where you are. The systems I’ve worked on were similar in that they were a common “thing” talking to others, but it pales in comparison to the complexity that this team is trying to tackle. I had the benefit of control over what that “thing” was, they’re dealing with different versions in the best case, and bad actors in the worst.
If it is possible to solve, it will take time and determination. And this team has a track record of not giving up. If anyone can figure it out, its these guys.
I’ve one practical one, which is what has kept me from participating - I run old contraptions, exclusively. Stuff people (usually family members) leave in attics and drawers when they change jobs.
I can’t remember the specifics, but early on I tried to get nodes going, and left the experience dejected. It seemed to me at the time that this wasn’t an option on my decade+ old machines, and it didn’t seem likely it would be soon, and this contradicted what I’d been told this network was all about.
So perhaps three concrete questions, feel free to tackle any one or all of them:
Is Autonomi aiming to support less performant devices, or not?
What likelihood is there of Autonomi getting there?
Can someone without powerful computers and/or lots of money to pay for servers and such participate? If so, how?
Tangential Anecdote
Recently fished a tablet out of a drawer, a Samsung Galaxy Tab A6, from 2016: had been neglected for years but it’s a very slick e-reader (KOReader is great) and light games machine (Simon Tatham’s puzzles, for example), battery is weirdly long-lasting, no sign-in to google obviously, tons of stuff disabled and deleted. It lives in airplane mode, and F-Droid software only as far as I can manage CyanogenMod apparently would be the next thing to do, but I’ll wait till I’m bothered by something in the current setup, which was a factory reset and 1hr of poking around. Very nice little reading and puzzles machine!
I can tell you we intend to support modern iOS and Android builds along with the modern Windows/MacOS/Linux builds. Autonomi does aim to be accessible on less powerful, hardware such as a raspberry pi, but for the foreseeable future I do not see support in legacy OS such as Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard/Lion. But older devices can certainly run nodes with updated OS.
I have a gaming desktop that I always leave idle. I can put a few Autonomi nodes to run when not playing video games. I have some older laptops and desktops I dont use that I could update the OS and put some Autonomi nodes on. No additional investment other then paying for the electricity. Bandwidth is already a fixed cost that I would be paying regardless. These options all will earn some ANT over time, but of course not as much if I had a professional setup. For the everyday user, Launchpad is currently the way.
My example is using my 2015 model
Macbook Air (2 core/4 threads),
RAM: 8GB
MacOS 12 Monterey (non-supported these days).
I run nodes from before the testnets on it 24/7.
Today it holds 30 nodes. I’m slowly running out of disk space on its small SSD though.
Do you mean that this machine is dedicated to running nodes, or that you do your everyday computing on it as well as running nodes?
Also, I believe it’s the case that you run this machine 24/7 then, is that correct? Like, there is no such thing as running the node only now and then, you have to be online 24/7?
Yes, it’s basically dedicated to running nodes. I still sometimes use it for other purposes. Like I can take it away since it’s a notebook for a couple hours. The node can go offline. For the network there’s no harm or threat. Nodes just earn proportionally more to their online presence. And it takes about 2 minutes for each node to startup. So if you have dozens of them there’s not much point to run them only a few hours a day.
But the network itself doesn’t punish you (like charging fines) when you go offline.
Node is offline → you don’t receive new paid chunks for storage.
Node is online → you may potentially receive new paid chunks for storage.
CyanogenMod apparently would be the next thing to do, but I’ll wait till I’m bothered by something in the current setup, which was a factory reset and 1hr of poking around. Very nice little reading and puzzles machine!