Interesting thoughts @opacey and very nicely put. You’ve obviously spent some time thinking about this and I wonder if you can provide some examples of similar projects that are achieving greater outreach and if so what they are doing differently?
From my limited research it seems that most decentralised projects are in the same boat, struggling to get third party developers on board for whatever reason, or having to pay a lot for them in rewards (e.g. Blockstack), and even then with most of the engagement being apps rather than the core tech.
In the general case I can think of a number of reasons for this, briefly:
- The number of get-rich-quick schemes diffusing interest;
- The combination of ‘revolutionary’ ideals plus technical knowhow being shared by only a few, and with those few drifting to the most visible projects (like Solid);
- The fact that “this stuff is much harder than we thought” leading to a wait and see approach or a loss of faith and redirection of energies elsewhere;
- “What’s in it for me?” Most open source development is tweaking stuff that already exits to fit a particular use case, or apps built on top, which is not really possible until a project hits Beta.
In the case of SAFE in particular I can think of a couple more:
- Rust - we’re fishing in a very small pool of potential core developers;
- Complexity of the project - maybe it’s hard to see a way in as everything is built from the ground up. Elastos, the other project of similar scope and longevity, seems to be suffering from this;
- Being first to ICO led to problems and the (relative) poor performance of MAID hasn’t helped;
- Lack of visibility - in the world of the new and shiny (Tron, EOS) it may look like a has-been.
These are all significant barriers to engagement and it would be interesting to think about ways to overcome them. I’m not sure how realistic it is to decentralise the whole management of the project - can you think of any examples of this? - but we should certainly be thinking about easing the path in.