Perhaps you miss the point that appeal is more art than science?
Point being that all positions are valid. You can have as many specifics as you want but if they are not relevant, then others will not care for them.
Jiu jitsu’ing the familiar in the way the OP tempts, could be a good route forward for making SAFE familiar.
More arm-waving!
Not all positions can be valid:
As a small, service business owner I have daily experience of the hard fact that getting the word out is the hardest part of such a commercial enterprise, by far, more than everything else put together. I suppose that would have to be called marketing.
Now consider two categories of enterprise, or of activities of one enterprise grouped in two ways:
Products and services that leverage the peculiar advantages of a medium or market niche.
Products and services that are just one more member of a generic crowd.
SAFEnet has certain properties, advantages, peculiar to it. Unique, actually. The things that it will become widely used for will leverage those peculiar advantages. The activities where it will be a relatively small player will be those where its peculiar advantages don’t cause it to stand out.
If you can leverage the natural advantages, then you don’t need to do much marketing. If you don’t then it will be a hard grind getting in front of prospective customers because there will be so many competing voices.
I listed actual areas that I consider advantageous for SAFEnet. You get lots of advantage for minimal expenditure on marketing.
Consider an actual example: Silk Road. Everyone’s heard of it, because of its notoriety. I’m sure they made lots of money with no marketing at all, because the mass media made their name known.
Now consider, say, peer-to-peer file storage. I know I cited it as an example but I consider it the weakest on that list, because it is competing with IPFS, Storj, and others that will no doubt come along. However, what advantage it does have is due to the fact that it will be the most secure of the bunch and most resistant to being broken by legal attack. So, notoriety will get the word out.
Now consider social media: I don’t see any advantage that SAFEnet will have, so it is not going to have a significant presence there. People won’t even have heard of it in that space.
I know, you’re going to mention “freedom” and “privacy.” But most people do not care about those abstractions, and even when they do genuflect to them, it is as part of a crowd of others doing the same, as the conformism of slaves.
The customer is always right… to their mind and to their perspective and interests, their take is the correct one - and the one you should want to appeal to.
Why limit ambition to being niche?.. Why not just become the new normal.[quote=“bluebird, post:22, topic:6782”]
Now consider social media: I don’t see any advantage that SAFEnet will have, so it is not going to have a significant presence there.
[/quote]
… because you don’t see any advantage?
A SAFE social media, is exactly what we should want. A secure and private route to communication is essential for progress. That’s potentially SAFE’s largest impact. You could consider websites are a slow form of social media… but why not have SAFE support fast modes of communication too… they are crying out for it. You can’t trust Facebook or any other similar flavour of social media, for the way they’ve sold out to other interests than those of their users… to the point they actively manipulate the feedback people receive; such actions are the most toxic any society can see. No, people should be able to communicate freely without being manipulated or exploited for a profit - whatever that profit might be.
and so will anyone who cares for SAFE… not because most people anything… but because those matter. Freedom; Privacy; Security are fundamental to a good society and that SAFE is addressing that need is what makes it so remarkable.
That is a non sequitur. I state that not all positions are valid, and you respond with God knows what.
By the way, not all prospective customers are right: a certain amount of filtering is required and some have to be turned away.
OK, then make the case. So far all you’ve done is vagueness.
Show me who is “crying out” to escape from Facebook. Whoever they are, they are very much a minority, or else Facebook would not be so huge. No-one is keeping those people there at gunpoint.
No-one cares about SAFE except the couple of thousand visitors to this forum. People in general care about what they can get, and those abstractions are well down the list for most people, otherwise we wouldn’t have Facebook, central banking, socialism, and so on.
That’s not to say that I don’t care, actually I do. But the color of my caring is dark rather than light, let’s put it that way.
Define: non sequitur
Just because you don’t understand the connection, doesn’t suggest there is none!
If you are trying to market a product that is notionally for everyone, then you cannot approach that effectively with an agenda that everyone must think like you and have the same priorities and exclusions.
All positions are valid, where you are appealing to everyone - otherwise you are not appealing to everyone; you are instead appealing to a subset.
is subjective - relative to your position. You maintain you are necessarily correct and yes there will be a difference with others… some will be more right than others and none will be as perfect as you. Yet, that’s missing the point of marketing to everyone… if you approach it like that, then it will be hard work.
Marketing to everyone is easy, where you don’t come at it with an agenda.
No, again you’re missing the points I’m making… because you know you are right.
Rather than answer that simple question, I’ll suggest it’s worth considering why Facebook is successful. If SAFE is to replace that with something that is inherently better for being with privacy and security - that engendering freedom and therefore progress in a real sense, then SAFE will need to adopt aspects of what made Facebook useful that so many people did and still do use it.
Facebook sucked people into it; LinkedIn did it in a similar way less powerfully… they made it easy to get it and attractive for having useful new routes to communication that appealed to people’s egos and relationships.
Facebook and LinkIn are dying and people are looking for the next big thing™… they don’t like the rounds of invasion of privacy and manipulation that go on. Same with Reddit. You can argue the timing is wrong but give it time and they will fall… because the next big thing™ has an edge that isn’t those issues users have found problematic. Those issues need not be privacy and security - though they could well be; they could be a run of alsorts but where that occurs and the forward thinking devs fix that and use SAFE because they can or because it’s useful for that, then you’ll rue arguing against the OP’s thought.
That is a non sequitur.
The point was talk of freedom and privacy not talk of SAFE. People who care about SAFE will talk about freedom and privacy… but more than visit here care about those.
Again consider:
We talk of those not because most people anything… but because those matter.
Back to front? Confused? Dark rather than light… hmm.
Also people do not need to “log into” SAFE to be able to use safesites. They only need to have installed the “launcher” or whatever it will be called.
So indeed the user may not even know of this network called SAFE, just that they clicked on a link to install a program (same as say flash) to view some sites.
Thus I do see a need to allow safesites to be able to show content from both SAFE and the current internet.
Hopefully not, surely this network has enough going for it without the need to pander to anyone’s laziness, lack of awareness, lack of care regarding their own privacy.
The idea is no servers within 10 years, so it’s up to organizations to see the writing on the wall and transition their users if they wish to stay in business…they are the one’s that need to play catch up and use internal resources to transition.
So make a native browser and you either use it or you don’t. Those that do use it, discover the awesome exclusive apps only available within, they will tell others and off you go.
You want to straddle…a foot in each camp…it’s a dilution…a compromise…a sign of uncertainity about your product.
Not providing for users who don’t behave, is rather arrogant - assuming that reality will necessarily play out the way you expect, is perhaps rather foolish. Flexibility is a strength not a weakness. As @neo suggested SAFE will likely cater for alsorts anyway, without much additional input being needed.
Mass adoption should be of interest to all of us and in that case being flexible is to our advantage. Expecting the user to come to us because they necessarily understand our niche, is a way to be niche… which obviously will be in certain people’s shortsighted interests, even if not truly in their longerterm ones.
I would consider the above; human weakness and in no way associated with misbehavior.
Misbehavior is akin to inappropriate, which was not implied. An assertion of arrogance is therefore unwarranted.
The elimination of servers within 10 years is the stated goal of Maidsafe, I would not consider them foolish for having this goal. I would not consider myself foolish for believing this goal is possible and treating the journey towards this goal as one that indeed will happen.
Straddling the Clearnet for the sake of Mass Adoption by way of Familiar Social Interactions
So no, I do not believe having a bridge to the clearnet for the sake of mass adoption is a good idea.
The timeline for adoption has been clearly laid out by Maidsafe and I assume that timeline was made with a native implementation in mind.
For mass adoption I believe you need to attrract developers and businesses who will bring their customers/ users with them. An example of a company would be Dropbox… a service for data and written in RUST. An example of a developer group would be Docker who now have native orchestration built in and are a very much a disruptor.
SAFE has finite resources and mass marketing for mass adoption is a gamble too far from my perspective.
You can argue the timing is wrong but give it time and they will fall…
I agree with this. There are already many who would like an alternative to facebook and other surveillance capitalism products (Google, twitter, reddit etc) and as David suggests above, these numbers will continue to increase over time.
It is also probably true that most are still apathetic, but many feel strongly about privacy and security, yet still use those products. For example, Google Search is the only one I can avoid most of the time, but they still get me with Android Play. I still use facebook - though I do configure the settings I’m allowed to, and share hardly any personal or social information there. Same with twitter and so on.
The reason I and many others still use these products is definitely not because we don’t care about privacy and security. I won’t go into the why I and many people do (that’s of topic) - my point is that we should not write-off the class of applications where SAFEnetwork can have the greatest impact for the greatest number of people simply because it’s a tough marketing problem.
I would agree with you @bluebird if you said, “here’s the low hanging fruit, we should target our meagre resources here first”, but writing off such important applications goes too far for me.
@davidpbrown is correct to say that as these applications will continue to exploit users and put them at risk, the opportunities for SAFEnetwork to move in will increase. So it may be a matter of timing. It may be a matter of the next big thing. Or a clever approach to marketing etc. It may, or may not, involve bridging the clearnet (which is the suggestion of the OP) but I wait to see a good case for that. I simply say we should beware closing our minds to it completely - even though I see a strong case for not doing it.
My point is we should beware ruling options out completely. If the benefits to people are clear, we should consider it, and keep our options open. That’s one thing we should learn from those who have captured the internet.
This is why we need a SAFE browser with the SAFE launcher built in. The average user will download this browser and think they are using a new internet.
I agree 100%. It has to be easy enough so all the 50 million tweens who follow the Kardashians can click and go and not give it a second thought (assuming they can handle two at a time…lol!) 