The road to mass adoption - Ease of site creation = Widespread usage

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In the interest of speeding adoption post launch. I think it would be wise to create basic site templates that adhere to the SAFE protocol. Having a small set of plug and play templates would dramatically lower the barrier of meaningful participation in the SAFE network. Allowing almost anyone to pick a template and immediately populate it with their content and the content of others.

Some would argue that this enables greater competitive growth therefore reducing early network profits for those knowledgeable enough to create more complex frameworks like twitter, and youtube style sites. While partially true, allowing for everyone to express their interests and distribute their content easily will reduce the intimidation felt by many that have avoided their participation in the current system due to little technical knowledge or the tedium of following tutorials.

I also argue that more competition usually results in more polish. Sites, apps, and companies will be forced to refine their offerings to avoid being outdone by another. Template use could also be paid with safecoin. This incentivizes template production and usability. Like the various game engines with different finance models.

The Tonda Tube Template (4T for short) would charge a one time 5 SC fee for example. While the whiteout chirp (twitter -esque) template could provide his template free to deploy, but could be designed to take a small percentage of all donations made to the admin. You guys get the idea.

That said, these are the templates I have in mind (all should be pre-configured to adhere to SAFE protocols) :

Blog Template
This template speaks for itself. Basically the site admin should be able post writings, receive comments, and assign privileges to other prospective co-bloggers.

Twitter -esque
This might seem a bit premature as messaging has yet to be worked out, but the structure can still be laid out.

Facebook -esque
Same as the twitter clone suggested above but with expanded features. You guys already know.

Youtube -esque
Same clearnet format but designed for SAFE of course.

Ebay -esque
Same as above.

All in one site creation tool
An easy to use tool that allows for the creation of sites with all of the above qualities using a simple grid based drag and drop system akin to weebly or wordpress.

ESSENTIAL TOOLS AND MODULES:

An internal site search function with an accompanying UI (i.e. search bar).

A tipping function. A click and tip mechanism with a confirmation pop up to avoid accidental tipping.

Like and Dislike buttons. Spamming expression buttons like these is possible but somewhat pointless. Achieving only increased network overhead and site caching. To reduce the impact of this attack vector we can limit the total expressions one account can impart to 1 - 2 million. My reasoning for this number aside from attack mitigation is that even at 250 likes/dislikes per day every day for 10 years, one would only have used 912,500 of their allotted expressions. IMHO 250 expressions per person daily is a bit extreme and unlikely to occur under normal use. The network could also regularly inform the account holder of their remaining “expressions”. Making the user more conscious of what they like or dislike.

A share function to allow users to share the discovered site with their social circle. Limited in the same way as suggested above.

TL:DR - Making it easy for anyone to create a site that has many of the features of today’s internet and all of SAFE’s benefits, could result in a Facebook like adoption rate. Imagine anyone being able to say “check out my SAFE site” without having to worry about the technical aspects associated with deployment and maintenance. Not constrained to the limited feature set of most of today’s websites. We can achieve this by making well thought out super easy to use SAFE site templates anyone can use to fully realize their dream site.

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I agree :slightly_smiling:

Making ease of adoption and encouraging / making it easy to share what people create and find on SAFEnetwork with people who don’t yet know about it will be very powerful, and could be the key to mass adoption.

I think what you outline is an ambitious ideal target. Ambitious because of the resources needed, when as you may know it is hard to find people to work on projects like this, while we have no shortage of ideas on what we could do with those resources if we had them!

http://safepress.org is very much about what you propose, and could even be the basis for the “All in one site creation tool” you imagine, but we lack the resources to figure out even the basics of a blog right now, let alone put together a plan and fund it. :frowning:

So we may need to start out with something simple, much less ambitious, while keeping the bigger target in our sights. Then use the simpler template/tools to build interest and attract others to get a team together to take on the bigger vision.

That’s my current strategy with SAFEpress - get to grips with how to build dynamic websites (currently an unsolved problem) - build some demos, attract collaborators, build on that for the next stage etc.

Anyone interested in collaborating on these kind of projects, please get in touch and let’s make it happen. So @Tonda, if you think it makes sense to combine forces, let’s see if we can work something out together :slightly_smiling:

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I’m sorry @happybeing I was in dreamland again, I forgot to give you these links:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform/description

Maybe you could get that guy interested to help you with the blog :stuck_out_tongue:

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I would posit that the ease of social interaction is a bigger influence to widespread adoption than site creation would be.

Is it not the case that if (within the Network only) if nothing can be found or shared, then nothing that is ever written would be viewed?

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I agree that this is crucial but it will not promote growth. Not enough of the target population needs another facebook. The ease at which people can build apps and earn will influence adoption. That will be the impetus for user growth and the desire/need for those users to interact will follow.

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Socialization in SAFE provides little incentive over the current incumbents. Convincing a significant portion of free social platform users to switch to SAFE would require a greater degree of effort. Site creation being intrinsically motivated just needs the mere mention of it to convince the user. I’m not aware of other alternatives that provide the ease of use and maintenance free deployment that SAFE does. Creating templates further reduces the barrier. Social interaction via SAFE while possible and very useful requires a user to shift their paradigm to that of a more restrictive one. The need to pay for account creation alone will likely repulse those that could otherwise use free and very popular platforms that provide the illusion of security and safety. I agree that social interaction has greater influence, but creation poses a clear benefit with regards to SAFE. Hence my choice to present this.

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good stuff . @Tonda

Here’s more support for your ideas but with opine on which will garner the greatest interest.

#1. Blog
#2. Storage
#3. eBay
#4. Youtube

Not a fan of dislike buttons - how about a NO-OPINION button? Or a ARE YOU SURE button?

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Sound reasonable. As for the buttons, the absence of an expression submission could be interpreted as NO-OPINION. The ARE YOU SURE is highly contextual (narrow use case). That doesn’t it wont be useful. Hell, we could create whole slew of buttons a user can choose from. :smile:

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Please excuse my ignorance. Would a hyperlink to a blog on the SAFENETWORK that was tweeted outside of the SAFENETWORK to the masses be easily accessible? Or would it be too clunky?

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Kinda. But how to qualify and quantify?

Great idea - not unlike the compacted share tools

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I don’t see why we can’t just make the button. Everything goes! :relaxed:

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It’s both / and. Social systems thrive if there is content to share, so if there isn’t much to share, the gearing of social is inhibited, and equally, content without means to share will also not create as much growth as with social.

See the following topics for recent thoughts on what safe links might be, and what would happen when they are shared outside SAFEnetwork.

We can’t make links work for people who are not yet aware of the network, but we could make them send such people to a website that explains what the link is and how to access the content referred to by the link (see first topic below).

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Perfect solution! … with a very well lubricated interface aka - KILLER APP-

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Glad you think it’s a good idea. Please read the first topic I linked to and the concerns that some raised about privacy, and add your voice to the debate. I’d still like this approach to be seriously considered! :slightly_smiling:

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I think these ideas are great. Making it easy to build sites would really help adoption.

That said I think the lowest hanging fruit is the Safenetwork as a backup service. I said more on this here

Once a load of people are using it to backup their files (And farming to earn the Safecoin to do those backups) then at that stage I see apps starting to appeal to those existing users.

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I am going to throw my 2 cents in. I think I am typical in many ways of the people who would be your first users. I know just enough to be dangerous. I come here attempt to figure out what people are talking about and leave confused. I understand the premise of the network but not the technical stuff.

I have several wordpress sites. I handle them myself. I would love to set something new up but things here are beyond my ability. If you want people to participate than there has to be a format that allows the people like me to be a part of all this.

I would be happy to test drive any platforms if that would help. :slight_smile:

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Start a thread and please voice this more loudly. This barrier needs to be down from day one of launch. Don’t be scared. Make it known. Invite your friends and family with similar technical knowledge to chime in. If popular enough, those with the time and capability will fulfill the request. It will be of great benefit to the network in terms of content diversity and node quantity. Just don’t advertise SAFE too broadly yet. We don’t want to give the greater community a bad impression with incomplete software or a buggy beta. :relaxed: Again, help push this as much as you can.

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One of my questions is: Would people be ok with static sites?

Something that looks like a blog from the early 2000’s, just a picture here and there, a menu at the top, and text as a post.

In this day and age, would average contributors (like @DanaD) be ok with no javascript, search and the like?

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I think this is an inevitable first step but only a stop-gap. Today’s internet is about self publishing (comments, posts) on other people’s websites, so if SAFE network is to compete with it we need to exceed that capability (e.g. same functionality, but more freedom, not sacrificing privacy, less centralisation etc.).

So I think we will definitely need dynamic websites for SAFE one way or another, although it is possible that they will not simply follow the model of the current internet. Quite exciting to be imagining this and maybe building it :slight_smile:

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The bulk of today’s internet still looks this way. Site creators can still achieve a very professional and aesthetically pleasing site by using various techniques (i.e. Using pre-shaded backgrounds and lettering that creates the illusion of depth, making sure there are few sharp edges for a more bubbly appearance in the case of less formal sites, etc). Future site templates could encourage this. I imagine a new SAFE scripting language could be developed by the team to allow for modern aesthetics without the security implications. @Scott could lead the charge.

If end user site interaction is what you meant, I believe it’s possible to modular-ize the site layout so that the site remains separate from the more dynamic aspects like a comments section or any other equally volatile system.

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