Hi there! After the hype about the launch, I want to know about real apps that we expect to help deploy the network far and wide. The discord has 2.3k members and active running individuals are less than that (based on leaderboards). Being privacy-oriented, descentralised and safe in itself will not produce adoption. The network needs to be useful for many, at a lower cost than alternatives.
I want to be conservative and down to earth here. So here is my intuition: adoption requires demand from users and supply of nodes. Even though supply can pull demand, ultimately, sustainable demand is needed.
So where will this demand come from? We know most people won’t pay for a service they can get for free (e.g. email). Most people are pragmatic and don’t care about non-pecuniary extras (like privacy, etc). Those few that do, can use Proton (also free). So, Jon Doe will not pay ANT for email when he has Gmail. Which are then the demand side apps that will foster adoption? It would be interesting to know.
Regarding the supply side (people earning some coins with nodes), that makes sense in two scenarios. The bad one is where ANT just becomes another crypto FAD/HODL/ETC. Even though that can foster knowledge of the project and expand nodes, it is not sustainable. No, this is a real, technically-solid project, not another meaningless, energy-intensive crypto-bubble. The good scenario is where coins have a value because they are useful. Which leads back to the demand side.
Since most people won’t pay for free stuff (and there are usually free alternatives for technically minded people, think of adblock + youtube vs youtube premium or jellyfin vs netflix), the target has to be mass paid services. But there are few mass products people pay (netflix, spotify, and similar, which require copyrights). Maybe free to users but paid by companies? Website hosting? Perhaps the civil society sector? Educational sector? But companies fill balance sheets and pay taxes. Can they do accounting with crypto? How will ANT integrate with financial side of business?
Lots of questions remain. Looking forward to your ideas.
Once a person is uploading to Autonomi then the barrier to adopting mail on Autonomi (amail?) is reduced to a miniscule amount. For some (many?) the benefits will outweigh the tiny amount of ANT needed to send mail. Things like guaranteed validation of sender, encryption of mail automatically, anonymous mails (not able to be logged/court order to view), none of this GMAIL does a oops we just zapped a few hundred million email accounts (and doesn’t say anything till called out)
Thus it will be the adoption rate that will drive the network effect for autonomi mail. The cost per email will also be tiny, and to get the benefits that Autonomi can provide included will make the paid versions of proton etc look extremely expensive. You’ll only pay for the storage of a chunk typically (3 chunks for super-dupper encryption using self encryption)
It seems that the tide is going out on the being uneducated that for Google, facebook, etc that you are the product and I hear rumblings from those who 10, 20 years ago were happy to give away their privacy, but today saying “what can we do, there is no alternative”
There will be this chicken and egg situation where people will not change when all their friends/associates are still on google, facebook, etc and no one on this platform where privacy is the starting point.
This is one area that Bux and the team are trying to address with the yet unnamed partners uploading tons of content from January (assumed then). The content seems to be along the lines of media to consume. A youtube replacement will take off once the quantity of quality and/or new content rises above a certain level, then creators will move to it paying small amounts to actually own and control their content rather than google deciding who can use youtube or what content they can view. One would assume like currently creators get sponsors to provide enough income to make youtube worth while. For many creators it is the loss of a full time job that means youtube revenue is not enough and have to rely on sponsors, and I suspect that it will occur for many creators on Autonomi, as much as we may hate the in video sponsorships.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that one of the first things to be added to these sort of social media apps is a bridge mode where you’ll be able to have the “same” account on Autonomi and the social media platform
It seems to me that the World is constantly moving into more and more polarized direction, maybe approaching WW3.
In a World like this, I find a truly decentralized and autonomous system the only one, that I can really trust to be impartial. All the possible demands of the various actors, possibly very violent ones, makes all other systems to seem more or less vulnerable.
So, I think that the whole World will find use for Autonomi network.
Also remember that there are different parts of the world, example 1 billion in China could need secure mail, access to news, media, information and other things.
An early killer app for the network feel like it would be dropbox/cloud backup and file sharing.
Other things.
Market places
gateway as storage layer for normal internet sites.
Forums, wikipedia, news.
What ever is hot in crypto world, cryptokitties NFT or what ever is the latest hype.
Just some thoughts early this day. If you search the forum, there is probably several posts which have been going through the subject.
Well, imagine if payments and storage were “taken care of”, to some significant degree. Currently, you can of course implement payments and data storage for your web services, but in most cases you’ve to engage in an awful lot of suffering and tradeoffs and time and expenses, one way or the other.
If (a big if, and uncertain how smooth it is with payments now, at least initially) these things are significantly easier, and if getting set up is real easy, loads of obvious things are a massive sell immediately. Books, music, films, (drugs and porn coughcough) and so on.
There are loads of projects in the decentralised networking and payments spaces, but none seem to have managed to provide those couple of things - idiot-proof setup, and idiot-proof storage and payment for developers and users. Crack those, and we’re off to the races.
i think this also, i’m not great with passwords, … the things they do with the breach database (29 billion records) sounds interesting and useful .
Also Autonomi becomes its own archive for future web sites since all the old versions of web sites on Autonomi will still be stored too. Basically just need a convenient way to logically access old versions as of a date, like Internet archive does
What are the parameters for what will be possible with this new decentralized, distributed architecture? Productivity apps a la Google? Communication apps - to what extent - messaging, sure, sharing photos and videos, sharing with groups in a social media style format? Live video? What are the constraints? I think the web browser going live will be a huge first step that will inform a lot… I saw that a basic HTML page could be publicly linked using awe that was developed by @happybeing. (I’d like to try that out!) What are the limits on the types of web pages that could survive on the new architecture? Is there an easy way businesses could opt to set up their business web sites through the Autonomi network, in such a way that it would be easy to get their customers to use it? Just some thoughts, but in order to have better thoughts, I and maybe others need to understand what the recognized limitations are. Could someone speak to that? Only two days in, and I am hooked. Autonomi just might save us from ourselves. Kudos to those responsible for getting it this far.
Welcome to the community. It really does seem like it could be a bit of a game-changer.
Hopefully some devs will come along and give a more insightful answer, but from what I understand most of what you mention will be possible, though will work differently (though live video may not be possible utilising only the network… but we’ll see).
A big difference vs current server based web is that basically all processing would need to be client side, so an app like Google Docs could be downloaded & run client side (e.g. in browser), with data saved back to Autonomi.
In the coming weeks / months APIs and some simple demo apps should start popping up, and that will hopefully lead to a lot more clarity about what can be done and how.
I feel it will be more of a site adds their search details link to some global “database” on Autonomi and your search engine will use it, or in some distributed way digest that global database into their own database. These “databases” are stored on Autonomi as well.
I suspect the days of databases will end soon btw and the days of a totally new paradigm in past and real time knowledge will come next. I don’t know what that will be, but I feel that massive dynamic data sets will not be useful. I think it may start with tertiary data and then be subsumed into a neural network that constantly learns by crawling and compressing what it finds into knowledge, but the whole web site and indexing of them I suspect will not live much longer as it makes little sense in a true knowledge based society.
but perhaps not quite unmitigated 