[stdcli]

Blockstack is not based on scuttlebutt protocol, but when it comes to addressing id creation, user friendly onboarding probably needing a browser, etc

"someone will have to build a browser-equivalent"

we do have a browser that has a somewhat user friendly onboarding process: https://browser.blockstack.org/

If it is your first time, you will be asked to create an identity on Blockstack: https://docs.blockstack.org/core/naming/introduction.html

Each instance of the "browser" whether on desktop or phone, requires a unique password, associated with the id. The id is stored on the Blockchain, the data is stored in your own gaia hub which you can host wherever you like: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html

"That's a problem best solved by modeling this as an app - and there needs to be a reason for the average user to use this"

The next browser release will have a landing page that features apps dynamically populated from https://app.co/ and will have a more user friendly onboarding process, one that explains in more detail that each instance of the browser (we have a desktop version, each login in a new browser, etc) requires its' own password.

I think my favorite app using our protocol is https://debutapp.social/ because it is the "facebook" or twitter like equivalent people can associate with to see there is a relevant use to this, and in general user end interaction with the platform can be seemless with integration of decentralised protocols when done correctly.

The founder/creator of this app is a self taught software developer who does this in his spare time outside of a full time job so if you have feedback make it constructive and feed it back to him on the help page.

Same as other protocols, we are working to make our nodes easily hostable. If you know docker at this point or how to launch a vm in digital ocean you are probably good, but we are working to automated images and one click deploys. You will see more rollouts with much less instructions and much more "one click deploy" based in the near future.

We are actually prioritising our gaia hubs being easily hosted with one click deploys by the average user over the nodes, because in our model gaia is where the user's data is stored, and the decentralized aspects of the protocol are related to identity, and authing that identity with a users data, that apps can read/write to, but the user ultimately has the ability to store that data where they want, revoke access to apps, whitelist apps, migrate the data, etc.

You can read more about blockstack, gaia (our user storage) and the rest of the platform here: https://docs.blockstack.org/

Given your very developed opinion on what the decentralised internet needs, and how it seems very aligned with what we are developing, would love to hear your feedback/initial impressions of our platform and app ecosystem.

[viksit]

Thanks for the pointers -- I'm pretty familiar with Blockstack and the Gaia ecosystem. I started playing around with it a couple of years ago, and registered [1] my ID in 2017 maybe? or 2018? I forget. Of course, it was much more bare bones then than now. But the owner address link doesn't work for me today [2].

Happy to give feedback directly on DebutApp, but my initial impressions of it when I tried were - it's a good proof of concept, but its a very early incarnation and so definitely rough on the edges on both product and engineering. It's commendable that this is a side project, since it shows promise.

One of my main questions with a lot of blockstack apps is exactly that - while they prove that something can be done, it's unclear to me how the next person who is going to google for "new blog" and try to pick one of squarespace, medium, or blogger - will use debutapp.

I'm curious about the host-able node comment. Who is this one click deploy targeted at? and what is the incentive for folks to do it today?

Also, any insights on why there's a general sense of lag on the ajax calls that these apps make?

[1] https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/viksit.id

[2] https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1LMxzW9LbL6HZEo3qeLb...

[stdcli]

Hey thank you for the feedback.

usernames expire after two years, so that could be it depending on when in 2017 you registered your username.

"One of my main questions with a lot of blockstack apps is exactly that - while they prove that something can be done, it's unclear to me how the next person who is going to google for "new blog" and try to pick one of squarespace, medium, or blogger - will use debutapp."

I think apps built with Blockstack like graphite and others: https://www.graphitedocs.com/ are gaining alot of popularity on the "normal" internet and getting recognition in places like producthunt, hackernoon etc: https://hackernoon.com/is-dweb-taking-off-a-glimpse-into-blo... , https://www.producthunt.com/posts/graphite etc etc

For now we are trying to point people to https://app.co/ to show the entire dapp ecosystem, not just blockstack based applications, but you can filter by protocol.

The next browser release will have blockstack apps from app.co dynamically loaded into the browser landing page as we know its a bit outdated based on the apps available now.

but yes there is alot more we can do, and alot of general awareness people can have on the internet. The idea is that applications like

blockusign: https://blockusign.co/signup.html

afari: https://www.afari.io/

graphite: https://www.graphitedocs.com/

sigle: https://www.sigle.io/

stealthy: https://www.stealthy.im/

travelstack: https://www.travelstack.club/

xor: https://xordrive.io/

diffuse: https://diffuse.sh/

dpages: https://dpage.io/editor/

(secret fave: https://blkbreakout.herokuapp.com/)

blockvault: https://blockvault.site/

and others listed on app.co, are also searchable on the mainstream internet, and advertised not as exclusively apart of the "new internet" but advertised based on the user value they provide that many centralised apps do as well.

"I'm curious about the host-able node comment. Who is this one click deploy targeted at? and what is the incentive for folks to do it today?" <-- in reponse to the top ranked comment on this blog about easily hostable infrastructure aka blockstack-core nodes and gaia hubs as well in our case. gaia hubs are where users store personal data (as opposed to ipfs thought gaia hubs can be technically support an ipfs driver/we have a req for this but have not prioritized it yet).

Making gaia hubs easy for users to host supports the idea that if they want to its not hosted by someone else/ a big cloud provider/another company etc, despite the api supporting they decide who has write access to their data/can delete if they want to, etc. It also allows them to host on their own server, or another cloud if they want to.

The incentive is mostly there in that already some applications are hosting gaia hubs for users and charging them for it, so there is an opportunity to make money.

In the future, we see companies dedicated to hosting gaia hubs for users and charging for it, not just applications, and you can see there are many parallel companies doing the same with IPFS type protocols like filecoin, golem computing for example (now lead by the previous founder of QubesOs, which says alot that she would leave her own operating system after a decade to focus on something like this). There is definitely money to be made in this space, I'm just a big believer in despite all of this, still making it easy for users to host their own on their own machine, a rasberry pi or something like Digital Ocean's one click deploy marketplace if they so choose to be wholly consistent with the idea that users can own their own data, manage the gaia hub themselves but not have to be an "anarchist sysadmin" skill level to do so. The incentive there right now is that Digital Ocean is also paying for 5months of one click deploy marketplace droplet hosting ($5/mo). That's something we are working on, but yes, there is definitely an economic incentive here..

The blockstack explorer actually went through some internal infrastuctural changes just this week. We are aware this is an issue and working on it. Will get back to you when you can expect faster response times for this. I would say end of not this coming week but next week, but will get back to your with more detail.