I worry that right now, Freenet doesn't provide a very good first user
experience- I worry that this leads to frequent installation of the tool
out of curiosity, and then subsequent uninstallation when the user can't
find anything fun to do with Freenet.
The main problem is that Freenet is marketed, and fproxy is oriented, as
a network layer tool. This makes sense, to a degree, since the goal is
to have many applications depending on freenet, but in practice users
download freenet itself, find it lacking in wizbang features, then
remove it. I propose that it may be in the interests of the project to
tweak fproxy to cater to that initial installation experience. There are
a few tweaks that can be done that would dramatically improve user
experience.
1)
For instance- Surveys have shown that people install freenet but
unisntall it because they can't find a way to find "files" to download..
I think the right solution to this is NOT to bundle Frost/etc, but to
make it
drop-dead-easy to publish a flog on Freenet, and include whatever files
or collections of files you want in your flog.. By doing so, and
providing links to them, you can do two things-
a) There is an incentive to the publisher to continue to put
out new editions of their site, since they are the "goto" place for
certain types of files
b) There is a single-version of the file that is popular, so
it becomes better propagated.
Imagine for a moment that I want to start a new page Nine inch Nails
remixes[1].. As the provider of this page, I can create links as I want,
rate them, provide reviews, etc.. This adds substantially more meta
information that files in a Frost store.
Further, as new remixes come out, I have a great incentive to add them
to my page, since I know that people around the world are coming to my
flog to listen to them.
2) Once people can easily publish pages and add content, we should try
to make it easy to find the files that people are already adding. The
default bookmarks are a good step, but the Librarian helps a lot more.
As I mentioned above, people love Search.. We can give it to them, in a
way that doesn't violate the Freenet model.
If we have the Librarian-style search on the default fproxy page
(perhaps only appearing after it has grabbed a few indexes), we can give
people a go-to place to look for information.
We can further increase the usefulness of this Librarian by
automatically checking the flogs and freesites we go to for a published
spider file. If Flog authors started including their own XMLSpider files
in their flog, urls would propagate quickly. We could add a checkbox to
the publish tool that says "[ ] Help others explore Freenet by
publishing a list of all known sites"
3) There NEEDS, NEEDS, NEEDS to be a reliable way to exchange data.. If
it's Frost-style messages, FMS, Freemail, Whatnot, this should be built
front and center into Freenet, and placed right next to the Create a
Freesite link.. Having a reliable way of sending data, not just to your
friends, but to an anonymous freesite, is crucial for interaction..
Essentially, we have weblogs working, but we need comments..
The reason for this is that we need a community to build up around
specific flogs. We want people to check in with a flog every morning,
read the links and news, and leave comments and suggestions for future
sites. There needs to be one solid way of doing contacts for this to
work at all ;(
People need motivation to keep posting.. Hearing from users helps. Lots!
4) Minor issues-
a) Can we Queue to Downloads, or Downloads and Uploads? I know
what a download queue is, but even I wouldn't necessarily look for it here..
b) Why are Statistics and Connectivity given the same high-level
placement as "Configuration" and "Downloads"?
These are fun, and geeky, but they aren't interesting to
most users.. The top-left placement is very high-value real-estate..
This should be used for links like:
"Publish a Flog!"
"Search Freenet!"
"Private Message your friends"
c) Freenet should model it's UI less after router configuration
pages, and more after LiveJournal/Wordpress/Etc.. They know how to make
publishing sites look easy and fun.
d) There should probably be some way to allow a node to pre-fetch
as much as possible..
I have over a TB of storage that I'm willing to let Freenet
have.. So why is it still slow when I browse requests?
It would seem that if I'm integrated into the routing, and
I start seeing a lot of requests passing past/through me, I could start
grabbing the pages referenced by those keys, just in case I need them.
e) Opennet is referred to differnetly in different places- Strangers
on the main menu, Turning it on is promiscous mode, Insecure mode, etc.
f) The Plugins page is too geeky.. Ideally, this would be more like
Firefox extensions. We don't need the FQDN of the extension, etc.
g) Freemail has no instructions on how to use it.. None of the
plugins do, really.. No one is going to figure these out... ;(
h) Further, to be a consumer-level tool, it'd be really great to
unify identity files a lot more.. Your flog id, is different than your
Darknet ID, is different from your FMS id, is different than, is
different than, etc.
It'd be best if we could have one public/private key, and just
have fproxy use it for lots of things behind the scenes, so we can
publish a blog under the same username we use to connect to our darknet
friends, etc.
Then, we can have a "Freenet ID", and be proud of it, whereas
now, again, we come across as a platform, not a destination.
i) Is up&p turned on by default? We should enable it, if they
choose low security...
[1] Reznor has released certain tracks under a CC license.
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