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[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

My Initial Review

After delving into RetroShare I have mixed feelings.

4/10 : GUI Flow

The interface is confusing, not well planned out, and not presented well. It's like they just kept adding features to it. Some things are customizable and some are not. Some fonts are too big and others too small. Some things offer 4 visual modes (ie "Chat": bubbles, compact bubbles, standard, standard compact) while there's nothing compact about "Activity". Having a 2 dark modes is good but neither is adequate.

The GUI is all over the place. Some stuff offers icons, buttons, drop-down menus, tabs, tables, etc and some stuff there is zero indication that there are right click menu options.

7/10 : Features

Many features in one place rather than many clients/apps. Many seem to overlap functionality thus adding to the confusion. The features are called "tabs" but are icons/buttons horizontally across the top (option: left vertical). They are:

  • Home
  • Network
  • People
  • Chat
  • Mail
  • Files
  • Channels
  • Forums
  • Boards
  • FeedReader
  • RetroChess
  • Activity
  • Preferences
  • Quit

Also:

  • Links (ie. Posts, Feed Reader, etc.) get opened in your external default browser - pros and cons.
  • VoIP doesn't have a tab for some reason (yet chess does).
  • No wiki.
  • Limited save/archive/expiry controls. Because it's decentralized I will be re-sharing everything I have, kind of like bittorrent.
  • No way to mail to external email addresses.
  • No way to archive mail, feeds, forum, etc.

I could be wrong about some of this, my first limited impression.

The Network, People, Chat, Mail, etc sections are not intuitive and confusing with the contacts list. I love that the mail has custom tags that can be used like folders to organize and sort your stuff. We have nothing like that on SaidIt.

In the "Boards" you can post a link, image, or post. Only the image has a thumbnail. :( The voting is strange and awkward as are the comments and the layout. Boards seem to be more like what we have on SaidIt - easily confused with Channels (video), Forums (discussions), and FeedReader (typical feed aggregator IMO).

FeedReader seems very promising. 2 types: Forum or Local Feed (I'm assuming I can feed into the 3 forums I made but I can only do local feed so far. (https://infogalactic.com/info/SaidIt#RSS_Feeds). I've set mine up to get the SaidIt Hot Posts, New Posts, and New Comments. "Authentication (not yet supported)" seems to imply that we might soon be able to login to SaidIt via Retroshare. The feeds can be stored for a standard (not mentioned) or variable time (I plugged in 999999 days). Update interval standard (not mentioned) or custom in minutes. They downloaded the first 100, which I think may be standard either for feed readers or for SaidIt's RSS.

The problem with feed aggregators is that it's just another step between you and the source. It's one thing if you have many feeds from different sites - but SaidIt already IS an aggregator. Thus it's a hat on a hat in this case.

7/10 : Options

Very good but not great. All the features and more have settings you can customize but each is a mixed bag, from basic to advanced, but not expert. Again in somewhat confusing arrangements.

9/10 : FLOSS Decentralized

Not only is it open-source and decentralized - it doesn't even need any websites. I don't give a 10/10 because I don't know what I don't know and maybe there are other issues with it, maybe not.

Also, one critical universal problem with decentralization is that for wide adoption people need to have plug-n-play, basic, advanced, and expert options available, IMO. Most people won't have time for the learning curve and dealing with the 4/10 GUI flow.

I suspect most users comfortable with Reddit and SaidIt would be too lazy to bother to learn this new desktop client (not sure if it's also a smart phone app). If the flow were better they might dig it for the decentralization and/or other features. Needing an external browser to read/see links may be a deal breaker though as some may not like switching between them.

27/40 : Conclusion

I can't help but think of what someone once said about starting up a new luxury car company (Tesla, Saturn, Lexus or something, I forget), something to the effect: It's not enough to just have a product that's a little better because they are established, our product needs to be universally vastly superior in order to break into the market and survive.

Sadly, IMO, Retroshare is very neat but not enough. Yet it's not without value and much potential. It's a neat side toy. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and it's the next great thing.

Regardless, I'm going to keep playing with RetroShare and Session for a while longer. PM me if you want to join our exploratory activities there.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)