Unpopular opinion but here goes 1. UX is hopeless (menu on the right, post on the left? ) and different to be different (use common design patterns, don't re-invent the wheel to be different. User have expectations from other sites they use, don't violate them)
2. Onboarding unclear
3. Non-existent discoverability
4. Tons of different domains joinmastodon.org, mastodon.social, mstdn.social doesn't work nicely with password managers and difficult to remember which to go to login...
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
I’m the opposite. I hate when people don’t use Calendly or the like. The back and forth is time consuming. I like the ability to choose a time and always receive a calendar invite (so I don’t have to create one).
Yeah it's so odd to me that Signal has such top tier engineers and they can't manage to get a presentable desktop app. It looks and feels like a boilerplate Electron chat app with no styling and subpar performance (oh but they have stickers :eyeroll:).
Interesting. Been thinking about something like this. You mentioned other privacy preserving services; which products do you think are most in need of privacy preserving alternatives?
For Zood Location, I'd like to add a 'Find my phone' feature. It's already mostly done in the Android client (I don't think it's possible on iOS). I just need to implement a landing page on the web that folks can use to log in and make their phone start ringing.
Re: other services.
I'd like to implement something akin to Google Photos but where all your images are encrypted before going up to the cloud for storage. All the fun face recognition features and indexing would have to happen on your phone, but phones are plenty powerful enough these days to do that while you're sleeping and your phone is plugged in and charging.
I'd like to implement a simplified personal assistant like Google Now, that doesn't depend on sending your personal data into the cloud. Again, phones are so powerful and they already know so much about you based on local context, that I think there's a big opportunity for making a "good enough" assistant that doesn't compromise your privacy.
More mundane, but I think still very useful, is being able to store your contacts in the cloud, but making sure they're encrypted with a local key you control, so the storage provider (e.g. Zood) can't see your contact list.
An actually trusthworthy VPN provider. Mozilla entered this space a couple months ago, and I think it's great that there is at least one trusthworthy VPN brand now. It's a very confusing market for people to navigate, but I'd like to earn the trust of people so a Zood VPN product would become a viable service.
Along the theme of helping people extricate themselves from the advertising and surveillance economy, a service that helps people remove themselves from these junk snail mail lists. You can do it on your own right now, but it can be overwhelming.
I have lots of other little ideas, but they aren't quite ready for discussing. :-)
There is also https://www.mylio.com which E2E encrypts photos on the cloud, is iOS, Android, Windows and macOS and is very performant. There is also photostructure, but they don't seem to be planning to make mobile clients any time soon :|
One thing I've actually not seen is E2E contacts & calendars. Everything seems to be based on CalDAV & CardDAV which I think forces you to sync them with a server in plaintext. Email is mostly a lost cause, the closest you could approach it is something like protonmail AFAIK.
Also as far as 'good' VPN providers, I think PIA & Mulvad have fairly good reps. Mulvad even lets you pay in mailed in cash.
> There is also photostructure.com, but they don't seem to be planning to make mobile clients any time soon :|
Sorry about that. I certainly get the appeal of "one app to rule then all," but as an indy solo dev, I have to focus on building features that give my users the best bang from my limited time.
File sync is surprisingly hard to do cross-platform--most apps have pretty abysmal app store ratings, including the built-in ones from NAS manufacturers.
> One thing I've actually not seen is E2E contacts & calendars. Everything seems to be based on CalDAV & CardDAV which I think forces you to sync them with a server in plaintext. Email is mostly a lost cause, the closest you could approach it is something like protonmail AFAIK.
Totally agree. I think the natural progression of things to replace would be contacts and then calendaring. For the life of me, I can't figure out what should/how to replace email. Or simply make it more secure for the masses.
I don't think you should bother with email. If you want privacy in your communications, use signal or matrix. Making a replacement for email that is E2EE is a much bigger problem that I think would take something like signal messenger to add something like oauth & domain support.
etesync.com already does it, and has it for years. Open source and an open protocol. Supported in GNOME and KDE (starting from the next version) and a lot of clients for other platforms too.
Yeah, the problem is if you’ve read all the same books as Naval, then you know where much of his tweets and ‘wisdom’ are coming from, but he never credits the source, instead implicitly passing it off as his own.
By way of comparison, one of his idols, Nassim Taleb, enthusiastically credits the sources of any thought or idea that is not his own, but which has informed and enriched his own original ideas. He makes that distinction clear in his tweets, papers, and books, the latter two extensively throughout the text, footnotes, and appendices.
It would be cool and admirable if Naval were using his platform to similarly boost his sources by crediting them more, and showing how their ideas have informed his own. Rather than commingling their and his ideas and implicitly taking credit for all of it.
That his ‘cult’ or followers don’t seem to see this suggests they either haven’t read extensively enough to recognize the sources, or they have and simply gravitate to someone like Naval confirming things they already believe.
This is really valid criticism which not only Naval is guilty, but most of the other intellectual personas on Twitter too.
I've always been interested not just in the ideas per se (which are often useful, no doubt) but also how they came to be, and I've had more than one instance where I wanted to trace back where they adapted the idea and I can't find it that easily.
That said, it may be the medium's fault, as the inherent character limit only allows for so much information that references and relevant information are considered way lesser in terms of priority... which in turn I think says something about the nature of ideas themselves.
No, Taleb has extensively credited Mandelbrot in his books and papers, and in public appearances with Mandelbrot, and has even called Mandelbrot his mentor. There’s not much more he could do to credit Mandlebrot.
Hi all! I’m currently working on a product called Betty (http://trybetty.com) that allows users to schedule completely within email without the back and forth.
I recently opened up the product to a public beta and I’d love to get some feedback (good or bad).
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.