Is there any good news about traffic? I look at escrow on my nodes and see an extremely low value on 4-12 month nodes. Stefan satellite is dead and payouts extremely low.
I think its time to kill some nodes 
In this project, there are no prospects for outbound traffic. 3 months from the date of release in production showed this. Cold storage of data? Yes, but you canāt make money from it.
Iāll lose about $2.5 held and someone can make ~$10-20 from repair. Execution time June 2 (Iāll kill few nodes or ~1-2TB end user data, only asia satellite will be affected this time).
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As primary customers are developers who would have to integrate the platform into their systems as well, it is far too early to draw any conclusions about production use. That said, I think anyone should start small and upgrade as needed. It seems you kind of went the other way around.
Iāll be welcoming your repair traffic on my nodes though. Theyāve done pretty well so far and have already paid for themselves and then some.
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I agree with both sides. Both to the Developers of Storj / Tradigrade and to the SNOs. Iāll explain why. If, on the one hand, in these āleanā periods, the SNOs feel taken āaroundā by the fact that I do not sell data flows go to their nodes and therefore there are no economic revenues and above all the nodes do not fill up, like mine for example, and I canāt add more, since they are on a single IP. On the other hand, the Developers are not doing very much or at least it seems, in my last affirmation it is obviously my pure personal opinion, to advertise the Tradigrade service to ensure that Customers upload data to the network. In my opinion, a massive and planetary advertisement should be made. In my opinion if the SNOs if they see that the nodes fill up they have an incentive to create others and therefore be paid more and then you will see by word of mouth how many people join the networks also professionals like me who have 4 proliant servers with 100TB available and two 1gbit fiber internet connection but it does not switch them on because it would not take a year to fill them. Or maybe I didnāt understand the concept of the Tradigrade network.
Obviously I apologize if I have offended someone but this is just my personal thought. I can, in fact I want to get excited.
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if i was storj and ājustā launched the network, i wouldnāt go on an advertisement mayhemā¦
i would have ensured i had ample of runway and time to sort out all the kinks and streamline the processes, instead of luring in customers that might walk away with a bad experienceā¦
much better to be able to provide support for those few customers that do pick the network this early on, because it wonāt be the rush customers that really want to use tardigrade, it will imo be people with very specific use cases which can be nearly impossible to predict in a post production environment.
sure it sucks that iāve still not made any money on being a SNO yet ā¦i can almost cover the electricity bill this my 3rd month xD, so iām sure that will changeā¦
part of the Storj goals are to make it profitable being a SNO, so iām sure they will try their best at that, SNOās are after all one of the most critical parts of the networkā¦ without atleast a core of semi reliable SNOās there will be no truly distributed network.
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in fact I have been sno for two months and I am online 24/7 with two 12tb nodes each in Raid6 with hd enterprise 10 ^ 15. Even if today my proliant is not gaining anything, on the contrary I am losing electricity, I am trusting the network and I hope that in the next few months it will evolve the positive way. I believe in them and I like the idea.
Good luck and I add one of my thoughts to all those who think they are taking the road to make a node. Remember that when you create a node and start accumulating data, your data may be on those disks, so pay attention to what you do with those data, even if you donāt know the content, treat it as if it were your data and in doing so the network and the customers of the Storj network will have confidence in them and in us and will be able to expand.
Good night, here in Italy itās late at night and Iām going to bed.
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I agree with both. I cannot tell for sure, it is just my impression that Storj marketing sucks. They seem to rely on 3rd party instead of pushing the Tardigrade platform on their own. But at the same time things like the Filezilla integrateion with V3 or a php-uplink is not even available.
But also little things, going terrible marketing wise. Even if a websites uses Tardigrade, there are no buttons no banners, no slogans like āPowered by Tardigradeā or something.
Also my suggestion to upload their videos onto Tardigrade additionally to Youtube to showcase streaming from Tardigrade network, I mean it is weird that they donāt use their own platform and showcase them.
If devs are not onboarding on the scale as hoped, Storj needs to switch strategy and provide more services vor endusers by themselves. Maybe only temporary, maybe only to showcase the platform, to prove that the idea they stand for works.
Again it is my impression that we read a lot about technical stuff that is happening, but almost zero in terms of marketing and there is so much they could do. I donāt think that is well balanced currently.
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What marketing do you guys expect? Which target group and which product?
Do you think they should make TV commercials all over the world for a decentralized storage solution? 90% of the people seeing advertisment probably doesnāt understand a single word and would only need ācold storage personal backupā (which is not what tardigrade is).
Apart from that you would need very easy to use tools and not require people to be tech experts. Additionally you usually advertise products like tardigrade with examples of ready-to-use software and the names of big companies using your service. storjlabs isnāt there yet.
Soā¦ What marketing do you expect? Imho thereās no possibility to make public, widespread advertisments because the product storjlabs is offering is not something that will reach the masses.
Therefore it seems unlikely that any of you will notice any marketing efforts from storjlabs. But that doesnāt mean they are not doing it. They are more likely to contact big companies directly, one at a time, one market at a timeā¦ but not make some big public marketing campaign.
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But marketing is not just advertisement to the masses. But it can be, depending on the product.
But just on example if you look at http://alpha.transfer.sh which was said to be using Tardigrade as backend, why are there no buttons, no banners? There is nothing. Why should this be done? To increase recognition, to establish a brand. There are services that use storage on AWS S3 as reputation.
Same could go with Tardigrade, if it was better marketed. And while i understand to distiguish between devs and end users, I am not sure if that should be done. Devs can be end users, end users could be devs or it admin in a company interested in alternative storage solutions.
Just to add: In your other thread this is quite similar. Markekting wouldnāt necissarily advertise to the masses but maybe offer public endpoints. Self hosted by Storj or offer hosting to reliable SNOs with reputation.
I believe SIA is having a thing like that with their skynet portals.
Eehm, a lot of questions posed here answer themselves.
Because the technical base has to be absolutely solid and at scale before you can advertise to the masses.
Because a platform needs to be a proven reliable brand before customers are going to tout it as an advantage.
Did you even look at that url? Itās clearly still in Alpha testing and not ready for production. transfer.sh is also not owned by Storjlabs, so itās not up to them to promote their platform, itās up to the site owner.
I keep saying this, but it doesnāt seem to land. Itās been just about 2 months. At this point the focus should be on giving customers the best experience possible and growing the platform based on those early demands. Additionally growing out the SNO base is important as well. When there are still relatively few nodes, itās possible a new large customer could raise demand on the network 10x. Thatās going to be very hard to make happen. You want controlled growth early on, so that supply and demand grow in unison. Once the platform is much larger, a sudden rush of new customers will not be as much of a challenge anymore and advertising becomes more interesting. If I may drop a suggestion, podcasts may be a pretty nice way to start doing that. But that time probably isnāt now. Just a little more patience to see this thing grow. I personally believe there will be an exponential curve in growth. Because larger size would allow for more marketing, and more spread through word of mouth. There would also be more slack in the network to deal with an increasingly higher inflow of demand.
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The current platform has been announced as production ready as far as I know. Either it is or it is not.
It is not an issue of an website being āalphaā or not. The issue is that such buttons or banners or slogans do not seem to exist. Thatās marketing failure.
But it is part of a marketing strategy and brand building to turn customers into promotors as normally it is beneficial for both parties. Failure to do so is again a marketing failure.
It is at the current scale. And while production ready is a yes or no thing, the underlying solidity of the tech never is. The more SNOs, the better all elements of the network work. The more development, especially after learnings from the first customer, the better the platform becomes. An MVP can be production ready, but not yet as complete as you would want it to be before you start doing mass advertising.
Or a marketing choice. And of course itās relevant that itās an alpha. If their software isnāt ready for production yet, it wonāt exactly be a great showcase for the platform either. So showing those buttons would be a bad idea to begin with.
Or still a choiceā¦
Could you please explain the advantage of either side in this case? Because I wouldnāt want my brand on an unfinished product, nor would I want to promote a platform that is not yet widely known. So I donāt see it.
You keep ignoring the fact that it could very well be a conscious choice to go for controlled growth right now. Thatās a comprehension failure. (since apparently weāre throwing that failure word around willy nilly right now)
personally i prefer when people keep their damn advertisement away from meā¦ there are many different ways of marketing and many of them doesnāt involve annoying right and left with irrelevant information.
tho i will say cloudflare did it pretty wellā¦short and to the pointā¦ and maybe actually performing a real function while advertising, i liked thatā¦ if it wasnāt / isnāt just a market scheme, and they just show us their logo and pause traffic for no reason.
if i was to advertise for storj i would most likely go something like that, but i still think it would be rushing in to battle, with little to no production testingā¦
Yeah sure, I could be totally wrong. I donāt mind. I can only judge from what I see and put 2 and 2 together. The sudden need for a php-uplink due to huge demand did not sound like Storj is going to reject customer traffic for controlled growth.
But see, there is much much talking about the technical side and much less of the way how to really promote it for growth. If solid plans exist, then you can make solid statements or at least hints if they are confidential.
But I seem to miss those statements entirely because I cannot remember such announcements being made.
So if Storj has great marketing plans, they should at least simply hint about them so me and others can stop making our heads about ideas what could be done to increase recognition, and make the platform grow.
There is a difference between rejecting customers or spending money to get more. You never want to have to reject customers. Which would be another argument to not market it broadly yet during controlled growth. The php endpoints are just another example of how they are fleshing out the product before marketing it as well. I donāt see anything wrong with that. Itās better to grow slow and steady and fix any issue that may arise along the way, than to grow too fast and be unable to fix problems on time and very publicly fall on your face.
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In May when the test satellite was switched over I could see the difference: Bandwidth usage with test satellite: Around 180 GB per day. Without: Around 10 GB and it was not only me wondering what is going on. From these figures there is certainly room for handling a lot more customers.
But as you seem to be very much informed, just name some of those existing customers that make use of the Tardigrade platform already. Even better if you have a link, so we can check out if they make some reference to Storj/Tardigrade.
I have no more information than you do. Just what is publicly communicated. Iām just presenting a different point of view based on the same information.
But keep in mind that itās not only up to Storjlabs to decide whether they will publish which customers they are working with. Those customers will no doubt have a say in that as well.
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If a customer must not be named, at least numbers could be published. But really when it comes to these topics, it feels like Storj becomes rather vague an secretive. You are certainly much more involved than I am and it seems like even you donāt have facts to tell.
Like I said, Iām working with the same public information that you are. Just because Iām active on the forum doesnāt mean I have any inside information. Yes it would be nice to have some numbers. But I donāt expect those to be published at this stage. And it shouldnāt really matter for us. So far Storj has kept SNOs quite happy by adding traffic as well as surge payouts. That has done very well for my node, so Iām not complaining. I think the expectation of transparency regarding this is merely a result of Storjlabs being really transparent in other areas. Most companies wouldnāt communicate about any of this, avoiding setting an expectation of transparency to begin with. Storjlabs on the other hand has a detailed whitepaper, regular communication with the community, asks for feedback on design blueprints and generally shares a lot of their internal process. I appreciate that transparency a lot. But I think they still maintain the right to keep certain strategic information to themselves.
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ā¦and they will store cold low paid backups
I think that one thing Storj lacks is a program that would allow me to mount the Tardigrade storage as a drive (like a Windows share) either to just store that data on it or to sync data to it (like NextCloud).
That could make it useful for regular people, though maybe Storj is waiting for one of their partners to develop such a program.
The pricing is such that I also think about cold backups and not normal storage, because I could get a VPS cheaper if I wanted to download. Yes, itās not decentralized, but most of the time it would be enough for me.
If I have a website and want a CDN, I would probably use Cloudflare - it is cheap (maybe even free) for normal sites and does not require special software (would it even be possible to use Storj as a CDN? It would require the browser to act as the uplink). Cloudflare is also probably faster (latency).
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