that would have helped me to know: there is a source of material that i can read into other then the very formal technical and short-kept tutorials (which are helping so far and are good).
And that there are Mods of the team to answer individual questions. really, i find that very importend.
at first i thought tardigrade is for techies, for developers and gave up on it. i went to Sia skynet to find a vibrant forum and non semi techyness. the reason i didnt choose Sia now was that they dont offer easy payment methods…, aand skynet needs you to have a big file downloaded to work, which makes it the same techy… 
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There is a reason we splitted the service into tardigrade and storj. Storj is the name of the token and if you search for it you will find a lot about the storj ecosystem including some terms that are still scary to a lot of potential customers. If you search for tardigrade you will get a different picture and that is intensional.
I am not an expert in search engines. I would expect that some cross links will mess up this experience. We want to be careful with that. Let’s sumon @jocelyn to make sure this topic gets her attention. She might be able to find a good solution in between.
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Hi! I actually agree that it would be good to link. Tbqh, before we first launched the forum, I considered tis issue. At that time, we were pre-production. So without a product bein available, there just wasn’t a critical mass of engineers to justify splitting the efforts 50/50. And of course SNOs were the core demogrpahic, since there was a thriving number of SNOs already.
The informational needs of SNOs and Engineers overlap but also diverge. Everyone wants to understand : how the product works, if its stable, if it has a future, whether the company has a good future. But a key difference is that SNOs tend to have a relatively closed set of questions that are oriented to getting a node up and keeping it running. Devs who are building on top of the platform will tend to have a much more open-ended set of questions (“how long is a piece of string?”)
Of course there is also overlap between the SNO and Dev demographic, because plenty of SNOs happen to be programmers. And its not unusual for developers to become intrigued by the tech and start running a node. Tech just attracts people with curiosity as a character trait, I guess 
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Actually I would love to hear feedback on something:
I’ve been working on a longer range plan for the taxonomy and information architecture of the community to address this issue.
I have some training in cognitive science and linguistics, and have done some light UX work in the past…Ive never been a fan of trying to overly dictate what endusers should want, because thats how you wind up with experiences that are stale and bland
An example: The forum was deliberately launched with far fewer categories than we had in Rocketchat. That was the result of research among many of my peers. (And I have pruned out and merged some categories that didn’t thrive) Its easy to assume or dictate that people should think a certain way. But actually members spontaneously begin to form norms. It’s my role here to respond and adjust to what people do naturally. And then look for ways to naturally fit that in to the company objectives.
I believe that the best way to organize is to look at the goals for community + the activity of people using the resources and bring those together. Frankly I expected tags to get a lot more usage than they do, so it just shows you have to see how people use a solution - not just assume or try t jam it down anyones throat.
I have an area of the forum that is still being built out that people can use to showcase their projects for publicity
Im a big fan of looking at personas and figuring out what different visitors would benefit from. For engineers, Im talking internally about developing a more robust set of curated resources. We have great blogs, great demos, great code samples, etc. But right now you have to hunt across different silos to ind them. So Im looking to build out a section of the forum that will have persona-oriented kits.
Here’s an example of a simple use case:
Devs-who-are-solopreneurs (DWAS) need a certain list of glossary terms, they should have a zipfile of demos, they need a collection of links to blogs that are immediately relevant to understanding business benefits. Because being a solopreneur is difficult Id also love to offer them a signup form for the showcase + work with PR/marketing to boost the message on our social platform or ofer opportunities for guest blogs + an application to be featured on Tardigrade Thursday podcast. Many solo founders are stretched thin and this is a way we can help amplify. So the community can help facilitate and tap into the things that other teams at Storj are doing. (Luckily community and marketing teams have a great relationship, so we can do that kind of crossover.)
Thats just one use case for a single persona. But there are others out there. Developers who work at a big corporation will have different needs, for example. I get very happy and excited to think of ways the community can be an active force to help and amplify.
I know that there will be some people who build businesses on top of this platform that we cant even predict. Its the anticpation of that next big discovery that keeps life exciting. I cant wait to see what those will be.
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thanks for the hint to that. ok. mmh, the splitting of the sites is not helping me at the moment as a regular consumer i have to say.
When there is a mainpage on top/first (url could be: storj.io AND tardigrade.io) to show me the sites (and only the further sites) i can go to for more information regarding on what type of visitor i am, then that would have helped me.
I checked the two websites again (storj.io, and tardigrade.io) and now i understand why i was so confused at the beginning. i thought i have mistaken this whole thing. i watched videos on youtube for “decentralised cloud storage” and found videos mainly about the bitcoin and earning aspects, which i found quite strange as i just wanted a consumerbased info. i think one video was about saving data. they all mentioned “storj”, and showed just the storj logo (videos mostly older then 6month, a few maybe 2month old). so i visited storj.io. On the top menu bar (where i have a short glance at to know what kind of website i will find here) there is only “operator” or “host”-kind-of infobuttons, especially “Become a Host” told me “its not a reaally consumer website(?)”. I scrolled down, i saw “be the cloud”, i thought “mmh, where am i???”, then i saw “tardigrade”, i thought “i dont want tardigrade, i want storj, they all mentioned storj, storj is good, tardigrade is surely some beginner partnercompany, dont want them” and so i got lost for one day. but i came back and clicked on “tardigrade”, on the top menubar i saw “Developer”, “Partner”, but not “Conusmer” or “Customer”, again i thought “god damn it, what the f*uck am i doing here man!!!, f#ck all that s#it!!!, i’ll just continue to usw Google Drive… f#ck safety, i’ll never mention that to anyone, no one should experience that stress and frustration as i did the last two days…” (sorry for langueage here, but i thing the level of frustration can be usefull as info for webdesign), i calmed down and clicked “Get Started” thinking “maybe i get carried to paradise now, where everything gets easier and selfexplenatory”, then i read “satelite”, “create project”, “API key” and there i go again, gone for another day. after calculating my future costs (not that much actually) for GDrive i came back… i sat down and read all that techs#it, at that point i was reaaaaly frustrated. As a regular costumor i would not have come back, for sure not!
But as i plan to build my whole income on digital assets, and plan on a future company and i have ‘some’ educational background for IT i am motivated to get through that tech-hell. My consumer motto is:
a. is the infos soaking you in? no? dont use ist.
b. soaking info? great. Is it easy to use for my Mother? no? dont use it.
<- and i was violating my rules very hard here. but a safe internet future is worth it
which would underline the design of a masterwebsite that links to persona websites
I love the idea for the solopreneur. Interesting for me here would also be “how much time and effort will it take me to understand this change in technology of storage as moving away from the tradional centralised storage services?”, and “how much ressources would i need to bring up to keep this technology up and running in my business? (time for setting things up, time for editing settings, time for changing already saved date and so forth)”.
I am not sure how much i find myself in a developer environment, what is the target of regular consumers actually? I would love to see theSimple-One-Klick-Consumer Persona
I think your frustration is in part caused by a misunderstanding of what the product is that Tardigrade offers. The reason you see a lot of mention of developers or partners is because Tardigrade is a storage backend for applications much like amazon s3. It’s the kind of platform that consumer applications like Google drive, Dropbox and others are built on top of.
That’s not to say you can’t use it as a normal consumer and more and more software is starting to integrate Tardigrade. One of the simplest ways te start using it now is through filezilla.
So in short, your mother is not the target audience. And neither is mine. But someone could definitely build an app on top of Tardigrade that targets the consumer audience with much easier to use interfaces. Some of this will rely on libraries to access the Tardigrade network directly from a browser. Those currently don’t yet exist and because of that there is still a reliance on gateways in order to make anything work inside a browser, which adds a fairly significant bottleneck.
One day you may be using Tardigrade without even knowing it because you started using a hip new consumer cloud storage platform that just so happens to store the data on a Tardigrade backend. Who knows…
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That part was actually clear on the website, that it is the backend that is beeing offered, the hardrives to store on in a certain way (distributed). Which is beeing repeated quite often on the website. but then the sudden jump from this simple explanation that everyone can understand to the technical depth of API’s and so on. Very unclear for me to decide wehther i am targeted as a simple cloudstorage consumer.
gateways…
that would be awome. And Duplicati is doing very fine at the moment already
That’s my point, you’re not. This is a product primarily aimed at developers. You can still use it, but it’s in the class of Amazon S3, not Dropbox. Complexity is to be expected.
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