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Comment by kk_cz | Hacker News Reader

from the tutorial:

> Please note that you shouldn't forget your password as long as you are using the current account. If your forget it, you won't be able to change it or get another one.

I can already see it being mass-adopted by non-tech users. /s

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Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal? There are plenty of FOSS projects out there, like Apache, GCC, etc. which are presumably unusable for non-tech users (by definition: if you can use Apache and GCC, you probably count as technical). It doesn't hinder those projects at all, and there are also a bunch of "user friendly" projects which rely on those as key pieces of infrastructure (e.g. many Web sites, and many native executables like games).

Also, as always, the nice thing about FOSS is that anyone is Free to contribute or fork/contribute their own improvements and services, either within the project or alongside, either to scratch an itch or to commercially exploit a niche.

For a social network, anything less than mass adoption renders it mostly useless. So if that isn't already a goal, then someone isn't doing their job.

I don't see it as a social network at all. It is a tool allowing you to communicate and collaborate with people you already know.

If you communicate and collaborate with people you already know, you have formed a social network...

It's hard enough to get people in your network to switch to a _polished_ platform (like Telegram), let alone a mess like this one.

Sure, definition of "social network" is vague enough to allow for semantic massaging into any form anyone wants. The point is that this is not a necessarily a tool to keep up with your social network, but rather a work/collaboration tool. And there is very little competition among those.

I don't need to keep up with my "friends" and their statuses/photos/events/feeds, or "IM" back and forth with someone using cutesy emojis. I need to be able to hold conference calls with presentations displayed to all participants, or shared whiteboard to discuss some design. Stuff like that. And I want to be able to host all this outside of dirty paws of third party corporations and governments.

I'm of course disregarding the abysmal quality and stability of Ring, so all this is just academic anyway. :)

> Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal?

I would surely hope so. Why bother with installing another "universal communication platform" if you will be only able to communicate with a small subset of your contacts. (And all of them will by on skype/whatsapp/whatever-else anyways, since that's where majority of their contacts are as well.)

> Why bother with installing another "universal communication platform"

I haven't installed Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Telegram, etc. precisely because they're proprietary (the client and/or server). Hence I'm already only able to communicate with a small subset of my contacts. Ring looks rather nice as a fancy way to communicate with people, which previously I've been unable to do whilst preserving my freedom (and I prefer freedom over fancy communication tools). Being p2p also makes it more appealing to me than client/server systems, federated or not (which is why I never got around to setting up matrix, for example).

In that sense, this is rather like GNU being "yet another Unix".

Wouldn't you prefer if your free (as in freedom) platform was also user-friendly enough to attract non-tech users though?

These don't have to be mutually exclusive.

That's fine for you, but you're a massive minority. Most of us actually interact with non-profit-making in a daily basis.

Well this isn't a web server or a compiler; it's a messaging app. Of course it needs to be used by non-technical users.

Where is the problem? 90% of normal users just create a new account when the forget the password :-/

Potential security issue, maybe?

"Hey, this is John, I forgot my pass again, so I had to recreate the account, again. Add me, plz?"

And lose all their contacts, and have to communicate to them that they lost their account and had to get a new one.

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