[mnet-devel] The appearance of progress

[Jim McCoy]

One of the reasons I am interested in getting a working mnet available 
again is that without it the entire project risks sinking into 
irrelevancy for future users. It is hard to get people interested in a 
new system, but it is almost impossible to get them back once they 
become convinced that the system is broken.  We had this problem with 
Mojo Nation during a particularly unstable patch and I don't think our 
user acquisition and retention rate ever recovered.

Users do not care as much as everyone here thinks they do about whether 
or not a particular system attains some cypherpunk seal of approval or 
implements the latest and greatest research paper du jour. Users want 
something that works. The longer we wait, the larger the group of 
people who think of Mnet as one of those things that was interesting 
once and then just seemed to stop improving.

The solution to this particular problem is obvious: crank out an update.

Get something out there that runs and which provides the appearance of 
either forward motion or hints at better things to come. Remember, you 
are never going to have the pool of always-on servers you want unless a 
few people try the system a couple of times and enjoy the experience 
enough to keep an agent running all the time.

Jim



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