Learning to be ourselves: NCE.DFOS Week 10

Hello everyone. We’re writing to you this week from the road and feeling under the weather. Not the most energizing combination! But there’s a lot going on and we want to continue to be transparent about our experience.

The past few weeks have been more challenging on the DFOS development front. Money was going slower than expected, and some of our other planned updates — including some new apps — were hitting complicated roadblocks that were slowing us down.

What we came to realize, each of us from a different vantage point, was that we had moved too quickly down the path of building complexity before fulfilling the core promise of DFOS. Basically, we were trying to make something that could support every possible iterative use case, layering that complexity over the overall experience, rather than letting the experience more clearly shape how DFOS was used, and making the complexity secondary to what DFOS was supposed to feel like.

This reads a little abstract, but think of it this way: we found ourselves going down a road where making your own personalized private internet meant navigating a bunch of complicated submenus where all the superpowers were buried. This meant that to do anything unique meant extra effort, rather than the space naturally evolving to meet what you want and need.

^^ Not the experience we want to be offering...

Last week Ilya came up with another approach: simpler single-purpose apps that can be more easily customized, tweaked, and installed by spacerunners, allowing for much richer and more varied experiences in each DFOS space. 

This approach much more closely fits our model for how we think about DFOS. But, we realize, we have found ourselves gradually drifting over time into making more and more of a Slack/Discord clone experience, with so much weight going into multichannel chat spaces that bring up bad memories of COVID-era “socialization.” Yikes.

Because of the protocol/OS/app model that we designed DFOS with from the beginning, fixing this doesn’t mean a hard left turn or a full rewrite. But it does mean a few revisions and changes, which will begin filtering out this week. It will start with global DMs, global search, and bookmarks, to give you a good overview of what’s active for you, and then next week with some big shifts in how spaces are created and how people use them.

Practically speaking this means that instead of opening up the waitlist last week like we planned, we’re waiting until this goes out. It also means that the full rollout of money will go alongside this. We want to make the pieces fit together just right.

We’re grateful to be learning these things in this private alpha with all of you. Building what we want and need based on our actual experiences is the only way to go. And when we find ourselves adhering too closely to what’s already here or what’s been here before, we keep realizing that this is when we need to pull back on the throttle and ask ourselves better questions.

Much more to come as we share what we’re thinking here over this week and next. Grateful to be in a place of trust and transparency with all of you. Yes!

Questions? Comments? Let's hear them.