Explain how Briar is different (rename the "blog"?)
Hi! Thanks for Briar, I'm very impressed with what you've done so far.
I was testing it for a bit (the wife and I now have the world's most secure shopping-list app!), and I wanted to share my first impression before it fades. Please feel free to close this issue if you feel it's unhelpful or redundant.
Basically, my dominant feeling was confusion.
What is all this stuff? How does it work? The messages and contacts are straightforward, and the private groups as well... but the forums and blogs had me scratching my head. I still don't fully get them.
How do people discover a blog, or a forum? Are they completely public? Are they shared word-of-mouth over messages? Are there any access controls?
The fact that I couldn't edit or delete blog posts after writing a couple of inane tests was very unsettling - this goes against the expectations any normal user will have for something named "blog", and it's bad enough that after perfectly normal "test behaviour" one is likely going to be forced to delete one's account and start over because anyone with a quirky (let alone risque) sense of humour is likely to write "test posts" that absolutely shouldn't stay on the public record.
I'm technical enough to understand that a lot of this has to do with the underlying p2p distribution, and is also likely emergent from the design goal of making things censorship resistant. But for someone less technical, these limitations are simply baffling and disconcerting. They're also a major roadblock to adoption - I will never use a blog like this as a casual, social tool for expressing myself, and I would strongly recommend against their use to anyone else as well. For personal safety, being able to edit and delete and curate ones' public identity is vital.
There is absolutely a place and a need in this world for a feature like this - but my personal feeling is it needs to be carefully explained and shouldn't be called "blog", as that word implies all sorts of casual social interactions which this is simply inappropriate for (in its current iteration).
But obviously these are just my opinions, I hope they're helpful!