Table of Contents
TEST ARTICLE
THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO TEST THE LANGUAGE AND STYLISTIC RULES I HAVE PLACED FOR MYSELF. IT WILL BE COMPARED TO THE ORIGINAL.
THE FOLLOWING IS THE ARTICLE WITHOUT MODIFIERS
THE PURPOSE IS TO IDENTIFY ALL SUBJECTS, OBJECTS AND VERBS.
ANYTHING THAT IS UNCLEAR, AT LEAST TO ME, WILL BE UNDERLINED.
R E T R O S H A R E
This is the real shit; what all the big boys use(THIS ONE APPEARS TO HAVE A SECOND SENTENCE WITH AN OBJECT FROM THE FIRST. USING A SEMI-COLON MAY THE BEST OPTION HERE. It’s fucking RetroShare bitches(THIS IS ALSO UNCLEAR, IT’S PROBABLY A SECOND OBJECT)!
Yeah so, RetroShare is not good.
Basic overview
RetroShare(WHETHER USING ACRONYMS ARE ACCEPTABLE OR NOT IS STILL TBD) is software, that allows you to create a social network with your friends(THIS WHOLE THING IS UNCLEAR, BUT IF I READ IT RIGHT, IT DOESN’T BREAK ANY RULES). You install it; create an account; generate a certificate and you are good to go. To connect to your friends, you need to exchange certs… which usually involves copying and pasting keys into other chat clients. Exchanging is also very literal; if only you give your key, you can not connect properly. Afterwards, it is all fun and games.
Contacts are split into nodes and people… yes, really1;2). You can message people directly through either the node or the person. You can assign a rating to them.
You can open chatrooms like Skype. Text is editable, so you can have huge red bold text taking up the whole window. Then there is mail, which is just email through RetroShare. “Files” allows you to share files with others, like BitTorrent. Then there are channels, which are like YouTube channels, except you have to download videos3). Then there are the forums, which are just forums but in RetroShare. Finally we have links, which is just Reddit in RetroShare. It’s not very customisable either.
Too fucking much
No matter how you look at it, it’s trying to do too much at once.
Users will be overwhelmed by what they can do. Stuff like having nodes and people separate only confuse users more. “What do you mean I have to create a person to chat in the groupchat?”
If you end up using RetroShare, you’ll probably be limited to the groupchat or the forum… the rest will just be left unused.
Something else is how it uses a lot of terms that would probably confuse a normal person. (DHT, NAT, UPnP and more.)
Plot Twist
Unlike with the Fediverse, I actually fucking used this thing for a period of time. Not just that, I had friends there with me. Shocking, I know. In fact, I was a big RetroShare fanboy circa 1 year ago.4)
And for this article, I gathered the opinions of those friends (at least those who replied to my question).
So what did I find out? Well, nothing really new. They perceive it as outdated and confusing. It’s a bit complicated to set up, the UI was hard to use (for first time users). Chatting apparently didn’t feel good.
One guy said it was only useful as a “torrent group”. Despite it not really using torrents5).
I remember one friend once said that it was basically an operating system, all it was missing was a web browser - which I think perfectly explains the software6).
The Better Social Network?
No.
RetroShare is slow7), confusing, outdated8) and too complex.
Which is a real shame since using certificates the way it does could be really good for social networking. If it removed all features besides chat and updated its UI, it would be almost perfect.
If I were a more experienced dev, I’d make a RetroShare clone just as a chat program with the certificate idea (although I’d simplify it by putting the cert in an image, so it’s easier to share). Actually, that idea probably exists as Tox.