Problems in the Tent community

2013-06-04T12:37:51Z

Tent is the social community which got my hopes up last october when I found out about it. I even wrote a multi platform client for it. I really liked the community around it, and at first it seemed to get quite much traction, people started to write clients for it and so on. But then, I think it was in february or something, the core developers made some decisions which soon will break all the code available untill now and this lead to the fact that most of the developers working on clients stopped putting efford to it. With the stop of development there was not much to talk about for the young community either so people who were online for hours every day only log in every couple of weeks just to see if something happened. I understand the need of refactoring of stuff sometimes, but it feels like it was a bit too much and too soon.

The lack of users here is what kind of puts me off. I can't recommend the platform for my friends because I know that it will take quite a lot of time before there are applications which will work with the new protocol version, if ever, and the users we had are dropping of really fast. Where we had at least 10 posts per hour in february, you now have wait about 4 hours to see a new post.

One thing I know puts friends of mine who were on Tent and all are early adopters is how the protocol is being developed. Yes I know about benevolent dictators like the Python one, etc. but this approach does not work for every community. I have two concrete examples where I thought the community work was handled poorly. We devs and users wanted to have a tent:// schema so different Tent-apps could do tasks, etc. Someone came up with one version we even had a meeting on IRC to talk about it, we made it better and so on. But during the whole time we saw no involvment of any of the core team members, oh yeah there was one, they said we are not allowed to use the plain tent://, so we thought about x-tent:// and stuff like that. So there was no comment on our work whatsoever until they came up with their version, which was kind of like our version but a bit better. It is good that there now is a official way to do it but why the lack of involvment? Or a couple of days ago there was a post about the problem of "ogooglebarhet" (you can't google for it) of the hashtag "#tent" because of this really big industry of camping accessories. The way the core team chose to shut down that discussion was to say "We are a couple of SEO specialists here on our team, trust us, we know what we're doing". That was it. Obviously that is a non-argument but a very effective, who would like to argue against something like that?