This issue (i.e. not building upon an existing protocols such as IPFS or bit torrent tech) is persistent within the alt-net / distributed-net community and means that MANY services have fickle/hacked-together (in the bad way) feel to them. Even stuff like Riot.im (which is built on top of the Matrix protocol) has a sluggish/react-js-overload feel to it.. plus the deep&wide stack makes it incredibly hard to understand/trust the system in a meaningful way.
Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.
So speaking from the Riot/Matrix perspective, this is a really interesting phenomenon which we are painfully aware of. For context: we built centralised comms apps before creating Matrix. So we have a direct side by side comparison, and reckon it’s about 6x more effort to do the decentralised equivalent. On the UX side, our centralised apps were actually pretty polished and lightweight - sadly they are gone now (hence in part Matrix), but you can get an idea from stuff like https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/.
So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is:
* Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit
* Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype)
* Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction
But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices.
That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs.
And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.
Good to hear that you are dedicating attention to Riot's UI which is currently the only decentralized app I use :). Less often really is better when it comes to UI, case in point: having to admin Google Apps could be great but is in fact a pain due to sluggish JS redrawing plus constantly re-arranged navi-bar(s)/icons/text/etc. causing one to NEVER be properly fast with it which is a pain for anyone working on daily admin tasks for an organisation (me).
Also, thanks for drawing attention to my ignorance when it came to the protocol aspect: can see key players ARE built on proper protocols.
(just to be clear: I’m responding to the “UX of decentralised apps is crap” bit of the parent post rather than “build on existing protocols”, given peertube and riot and mastodon etc all build on well defined protocols.)
Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.