Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Killed My Kickstarter Campaign
New submitter agizis writes "Alex from Connectify here. I wanted to say thanks to all of you who commented on the Slashdot story about our Kickstarter campaign It was super-educational discussing Switchboard with all of you: you wanted your own servers, and we weren't doing enough to communicate what was so special about Switchboard. Based in a large part on your feedback, we blew up our Kickstarter campaign, and changed almost everything. Thanks, Slashdot. This isn't reddit, but ask me anything."
Hi Alex, thanks for the info. Based on your experience with Kickstarter, do you think a Kickstarter to get a subscription to Slashdot would be successful? I don't seem to be able to disable ads anymore based on my karma, and I'm finding them highly annoying.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Let me get this straight...
You didn't read the summary or the linked articles?
Here's what happened:
1) They had an idea they needed funding for to make it cloud-based
2) Based largely on Slashdot feedback, they realized that the cloud was a no-go because people wanted to run it on their own machines instead
3) So they killed they the Kickstarter funding to make it cloud based and instead are making it available now to run on your own gear
Ok, I got a little dramatic in the title of the post. Body is accurate though, I really did get a lot out of the discussion here. People thought it was just a load balancer, and everyone was very wary of yet another subscription. It was real feedback that helped explain a lot about what was going on with the campaign.
Sorry, you're right. Here's what changed: Originally this was going to be cloud based service. We'd have servers all over the world, which would aggregate your connections for you to give you faster Internet. But people wanted to run it themselves. And once that happened, we realized that we might as well make it clear that Switchboard is really a VPN. So once you're running your own server, you can start sharing resources off your network with yourself, wherever you are.
Thanks guy. Since we can ask anything.
Why is Slashdot so much better than reddit?
Because the stories hit Slashdot days after reddit so we've had plenty of time to think about our sarcastic posts.
I do get how unbelievably negative Slashdot can be. Take the first Slashdot story that ever covered Connectify. ... What did I get 200 comments on Connectify, probably all negative. But I got 20,000 downloads of the software in the 8 hours after the post went up. So it's not obvious from reading the discussion but there actually were 100x as many people who liked the idea, as hated it. (Oh and then we decided that this really could be company).
They might try to fight the RIAA/MPAA in court next, or come up with a new way to find extra-solar planets, or create new physics, or even run for public office.
No we won't. This just confirms our belief that complaining about problems on slashdot is all that is needed to make a difference.
More and more, I'm coming to think of myself as a guy who takes complex networking technology and tries to make it simple. I'm doing this because I want to give people not only faster internet access, but also free them from the companies that would control what we can do on the Internet connections that we're paying for. Well that's my big vision, mostly I answer emails, and wish I had more time to actually code.
Linux will be a supported platform for Switchboard. We did a much better job of building cross platform C++ with an HTML user interface from the ground up. Dispatch's a code has a lot of Windows specific stuff throughout it, the port would have be a new development effort almost from scratch. So I can't really say if Dispatch will really ever happen on other platforms (it could but... not soon, anyways).
So, I think I get the point here.
I have multiple ISP's here (I use pfSense for load balancing) but I can't aggregate them for a single connection because I have multiple IP's and unicast doesn't work that way. So the cloud-hosted version would have allowed all my pipes to talk to your endpoint, which would give a single IP to the data-provider and then you could backhaul it over my multiple links. So, a multi-link VPN, right?
So, that sounds like it could be useful in some cases.
Now then, if I'm running my own server, where is it? If it's just here it doesn't do anything new, since I'm back to where I started. So, I can buy the software and then run it on a VPS provider or something?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hi, This is Dave, the lead developer on Switchboard. Alex had to step into a meeting, so I'll be sitting in for him for a bit. It's not exactly a switch in the traditional sense, but the Switchboard code takes into account bandwidth, latency and loss to decide which connection to send traffic over in a bonded channel. Thanks for the questions, and keep them coming! Dave
Just an FYI for everyone reading the terrible summary.
Switchboard was advertised as a "MAGIC OMG FASTER INNERNETS BECUZ POWER OF TEH CLOUD" thing.
What it actually was:
A VPN client that aggregated all internet-connected links you had, split up packets across all your pipes (you have to have multiple ISPs), and then sent them off to some server they leased which has a fatter pipe, reconstructed your packets from the split up packets, and then routed your traffic to its intended destination, and did the reverse for traffic going to you.
This was far more informative than the summary was.
Actually, I find this sort of encouraging.
There's a whole raft of companies out there that simply can't let go of The Vision. And absolutely MUST ram The Vision down everyone's throats.
It's rather refreshing to see a company stop, mid-stride, and re-evaluate a product and actually be willing to make a change like this.
To actually, y'know, LISTEN to feedback. Instead of bulling ahead and damn the torpedoes.
Or worse, making some a pointless token gesture.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!