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Comment by JuniperMesos | Hacker News Reader

> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form

One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.

Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.

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I wonder what distinguishes these kinds of communities over others. Some, like 'decentralization' or 'privacy' or 'security', require absolute adherence. If you're building a decentralized tool or a privacy tool or a security tool you must first reinvent the universe. Post on HN? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Use Gmail as your email provider? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Fastmail? Centralized. Run your own mail provider? Cool, on a cloud? Centralized, privacy nightmare. On your own infra? Centralized, bus factor 1.

Sort of an interesting market signal. "Don't bother building for me unless you're absolutely pure". Funny stuff.

Making a google form requires more effort than "send me an email at mailto://feedback@shipyard.com". The email body can even be prepopulated with the feedback template. Its really not a high bar, and thus disheartening that the people that should care, seemingly, dont.

This is honestly just the nitpickiest complaint of all. Criticizing people who just found out they're losing their jobs for which solution they use to collect fond memories from their users is an outrageous thing to get upset over. Just don't fill out the form.

Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.

It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.

I could (sort of) see why you might get this upset if people were required to have a Google account themselves to submit this Google form, but that's not the case. Who are you to tell an underfunded opensource dev company that just lost their biggest project what tools they should use? That email you hypothetically sent will probably get delivered to an account in their Google Workspace, how on earth is that any different?

I've run into a lot of Google forms for projects that do in fact require me to log in with a Google account in order to submit, which I think might be related to Google detecting that I'm using a VPN and treating the submission as higher-risk. I just have this reflexive assumption that if something is presenting me with a Google form, it's not gonna work unless I log into a Google account on my local machine. Which is ultimately the reason I care about this kind of thing.

Google Form authors can require login to prevent spam.

Google demands logins if the Form includes any attachments at all.

It's not their job to cater to your nitpicking. Even if this Google form didn't work over a VPN (which it totally does), you're capable of turning the VPN off if you really want to submit feedback. But it doesn't even sound like you have any feedback, so what's your problem?

I think it's a perfectly valid complaint about the ecosystem at large. Not a criticism of the individuals or of this specific case to be clear, but a broader observation that this isn't how things ought to be according to a certain set of ideals and the question then of why we keep seeing it over and over. Clearly there's some sort of systemic shortcoming that applies to the entire ecosystem.

What exactly is the complaint? They haven't even made that clear is my point.

They were perfectly clear; you're trolling.

The person who creates the form has the option of only allowing Google accounts to respond. It's a per-form setting.

There is no ecosystem. IPFS is dead. Relatively speaking, nobody’s using it. There’s no strong use case or benefit.

This is the last gasp of a blockchain hype cycle solution that never found its problem.

Imagine if all the energy spent whining on the purity of a system being insufficiently private or decentralized or somehow loyal to a fight against the man, was spent instead on actually improving those systems. They're open source.

The system I'm complaining about is Google forms, not any open-source software project. I cannot actually improve it because I am not Google.

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