Map top IPFS pinning user journeys

[meiqimichelle]

Where "top" = people don’t necessarily follow this journey today, but we expect people to want to do this in the future, and its important for the future of IPFS.

[meiqimichelle]

User workflow 1️⃣tl;dr 👇👇👇

John Q. Curious Public wants to stay in control of his data, and share pictures with his family.

North star

A non-developer end user should not need to know what ‘pinning’ is to get the benefits of IPFS. We should abstract the idea of ‘pinning’ away by re-branding MFS as “IPFS Drive” and build our GUI products as different interfaces into one user experience.

Priorities

In the short term, the low hanging fruit is to move our GUI applications from using the low-level Pin API to adding user data to MFS, where all files are implicitly pinned, and are also much easier to manage via Web UI. We should also transition the language in our GUI apps (both visual and words) away from ‘pinning’ and towards clear, non-technical vocabulary.

🎊🎊🎊Full draft workflow here, feedback welcome! https://gist.github.com/meiqimichelle/b9564a1874479dcb5ee619ff17aaf778

/cc @lidel @hacdias

[meiqimichelle]

User workflow 2️⃣tl;dr 👇👇👇

Data Architect Maria needs to replicate huge datasets across many data centers to make it highly available for scientific study.

North star

Someone managing large data (either in number of files or in volume) should not need to copy-and-paste hashes or peer ids into the standard IPFS CLI to do their work. We need to actively market and develop IPFS Cluster as the entry point for the ‘enterprise management’ use case. We also need to build a lightweight admin interface that makes it easy for data administrators to manage pins and peers.

Priorities

In the short term, we should re-write the IPFS and IPFS Cluster homepages (and any other useful communication points) to actively market IPFS Cluster as our ‘enterprise admin’ solution. We should also build a very simple, v0 enterprise admin panel that controls and explains several key IPFS data admin concepts (for example: replication factors; types of Clusters; pinsets; and followers).

🎉🎉🎉Full draft workflow here, feedback welcome! https://gist.github.com/meiqimichelle/a9165cbf91f82e5c4ab12b5bc310edff

/cc @hsanjuan @lanzafame

[meiqimichelle]

User workflow 3️⃣tl;dr 👇👇👇

John Q. Curious Public wants his photos to persist on the distributed web.

North star

People need support for persisting data on IPFS, either via clearer paths to co-hosting, or via third-party pinning services. We need to convey how ‘saving’ something on IPFS, or more importantly, ‘publishing’ or ‘sharing’ something on IPFS, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s always accessible.

Priorities

In the short term, we should provide clear indicators (both visual and words) of what saving, publishing, and sharing, mean in the IPFS ecosystem. We should also give people next steps in our GUI applications for data persistence, which today may be as simple as explanations and links pinning services and roll-your-own co-hosting information.

At a deeper technical level, we need to improve our garbage collection user experience. As traversing a DAG to perform GC is essentially unavoidable, we should intentionally experiment with when and how this happens, and how many other things can happen concurrently. Also, we need to address the race condition problem in the API.

✨✨✨Full draft workflow here, feedback welcome! https://gist.github.com/meiqimichelle/deb74ef925c4e1f1ec0eebc8964350da

/cc @obo20 @lanzafame @carsonfarmer

[meiqimichelle]

First go at this is done. Closing.