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."

Re:Kickstarter & Slashdot

[Lunix Nutcase]

Whoosh.

Re:Kickstarter & Slashdot

[Grishnakh]

It blocks the regular banner ads just fine. Nothing can block Slashvertisements however.

Re:You took slashdot comments seriously???

[SJHillman]

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

Re:I don't understand why you blame slashdot...

[agizis]

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.

Re:no content

[agizis]

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.

Re:Linux Release

[agizis]

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).

Re:Hi Alex,

[lewdavis]

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

Truth About Switchboard

[sexconker]

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.

Re:Linux Release

[lewdavis]

Dave from Connectify filling in for Alex here. Here's our Dispatch FAQ: http://www.connectify.me/dispatch-faq/ [connectify.me]. As you can see, Linux is behind Mac and Mac is a ways off. The benefit of Switchboard is that it can bond channels, so it can help every application you can think of, including those Dispatch can't (video streaming, file uploading, VPNs). We thought fixing all the complaints for Dispatch (supporting more applications AND more platforms) was a winning goal.

Re:Trying to understand

[lewdavis]

Dave from Connectify here. You hit it right on the head. The cloud-based service is still in consideration, but for the meantime everyone gets to run their own server. If you don't have access to one big pipe in a physical location, you can rent a VPS and spin up your own cloud server.

Re:You took slashdot comments seriously???

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be fair, he admitted one of their problems was communication.