That's a very honest and well written post mortem. The "bloated MVP" blog is interesting and it seems like a useful concept, albeit a bit tautological (a bloated min-viable product is a contradiction).

I spent some time last night pondering if my current company (https://hydraulic.software/) shipped a bloated MVP. Conveyor simplifies packaging and distributing desktop apps, which as you'll know if you've ever wrestled with the existing tools is usually a really unpleasant experience. There were quite a few features in the first release that weren't strictly necessary, like parallel/incremental builds and self-signing support, but in the end I figure this "bloat" was acceptable because it makes it so much faster to test and iterate on the product itself as well as making the tool more pleasant for end users. Liron's value prop test is also easily passed: there are clearly defined users (devs) who derive unambiguous value from the product (it's much easier to use than other approaches). So having slept on it I think it's not (too) bloated of an MVP. The hardest part with this sort of developer tool is just letting the right people know it exists, not lacking a clear use case.

Speaking of value props, decentralized apps were actually one of the original (smaller) use cases for Conveyor. I spent a lot of time on the early years of Bitcoin, back before "tokens" were even a thing, and the tech-focused part of that community hit similar problems. Some decentralized projects have succeeded in a big way like the internet/web/email etc, which encourages people to try it with new things too, but they date from a different time and the world has changed.

The biggest problem looks like insufficient incrementalism. Decentralized things are expensive to create due to technical challenges, so they become over-ambitious in an attempt to justify the high baseline development costs. Then because they're so expensive to create the ability to iterate quickly is gone, so they end up advertising how they work as the primary benefit vs tangible end user value props.

How to increase incrementalism? Here's one proposal. Some decentralization projects could on close inspection drop a lot of stuff often considered fundamental, like P2P networks and cryptography. Instead you'd re-orient around nicely designed desktop apps which can remotely control cloud resources, allowing people to fit inside free tiers and deploy stuff to the cloud without needing any technical skills. The app itself would take care of signing up for accounts, using the cloud APIs to instantiate serving resources, obtaining and wiring up domain names and even moving it all between clouds. This may not sound much like classical decentralization but is actually how the internet did things originally - a competing market of commercial providers for connectivity and hosting which you can switch between easily. Although there's no TCP/IP equivalent for all cloud services, there are some close equivalents like SFTP and the S3 API for file hosting. The "microfeed" project currently on the HN front page is an example of this, albeit without the end-user targeting app.

Because the management app is running locally, you get a lot of stuff like good levels of privacy for free (and it can be upgraded with reproducible builds, audits, threshold signed updates etc).

Exploring that approach requires it to be very easy to create, ship and update desktop apps. Which thanks to Conveyor and the new wave of desktop app frameworks, it now is. Hopefully at some point someone will try this and we'll get some meaningful level of independence from big SaaS providers.