@Nutomic: I created PRs for all of them, but the introductory animation. I still have to draw up the concepts for those.
I’ve had another really simple idea tough: We can just include a tutorial video on the website which goes through setting up a vanilla installation to share a folder with another device.
BtSync uses different secrets for R and RW, which are simply handed to everyone who is supposed to access it. Their concept misses devices entirely.
Do we know how much of a difficulty users find communicating device IDs? Have we got an idea of the methods they employ themselves to make it easier? Having read over the challenges and complexities here I wonder if it’s worth getting some information on how how big of a hurdle new users find it.
I’d love to see some data, but for that we’d have to do actual user testing, which is expensive and time consuming. I’ve helped many people setup Syncthing (as in I was physically in front of their computer), and many struggle with the concept and the UI, at least in the beginning.
Anecdotally, I’d say from the forums and IRC, that firewalls not letting through local discovery broadcasts and UI progress not being clear about “what is happening”, for slower devices, are two of the bigger challenges new users come across.
Those are unfortunately pretty biased experiences, because no computer illiterate granny has ever joined an IRC channel in the first place. With the forums it’s a bit different, but not much: Someone who downloads Syncthing just to check it out and has difficulties early on, which make using it impossible/very tedious, will generally disregard it, because it’s “too complicated”. Those users don’t want to go trough more hassle (registering anywhere), they just want a solution. Also the forum isn’t featured very prominently in the UI and on our website in the first place. So it’s very easy to miss those resources for inexperienced/lazy users.