Yes the technical aspects of the blockchain are complex, but I’m talking about the real-world use cases that are totally hard to get into

Why is that? Is it because the websites and services are built by crypto nerds and thus lack UX design? I do not want to offend anybody, I am a total nerd myself and often blind to the fact that other people do not understand the stuff I build..

Or is it that everything is so new that we do lack the vocabulary to explain the steps needed to understand and use a platform like mirror.xyz? (Is it a platform? I honestly do not know, because I could not really gather the essence of what you can do here.)

A lot of tribal knowledge seems to be involved.

The confusion explained step by step - about my experience in onboarding on mirror.xyz

How I found my way here

I learned about this “writing platform”? during a presentation, I believe it was Nader Dabit’s introduction to Web3 development of decentralized apps during NextJS Conf .

Funnily it was easier to follow his tutorial on creating an app on the ethereum blockchain than figuring out how Mirror works :D. Following that tutorial I stumbled my way through the creation of a Metamask wallet which I could use to “connect” to here.

Q: Why is it even “connect” and not a traditional “sign up/in”?

But let’s start at the beginning: I could not understand how Mirror’s concept works. The text on the homepage did not help me much. I could get that it’s about writing and that you could “express, share and monetize your thoughts”.

But where? Where is anybody sharing these thoughts? Where is the list of posts written, the directory of users? the content basically?!

A network should be linked no?

And what is the whole “Do you hold $WRITE? Get started by burning your token.”?Clicking on that button helped me find out that I do not have a $WRITE, which I kind of knew before, but you never know, right? So no mirror for me.

However, since I connected my (empty) wallet, I got a dashboard, which led me to write this post, at least after a lot of cryptic (sorry for the pun) signing and confirming in my Metamask thingie. And since that is not enough exploration, I also entered the race to $WRITE, which I will surely lose with only a couple of hundred followers on Twitter and having no idea how I can win that.

My race entry - if the link works for you - I myself get a spinner that stays for minutes without loading content oO

Why is it even important to Mirror if I have many followers on twitter since this is a separate platform?

Writing experience on mirror

Hey, that’s a no-brainer, markdown is a web developer’s friend, I would have loved to rather have a proper tutorial for the overall concept instead of the editorial tut.

The only thing that got me confused was the fact that saving the post as a draft lets me still view it publicly when I open its URL? Should a post in the draft state not be really private not just obfuscated?

And if I publish, where will the post show up? Do I have to hand/tweet out the link?

To be continued…

I will post this to Twitter and see if I can find some answers. In hindsight I should have recorded a video of me stumbling through this process, might have been funny 😅

Disclaimer:

I am not a troll, I am just curious. I am an old man without a proper dictionary. Teach me, I can take it (I hope) 🤕

Image credit:

https://unsplash.com/@brett_jordan