Things are a little off track it won't be that way for long I know things will polish up and we will be all the better for the experience.

many much frustration

So many are frustrated right now... I read about it on the PeakD discord channel every day (every hour)... I go to every other hive discord and see the issues as well.
Q: "Why am I having this issue?"
A: "Node problems"
Q: "What node should I use?"
A: "I'm not really sure but X worked for me recently"

Its a game of whack-a-mole.
Users giving other users suggestions for what api nodes to TRY on keychain and having to come back the next day (or in hours) to find out what node is working now for the type of transaction they want to do.

"You have to use api.anyx for claiming rewards but if you want to power up you have to use openhive" ... yeah fun stupid game.

This recent discord message kind of sums up the issues almost every active user seems to have

getting back on track?

In short: The status of blogging and social interacting on Hive is a total crap show right now (and hopefully not for long)... how do we get it back on track?

a different monster

Past hard fork fails were embarrassing but they were limited in time, very specific in nature and they got fixed and we moved on.

The issues we are facing right now seem to be a multi-headed monster... cut one off and 2 more grow in its place?

One of the frustrations is that because it's not a very specific error of very specificy code that users don't really know what is going on... not much is being said about it. Imagine those users who aren't on Discord and aren't getting constant feedback of what node to try for different transactions.

We know comment count is broken almost everywhere that one seems the only consistent one (we reported this issue while testing before the fork) but there are lots of different issues that seem to happen frequently but not always for all nodes. That's sometimes even more frustrating.

IT WILL BE FIXED...

I'm glad people are working on these problems and I have faith these issues will be fixed and we will hopefully forget these frustrating times happened. (Its a good goal)

To be clear the hardfork itself was pretty dang smooth by past standards it was delayed a few times and there was a small mistake fork but in the end the blockchain never went down which is more than can be said for several previous forks.
And the issues we are having now are not on the blockchain itself but on "layer two" issues.

QUESTION:
Are you more annoyed by these issues or past hard fork fails? Honest inquiry. Both have their issues. #poll

thankful moments

Let me be blunt... In a way I am thankful Hive doesn't have lots of users right now. Can you imagine handling thousands and tens of thousands if not millions of users having to figure out what node to use for what type of transaction? (Including but limited to games and non social media type applications) It would be a catastrophe ... but our users that stuck around are very forgiving and more technically inclined than normal.

Node issues aren't suddenly new... there have been issues (smaller degrees) for a while. They popped up from time to time and users come to discord to ask questions. Often users get an error, give up with their saved draft, and came back later when things are magically working.

Let's also be thankful that we have many nodes... last I knew steem had one usable node, (Not sure if that's still the case) and that node was heavily censored.

We can and should now focus on how to handle helping our users with nodes.

Though node choice does help in theory against censorship and other forms of centralization.... Giving users lots of choices isn't the only reason in and of itself. The bigger impact is that lots of nodes can help handle transactions from lots of users. So this is great... but how to turn that node-quantity into actual usefulness?

Peakd gives users options... but there is so much more needed than a simple drop down of choices.

top priority for peakd.com

I think myself and @asgarth are agreed that the number one priority of peakd.com right now is helping our users navigate the issues of nodes. It will be good for the immediate and the long term usability of the site.

Concurrently we are working to educate users what nodes do. But more importantly working on future features that help our users stick to nodes that will process their transactions correctly.

The better our solution perhaps the less node education we may have to do... but maybe its handy to do both.

For a long time we have had a benchmark tool for nodes. It however was designed to help users identify what READ functions worked well. (Viewing of posts, wallet data, activities etc)

But most of our errors right now are WRITE functions. (Claiming, posting, powering up etc)
However uniquely right now even some of the READ errors like display of recent comments/votes are problems mostly because we designed the system to respond to fast block times instead of the new slower hivemind times but that is a ui issue we can deal with. (However those issues are gonna be worked on so we don't just have to adapt to slow read results)

GOALS

• Our hope is to help users identify how well different nodes are doing with those WRITE-transactions as well.
• We hope to have something that is much more hands off as well... something that will be "AUTOMATIC for the people" (to quote depechemode)
• And perhaps device specific node switching instead of account specific so that if you have several accounts it will fix your entire experience.

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I forsee a day when there are dozens if not hundreds of nodes and peakd.com helps millions of daily users to find the best node for them and automatically identifies problems and auto switches them to the next best option when hiccups occur... all the while intelligently helping to not not overwhelm nodes.

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node educational addendum

Because under-the-cover automatic switching nodes hasn't been perfected we still should understand the place of api nodes

Peakd.com node settings = the nodes that we use to read (find) and display the data you want to see. The blockchain is a big place with crazy amounts of data... what happens is that data is organized into a 2nd layer database, most notably "HiveMind" it's actually a Postrges SQL database. So when you ask for user123's posts we can go to that database asking and that database can supply that info quickly.

I hope people realize that peakd.com doesn't write data to the blockchain... it is your LOGIN METHOD that does that through the node selected. When you select node setting on peakd it chooses which node to ask for information.
If you login using peaklock then that setting performs a dual function as the setting impacts what peaklock uses to write data to the blockchain.

OTHER LOGIN METHODS
Keychain and Hive-Signer are the other loging methods which you should consider your actual blockchain intermediaries.

For example: if you use keychain PeakD gives keychain some data and it is the keychain software that is putting your stuff into the blockchain.

On keychain you also have node preferences which decide what node the keychain software uses to interface with the blockchain. PEAKD prepares... keychain makes it happen, the node is the gateway to the blockchain, and blockchain is where the data is etched and recorded forever. And when you want to see that data peakd directly uses a node of your choosing to read from a big database of info ... usually the hivemind database is where we go to find that information. Recently Hivemind database was tasked to do much more than before and the HiveD database had more removed from it's task list.

Again... The login method known as peaklock is separate software that is run by us as well. And hive-signer is yet another 3rd login method. Again decentralization of options is wonderful ... assuming they all work well. Otherwise they just add to the complications of support.

RECAP:

Peakd is User Interface viewing software to see data from the blockchain and to prepare and initiate transactions... but the actual transactions are done with your specific permission using the login method you authorized.

One day all this will either be more under the hood and users won't need to know this, or our users will understand the idea of blockchain and permisions. I think we would likely prefer the under the hood... out of sight out of mind aspect. But to some extent helping the general public recognize the value of decentralization, blockchains and permissions is a valid goal for humanity.

Upcoming feature goal

Make node switching smarter and more hands off.
Make it so you can at least identify what nodes are screwing up in the areas you need it for.

... These are all my personal thoughts btw ... not an official @peakd statement