The next Xiki Kickstarter

[Craig Muth]

The next Xiki Kickstarter is going live on Monday!

Please help me spread the word by retreating and liking!

https://twitter.com/xiki/status/910299471254192128
https://www.facebook.com/xikirevolution/photos/a.1538216626406088.1073741827.1525022061058878/2032057237022022/?type=3&theater

The campaign is for XikiHub, which will do for commands what GitHub did for code. I've been working on the campaign videos for many months. Thanks to all of you who've helped along the way!

I do a Riverdance with a horse and a banana in the videos, so be sure to check it out :)  I'll send another email on Monday when I launch. And I'll link to a medium post I'm publishing about my life story, in a new podcast episode I'm a guest on.

Attaching some photos to pique your interest.

​

--Craig

[K Rhodes]

I’m sorry, but as much as i love the idea of Xiki and as happy as I was to support the last kickstarter. I won’t be supporting this one.

Here’s why:

• I never got a version that came anywhere close to promises (or that i could actually use for anything)
• help docs were / are terrible so even getting the basic stuff working didn’t happen. Tried to start writing them for others, hoping to slog through things but wasn’t even able to do that.
• it kept dumping me into emacs and I’m not an emacs user

But even more importantly, the work was never done in the open. This is only an open source project in the most legal-weenie definition. The work has all been done away from the public.

No commits have been made for almost a year. No commits have been made by anyone other than you.

You’ve been talking about these new features you’re writing, and how there are big changes about to happen and apologizing for how long things are taking, but no-one else can help because you won’t make topic branches in the public eye, and don’t seem to understand the whole git workflow with targeted topic branches. Even if folks still wanted to contribute I don’t think there’s really a point because you kept saying you had a much better core (or something to that effect) coming soon, which implies that anything we attempt to add now isn’t going to work with the new stuff, and we can’t see what’s coming so we can’t work with / towards it.

I’m sure the Kickstarter will look great, and I kinda hope you succeed, but we never received half of what was promised from the first one, we never received a tool we could easily help improve, and in my opinion we didn’t receive a tool we could even use in any meaningful way. Maybe it could be argued the wiki stuff works, but lacking any help docs i was never really able to figure out how to really use what you provided so I’m not even sure if it does, and even if it did, there are plenty of great wiki options out there that definitely work, and can be easy expanded upon as needed.

I really REALLY wanted Xixi to succeed. I thought from the original Kickstarter video that it was far more functional than it actually was. I assumed it was probably rough around the edges but at least usable, or that it would be usable soon, because it looked like you had a tool you were at least using personally. Even forgiving that, after the project was funded your messaging really made us thing that there was good progress happening and soon we’d have something we could start playing with.

If you want me to contribute you need to convince me of 2 things:

1. that you’ll have a stable working version with minimal functionality and at least basic how-to instructions like yesterday. I’m not talking about new features. I’m not even talking about all the features promised in the first kickstarter.I’m talking about the core infrastructure to support the functionality promised in the first kickstarter.
2. that you’ll be working in the public, with the community, in such a way that the we could easily contribute.

​

With real sadness,
- Kay

[Clark Feusier]

What Kay said. Exactly.

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[Jeff Peters]

Couldn't have said it better myself. Xiki looked like a huge timesaving tool; it turned out to be a huge time sink.

What Kay said. Exactly.

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[Craig Muth]

Let me start by saying I admit I've made mistakes, many of which you don't even mention here. I also admit to doing things in non-standard ways.

- didn’t receive a tool we could even use in any meaningful

- way.

There has been a version of Xiki that runs in the shell console out there on GitHub for about a year. A few people have had issues with getting it up and running, but I think they're a minority. Ideally people with issues on specific platforms will continue to help troubleshoot and submit fixes to them.

- help docs were / are terrible

There has been a tutorial out there (https://xiki.com/@xiki/tutorial) for many months, that I've gotten pretty good feedback about.

I'm only asking for $25 this time around. On my side, I've burned through above $300,000 in life savings. I've been working on Xiki full-time for over four years, and part-time for over 10 years before that. I've contributed 1000+ commits to GitHub. I'm throwing many years of my life into Xiki because I believe in it. I'm not mentioning this only to gain sympathy, but because there's comparatively little awareness of how contributing to open source is often a quite thankless task (google "open source burnout").

You do a good job of elucidating some of the challenges the project faces. Xiki has been rewritten almost from the ground up several times, which has presented unique challenges. The point of the upcoming Kickstarter is to remove me as a bottleneck. It's a repository where people can submit contributions to Xiki without me having to approve them. It doesn't matter if contributions from users aren't to my liking, people can contribute them as their own.

Imagine you can access all the amazing command interfaces other users contribute, by typing a search right at your usual command prompt and hitting a keyboard shortcut. That's what the XikiHub repository is about. Please withhold judgment until you see the campaign. I thank you for your past support and am hopeful you'll go from kind of wanting it to succeed to continuing to give Xiki your much needed backing. 

--Craig

[Jeff Peters]

Craig, that all sounds fabulous, and I hope it's a tremendous success. Obviously you love your baby, as you should. But at this point I'm in "fool me once" mode.  And your last paragraph, "Imagine...", sounds like the same old same old.

When I first saw your presentation on Xiki, I was right there, ready for it to make my life CLI heaven. I've been in this business over 3 decades, and had my first exposure to programming 44 years ago.  I love the command line.  But after months of downloads, configuration attempts, searches for useful documentation and examples, etc., I had to give up and admit it wasn't what you sold us.  It was all that and more--for you, because you created it and it all makes sense to you. For many of the rest of us, the guidance available didn't lead to successful use.

And, for that reason, I'm out.

[Craig Muth]

- But after months of ... searches for useful documentation and examples 

Again, the tutorial has been out there since last year. How is this not useful documentation? It walks you through everything and give you examples along the way:

https://xiki.com/@xiki/tutorial

--Craig

[Jeff Peters]

I couldn't keep up with the number of ways my experience didn't comport with the claims of that tutorial, and the amount of time I spent trying to figure it out.  That's the whole point--Xiki turned into a time loser, not a time saver.  I have no more time for it.

[Craig Muth]

The tutorial is working for most people, I believe. They're not so much "claims", as steps you're supposed to follow. It's been a while, but before I released it I went through it with many people until it went smoothly.

--Craig

What Kay said. Exactly.

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[Jeff Peters]

That's great. Those will be your round 2 supporters. 

What Kay said. Exactly.

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