"Those who most appreciate the security features of streams are probably those least willing to deal with an open instance. I get that, easily. "
This. ^^
My goal is that most streams admins can just set it and forget it. None of us want to spend our lives dealing with riff-raff. Been there, done that. It seems that most folks running streams sites share that vision. I also love that @
K&T Host exists, because the barriers to entry for running a personal or "close friends and family" site are reasonably low. With the exception of domain name registration, it's practically a social "appliance". We don't need or want super-sites and dealing with masses of crazies and trolls and bots and spammers. Those are artifacts of the corporate social world we left. We're still just as connected, but this time it's completely on our terms, not somebody else's.
My only regret is that we don't have a lot of options for "try before you buy".
Might be a good idea to bring back the concept we once had of a trial site where people could poke around and do stuff, but the account was on a fixed timer and would get killed. If they wanted it to continue, they would have to clone their channel elsewhere. But then we're back to dealing with riff-raff -- and nobody wants to do it. I certainly don't. I've got 2-3 years of development work in the pipeline at this very moment.
