I did apply, (recently) in November. Received the boiler-plate response below:
```
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for submitting your grant application to OpenSats. We regret to inform you that your pro...
Yeah, I wish there was more transparency. At the same time form letters forestall a lot of nasty problems when people don't take rejection well (see above for an example).
Unrelated to your application, speaking for myself only and on behalf of no organization (especially not OpenSats), here's my opinion about relay.tools:
- The design and frontend work is not good. Get a designer to come up with user stories, flows, and do usability testing. I have no idea how to use the support portal, the zap image is massive on payment, the sign in prompt in the landing form is hard to find, the wizard is a good idea but poorly executed, there are lots of ugly/wide/compact boxes.
- There are long-standing bugs - my paused coracle-dev relay has a balance of -128713 sats, the relay subscriptions page shows everyone's subscriptions.
- Scope is not focused. There is a LOT that can be done with relay hosting: custom domain names, multiple implementations, nip 86/11/43/29 management, etc. Instead you've added nip 05 (with no explanation of what it is), written clients (I'm sorry, but UI is not your strong suit, and there are much better community clients getting the developers' full attention out there), done stuff with nip 66 (which I personally think is not very useful) and web of trust.
I ended up building caravel because you never added community relay support. This to me is the biggest miss — as far as I can tell, relay.tools only supports strfry? I thought that one of your goals was to make it easy to set up any implementation. I waited for a long time for this to materialize and it never did.
Anyway, don't take this as me dunking on your project. I know you're not funded and keep working on it anyway, which I really respect. But the things I've asked for as not only a customer but as a potential partner (remember talking about referral codes), you've just not executed on. I would be excited to see you move in that direction, because you're the only person who has substantially done anything like this so far.
Unrelated to your application, speaking for myself only and on behalf of no organization (especially not OpenSats), here's my opinion about relay.tools:
- The design and frontend work is not good. Get a designer to come up with user stories, flows, and do usability testing. I have no idea how to use the support portal, the zap image is massive on payment, the sign in prompt in the landing form is hard to find, the wizard is a good idea but poorly executed, there are lots of ugly/wide/compact boxes.
- There are long-standing bugs - my paused coracle-dev relay has a balance of -128713 sats, the relay subscriptions page shows everyone's subscriptions.
- Scope is not focused. There is a LOT that can be done with relay hosting: custom domain names, multiple implementations, nip 86/11/43/29 management, etc. Instead you've added nip 05 (with no explanation of what it is), written clients (I'm sorry, but UI is not your strong suit, and there are much better community clients getting the developers' full attention out there), done stuff with nip 66 (which I personally think is not very useful) and web of trust.
I ended up building caravel because you never added community relay support. This to me is the biggest miss — as far as I can tell, relay.tools only supports strfry? I thought that one of your goals was to make it easy to set up any implementation. I waited for a long time for this to materialize and it never did.
Anyway, don't take this as me dunking on your project. I know you're not funded and keep working on it anyway, which I really respect. But the things I've asked for as not only a customer but as a potential partner (remember talking about referral codes), you've just not executed on. I would be excited to see you move in that direction, because you're the only person who has substantially done anything like this so far.
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