By Sudo, Nym Head of Community
The Nym community operates the largest decentralised mixnet in the world today, counting 500+ mix nodes across 60 countries and five continents. Now that the network is up and running, it is time for mass adoption! At this crucial moment, the Nym ship needs all hands on deck to steer and navigate, in order to bring strong network-level privacy to everyone, everywhere.
The Nym People Survey and Vibe Check Survey were recently sent out to our communities, partners and supporters. We thank you all for participating and sharing your thoughts! With over 500 submissions in eight languages, there is a lot of invaluable feedback to sift through.
But first, a commitment:
Q: “ What would you like to see more of from Nym?”
A: “A Harry pin-up poster.”
You got it, buddy. Stay tuned for a Harry Halpin pin-up poster!
In this first quick blogpost on dissecting the survey results, let’s explore some key takeaways from all your submissions. What is important to you, the Nym community?
Seamlessness
“I would focus on enhancing user-friendliness and accessibility. While Nym’s mission and technology are highly commendable, ensuring a seamless user experience is essential for driving widespread adoption.”
Many of you find ease of use, seamlessness and accessibility important, and rightfully so! These are all absolutely crucial for mass adoption of any technology. “Privacy by default” starts here. As you will see in the next section, integrations are top of mind for the project and the community alike. This is because integrations leverage a key feature of the mixnet: the fact that it is a layer-zero, infrastructure-level technology. Any application running over the Nym mixnet enjoys strong privacy protections at the network layer.
Integrations, partnerships, use-cases
“Execution for real world problems — especially for mobile users, as android users are counted as 90% of total internet users.”
“Increase pace of development and diversity of service providers onboarded”
One of the key themes in your answers across both surveys was use-cases of the mixnet. Usage for mobile came up a lot too, as a large majority of us use mobile devices for most of our apps and services these days. Strong privacy protection on Android and iOS is important.
What devices are you using?
Partnerships and mixnet integrations are top of mind for the Nym community: most of you want to see more of these in the future, and they are both key priorities for the project core team.
What would you like to see more of from Nym?
Some of the integrations you requested: Email providers, IronFish, Nym Wallet, YAMN Remailer Network, Twitter, Wasabi wallet, Bitcoin Core…
Importantly, besides application-specific integrations, general purpose use-cases of the mixnet are also important to the Nym community. Mixnet-based browsing and VPN services for both desktop and mobile were often mentioned in your responses. After adblockers, VPNs came out as the close second in the privacy-preserving technologies the Nym community is using.
Which privacy-preserving technologies are you using?
Education and internationality
“More multinational community marketing and activities are needed (Especially Education about privacy)”
“More internationality.”
“I think the mixnet is not well understood. I would like to spread this in a way that everyone can understand”
“Que todo está en inglés y el lenguaje que usan es muy técnico. Esto es una barrera para la adopción.”
The Nym mixnet is a complex solution to mass surveillance, which is an even more complex problem. Written explainers, documentation and community support can only go so far to cut through the technical mumbo-jumbo. This is especially so for a non-technical audience, which is most people! This could be a barrier to mass adoption.
Back in 2022, Shipyard Academy was the first effort from the Nym team to provide an interactive, zero-to-hero overview of both the problem, and Nym’s solution to it. We received great feedback from the community about the Academy, and it was often mentioned in your survey submissions as well. Stay tuned for more details on the next cohort of Shipyard Academy.
When it comes to international reach, there are Nym community channels and blogs in various different languages to ensure ease of content consumption. However, the regular Nym community calls, AMAs, and other community activities are (mostly) in English due to it being the common language for most of our communities and speakers.
What would you like to see more of in your language? Community calls? Documentation? Something else? Come to the Nym Telegram or Discord and share your thoughts!
Nym at a party
The team had a lot of fun reading through your responses to the question “You are at a party, and Nym is a person at that party, how would you describe this person?”. Here are some of our favorites:
“The reliable guy to whom everybody goes and tell their secrets”
“Indistinguishable from all the other party people.”
“Mysterious, wearing a mask. Likes to be a part of the crowd, because privacy loves company. Not standing alone, for sure. Dynamic, likes to change places.”
“Nerd. Lol.”
“Nym is a bouncer that prevents bad guys from having access to the party.”
“Secret Santa.”
“It’s Harry!”
“A guardian making sure no one is recording/photographing people without permission.”
“Does anybody know the guy in the corner? Who? Oh, he’s gone… never mind!”
Let’s keep the conversation going!
Although the surveys are over, the conversation has only just begun. Keep an eye on the Nym blog, Telegram and Discord as more findings are shared and discussed over the coming weeks, and participate in the conversation! Let’s shape the future of the Nym decentralised infrastructure and ecosystem together.
Much love,
Sudo
Privacy loves company
Discord // Telegram // Element // Twitter
The internet is global and so is Nym: join the Nym Community wherever you are and help build the private internet today.
English // 中文 // Русский // Türkçe // Tiếng Việt // 日本 // Française // Español // Português // 한국인
