Using big words and talking about how they want to change the dapp space is cool and all, but from the outside it looks like the team have no clue on how they will get that done and bring developers into the Mainframe OS. As far as i am aware its not even listed on the main websites were developers can find the project. Most developers don't even know about Mainframe OS.
Because of this shift in focus we had to pull resources away from Mainframe OS, notably the maintenance of some apps we used to provide such as Uniswap, and the development of the core OS itself. We’re still actively working on Erebos though, which is a core component of Mainframe OS so once we’re able to allocate more resources on it, it will be from a good place.
Regarding Mainframe OS, we’re not actively working on it at the moment but still intend to focus back on it when we can, because our plan is the same as it’s been since we started: get people to use decentralised technologies.
We started focusing on messaging because that’s what we had experience with and thought the decentralised infrastructure would allow us to build this, but as we started to dig deeper into the problems we’d have to solve, we realised we would need to build lot of “platform-level” functionalities (such as identities and contacts management, storage, application updates...) even before we can get to messaging, this is why we started building Mainframe OS to support not only messaging, but also other types of applications.
Now as you may be aware, the whole “web3" movement that seemed all the rage when we started working on Mainframe OS hasn’t reached much end-user traction, so our current focus on decentralised finance is with the hope it can be a more straight-forward way to attract users. We still intend to build a whole decentralised platform around it as we can, but first we need to get enough users to make it relevant providing such a platform.
I hope that answers your questions.
About messaging, we started using PSS (https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dapp_developer/index.html#pss) in our first PoC, that offers real-time messaging capabilities using the Swarm network.
The downside is that it requires running a Swarm node so until adaptive nodes (ethersphere/SWIPs#12) are supported, we're using a Swarm gateway and feeds (https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dapp_developer/index.html#feeds) for asynchronous communication.
Regarding end-user traction there's a classic bootstrapping problem between the constraints of getting users in order to be interesting for developers, and having developers create compelling apps to attract users. Eventually we want to build compelling apps ourselves, but for this we need to build a solid foundation at the platform/SDK level.
One of the difficulties in that regard is moving from proof-of-concept implementations to "future-proof" protocols we need to define, implement and experiment with. This is something we're doing with the wider Swarm community because we hope these protocols can be used not only in Mainframe OS, but generic to decentralised apps using Swarm.
About supporting the bzz:// protocol it's not something we intend to do in Mainframe OS because the protocols we aim to provide are higher-level, but it would be nice to have it supported in browsers such as Brave for example, where it could be more relevant.
Have there been audits?