Nostr Web Client

Radical community nostr client update:

I love how multiple projects and developers have reached out regarding building a community-based Nostr client. There are a lot who agree with closing the whole nostr ecosystem from the people joining on this particular client.

But I want to share some of my learnings and concerns to further the discussion.

It seems that NIP-29 provides a way to create groups and build a community-based forum.

However, a developer mentioned one caveat: it is built in a way to prioritize the Members. The arguing is that members invest in these communities, but the owner retains ownership, which, of course, makes sense for the owner.

But NIP-29 groups are designed to be forkable, which is intended to solve this ownership issue. In theory, members can fork the group by copying content to their own relay. This is good for edge cases where the owner goes rogue, but I suspect there will be grifters who might copy a community just to steal it.

I don’t fully understand the technical details. But from a creator's perspective, these owners have been building their communities for years, and people follow them for a reason.

I think no creator would ever use a community platform if they couldn’t own it. It should be the equivalent of owning an email list. This client should enable a person to act as a multiplier, reaching thousands of people. This particular use case of nostr is aimed at creators, only indirect to his followers. Fans can opt out in various ways, but forking a community that a creator has been building for years is a non-starter for them.

The need the power and own the community and can do with it what they want.

If you truly enjoy an email newsletter, you trust the decisions the person makes, even though you have no control over what they do with it.

If he fucks up go to another community - someone you trust more.

Most creators have a good incentive and long term focus on their communities (fuck the people who dump shitcoiners and grifters) real creators care about their people following them.

hodlbod 1y ago

Yes, if censorship resistance is an anti-feature for a community organizer, they won't use nostr. That's ok, centralized use cases can use centralized solutions (although integrating nostr would still have benefits, if only for portable identity). This is a question I've been mulling over for a long time now. Nostr is really only useful for open and semi-permeable groups.

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Discussion

Max DeMarco 1y ago

Interesting. Hmm I was hoping that people can plug in their identity into this. So nostr is not the right tech stack to do this?

hodlbod 1y ago

You could make exclusive content work, either with encrypted groups or some other method of signature stripping, but you'd be cutting against the grain. Still, this is something I'm very interested in experimenting with on nostr.