Thank you Sam for all your kind words and support. I agree, it’s easy to switch clients, and some definitely did a better job than others. I like to think that we pushed the envelope of early development by creating difficult to render notes that challenged developers and their design choices.
This was eye-opening experience for many reasons, especially seeing that #v4v is probably not a reality at this point. None of us wanted to pursue traditional models such as advertising and it became hard to justify the amount of time we were putting into the project compared to the engagement that we got back. nostr:npub1h882a66p0zj5n69s2u8nfzev4f97lzfnlcej84z78p6uqxge5tpqlupz20 had a great take on #V4V recently discussing multiple income streams for content creators. I agree with his sentiment that while value-for-value is ideal, and made possible with #bitcoin, it probably doesn’t work as the sole source of revenue for content creators (yet!).
And while grants are nice, they don’t make for a sustainable project like we want to pursue. I actually did apply for an open stats Grant, but since we are not an open-sourced project, I don’t think we qualify. I even went so far as to discuss, turning the nostr:npub19mduaf5569jx9xz555jcx3v06mvktvtpu0zgk47n4lcpjsz43zzqhj6vzk into a NostRocket project with nostr:npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w to partially open-source it. I still think that would be cool, but certainly something we would have to think long and hard about.
Like corn said, we are still committed to our mission of being the human algorithm keeping everyone up-to-date on Nostr, but we need to find a path of growth that is sustainable and worth the significant amount of time put into it. I’m not quite sure what that means just yet, but we are working on figuring it out. If you have any ideas, or want to give a hand we’d love to chat 🫂