The German phrase is "Building on a green field".
Discussion
Some of the Green Field Junkies tend to wander off, when things get more complex and they start spending days bug-fixing or trying to figure out some library conflict or fixing the webserver.
There are always new Green Fields and the grass there looks so much greener.
Building on a green field is fast when you have a bunch of pre-fabricated components and you're just throwing up a double-wide and a barn. If you have to fell trees, plane the wood, gather stones, and assemble them all by hand, it will take a lot longer to get to something resembling a finished product.
Yeah, and with prefab, then everyone is staring at the field, wondering why nothing is getting built, and then they come back later and a house got put up, overnight.
nostrmeet.me is still broken.
Three solid months of development.
First month went fast… assembling prefab components for a nice “qr code” experience. Then… (also cause I’m new to typescript and Nostr dev) the last few weeks “building an oauth style login experience from scratch, with cloud backup of encrypted keys (cause nsec.app doesn’t play well with new account creation)” has been painfully slow.
Nostr is Wild West. Maybe not so fast even for green field apps.
Every Nostr dev has to re-implement the protocol themselves, as well as login (which isn't easy; OAuth is a quite sophisticated workflow), data storage, security, etc.
There are prefab components, but there aren't *Nostr* prefab components–at least, not many. I'm sure more will come as the ecosystem matures.
Kudos to ‘NDK’ and ‘nostr-tools’, but even these are hard to keep in sync with fast changing NIPs and ‘best practice’ environment.
If someone creates good, reliable, widely-used Nostr protocol libraries, like NDK and nostr-tools, those will be the de-facto spec. There are benefits to a high pace of innovation, but not everyone wants or needs the latest NIP the moment it is proposed.
Perhaps a monetization model is for the free version of an app to use the "old" stable NIPs, maintaining a broad base of compatibility, while paying users get to try out the latest and greatest protocol updates as soon as they are implemented. Those paid users can also give early feedback and/or request features.