Replying to Avatar HoloKat

People will probably fall into 2 camps here:

1. Zaps are great, and are the signal / what makes nostr work with v4v

2. Payments and social may send mixed signals, ego stroking etc... so payments should not be emphasized.

I see that Primal has positioned itself as a social bitcoin wallet vs. a nostr client with a bitcoin wallet. So, I think from that angle, it makes sense to push hard ton zaps / seamless wallet integration etc. It's more about highlightning bitcoin than nostr, though both play well together.

Personally, I got one foot in each camp. I feel like if you position your client as bitcoin-centric, then by all means, lean into it. But if you wish to lean into the nostr aspects and not care as much about payments, by all means don't emphasize payments.

I don't know which is better positioning - but I suspect the vast majority of people out there don't care as much about zaps as we think they might. I suspect that we have created a bubble for ourselves in thinking that zaps are the winning feature, when in reality people likely don't care.

This is not to say that I don't like zaps or I'm not optimistic about v4v micro payments. I would like for all of it to work.

The beauty of nostr and the fact that it's so early, is that we can test all of these things and see what sticks. Personally, I would love to see a nostr client that has zero bitcoin features, and leans into fiat subs instead. I suspect that this client will gain more broader appeal, especially if it does a great job delivering non-bitcoin content to new users.

I think one of the problems we are not acknowledging currently in Nostr is the lack of content variety, and there's a lot of focus on everything else BUT the problem that makes nostr not sticky. You join, you see nothing but bitcoin talk, you leave. I'd like to see clients push for content creation / surfacing features.

Here is the two camps I'll predict (might even include a fork)

nostr the business

nostr the freedom protocol

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You can’t have nostr the freedom protocol without nostr the business. This is the real world not la la land

Nostr businesses are going to through many iterations of what doesn’t work and what works slightly better.

A good amount of people may not have been around during the shitcoin that was early internet businesses.

Did you know Netscape used to charge for their browser until Microsoft undercut them?

Did you know Netscape before it finally died tried to bundle an email client and IRC client with the browser?

Does anyone remember the hit the money win a prize.

I mean a lot of this pales in comparison to the ad driven monocultural internet we kind of have now (mostly the web but internet at large).

Let’s not go there but let’s also experiment. Some things are going to be shit. Paying for 700 subscriptions to maintain Nostr like streaming services may not be the most optimal but let’s experiment, give feedback, iterate.

…What was the question?