Warning: this is a polemical note.

I understand that it is not easy to make a client for Nostr.

Too many variables, too many NIPs, too much everything.

So far I've tried everything:

from mobile clients

to desktop ones

to browser clients

to factotum ones

to specific ones...

but they all have one thing in common: they never work well.

They are all full of merits, but equally full of flaws.

I'm constantly jumping from one to another in hopes of finding the ultimate one, but still nothing.

The only one that for obvious reasons I have not been able to try is Damus, because I don't have an iPhone.

Tomorrow marks one year that I've been here, and I was honestly hoping in all this time to find a client to recommend to anyone I talk to about Nostr, but it's impossible.

Primal is beautiful, but after a year it still has no internal translator whatsoever.

Amethyst is the one I use the most ever, but its interface is confusing in so many ways and some features are almost hidden, when something new comes out and I go to read the changelog I get a headache.

Snort and Iris, they are great, but the web app version is unmanageable.

Coracle has so many nice features, but like Amethyst it has a confusing interface.

Satellite.earth ditto.

Then there is the Swiss army knife of nostr clients, namely Nostrudel. Also super great with dozens of features, but it takes an engineering degree to use it and the interface is confusing and unattractive.

I know, developers do what they can, many do it practically for free, but there is no use complaining that there are few of us on Nostr, that no one comes here.

Nostr is still a place for geeks, for normies it's not time yet.

Sorry to vent, it's a gray day, that's the way it is today.

I love you all.

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Discussion

this is not a gray take, this is refreshing for many i am sure.

i completely agree on every point you make. thank you for writing out my thoughts😁

vent as you please btw, get it off your chest🫂

I feel your pain.

And yet, all the Nostr things are also one or two order of magnitude better than they were even 6 or 7 months ago.

Eventually a really good single point client will emerge and they can put monthly access behind a sat paywall.

Appreciate you experimenting, sharing and marketing your art here.

Know that the status quo in twitter is millions of dev hours ahead, whereas most nostr projects are lonewolf dev built and maintained.

Most develop on nostr for a brighter tomorrow, and a yuge potential of a free non corpo non walled internet. Gradually then suddenly.

Very much a shared sentiment. This is important and it’s a topic that needs to be pushed publicly. Basic functions on Nostr don’t even work consistently across clients, except that they are consistently broken.

Because the developers are in a constant race to build something new, for fame and fortune.

A rapid-prototyping culture produces prototypes.

There are other devs at work, but they take longer to produce and test something, so you will have to be a bit patient.

For what it’s worth - it looks like nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s will be releasing an Android version of nostr:npub18m76awca3y37hkvuneavuw6pjj4525fw90necxmadrvjg0sdy6qsngq955 soon - so you’ll be able to try out that client (which is currently my favorite, since it very much resembles the Twitter/X user experience without the spammy ads, censorship and stupid algos).

Very good 🤙