I heard that #[2]​ had started funding development of a decentralized messaging system (that wasn’t Blue Sky), and I already knew who #[3]​ was because I’d been using the Lightning Network for a couple of years. I tried creating an account on astral.ninja but it was too hard to figure out how it worked. Later, I saw that an iOS app called #[4]​ was in development so I signed up for the TestFlight.

This was around the same time I had already decided to leave Twitter, and I had started exploring Mastodon, but didn’t find any community there. The conversations were dull and there was no engagement, so I never put any energy toward using it.

After couple of weeks, I fired up an early build of Damus and saw how seamlessly Lightning was integrated (well over a month before Zap Day) and l fell in love with the concept. It was also a huge plus that everyone seemed so excited to be here.

Everything fell into place after that.