If Nostr wins, I expect any user to have at least 30 clients being actively used in a single phone. If Nostr "micro apps" win, I expect over 100 clients for a regular user.
This is why App management clients are so important. No one will install 100 clients one by one. We must have some form of bundling that facilitates the integration of micro apps to do specific tasks.
Perhaps it could be done in a similar way to browsers where you simply use add-ons to the primary program
Or in the latter apps become more like bundles of microservices nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z
I currently use Spring browser for app management, have Amethyst installed directly and all other apps are used through Spring.
Yes! Please 🙏
Nah, I'll just use amethyst 😉
I like the micro apps environment. One for streaming, one for music, one for post, one for long post, one for shop.. but every one of them doing good work instead of something with everything and doing it just right
Isn't that called a package manager? do we really need yet another one?
On it 🫡
Most people, when I mention Nostr haven’t heard of it yet, or immediately go to their App Store looking for the “Nostr” app. We are still a long way from winning.
We can't win, we all die in the end. Just gotta slap some booty along the way.
When you put it that way!
That's fine. We can have the main apps there and all the micro apps on zap.store
It is communication that needs to change. For the lay user, there is no point in saying NOSTR, you have to say the name of the application and it has to be available on the Play Store. This is the beginning, over time the user will discover the rest on their own.
Agree. I don't invite people to nostr. I invite them to Amethyst.
What about people who don’t use Android or want a browser experience?
Then I sell Coracle or Primal. But I rarely discuss nostr itself.
Does that not do a disservice to the common protocol that we use? I usually say I want to invite someone to Nostr and then immediately follow up saying that there are a lot of apps to choose from, and show them my profile on 2 or 3 of them.
No. The protocol is irrelevant. People want do join a cool community/app. They couldn't care less about the protocol. If you are explaining the protocol first, you are still talking inside our inner circles.
I, for one, welcome the inner circles
There’s a reason there was a Nostriga and a Nostrasia and not an Amethriga or a Damusasia.
Yeah, these are dev conferences. Real world is a LOT different.
I tend to think about it the way I think about bitcoin. One protocol, unlimited apps. I’m not promoting any one app because what happens if that’s the one that rugs them?
Then that app is to blame. If you sold that app as Nostr, the whole protocol is to blame. This is why people think Nostr is bad, even though what was bad was their experience with the first app, not nostr itself.
Composable apps / clients…🧐 I think we need an OS
We already have. It's called Android. :)
We can use that as a solid base to make it more Nostr native yes 🤙🏻👀
And for desktop?
Desktop is so far out... We still need to build everything over there. We don't even have a desktop-native signer right now.
desktop was forgotten as an app platform in the last 15 years, it's pathetic
very true, we need to move away from web apps, to native desktop, with encryption as identity
I've got some buddies in #GitCitadel working on .deb build processes so we can distribute our apps as Linux desktop apps.
The Age of the Desktop will return.
Wouldn't it be better to ship as flat packs?
flatpak is already deprecated on ubuntu 24+
snap is the main format these days, debs are still ok
the move of linux towards trying to do app isolation like android is really not going anywhere, they should just put energy into putting android's app framework into linux and extending it a little to make the bundles binary instead of jars
Has anyone tried one of these Android-apps-on-Linux programs? (perhaps a temporary workaround for Nostr desktop adaptation?)
https://bytebitebit.com/operating-system/linux/how-to-run-android-apps-on-linux/
I think it makes more sense to focus on core features and stability. I mean, anyone who wants to can an fork an OS and build nostr into it, but I think it makes more sense for nostr devs to focus on building and improving the protocol and functionality.
I doubt it….
Doubt what? :)
Wow that was fast. Are you stalking me? Lol
Pokey notifications :)
nostrudel is pretty fast at showing them most of the time too
But this one came in when I was not using the phone :)
Our notifications are good too Vitor haha. But in response to your note. I think we are very far from having ppl want that many apps. We need nostr to be ‘good’ at the most base level first. You’re doing great work there along with others but it’s gonna be a long road. Ppl are lazy and also hesitant to download apps they don’t understand. Our focus in 2025 is going to be finding those ppl, getting them on-boarded from a base level and then hopefully they find other micro apps eventually that they can use.
Makes sense. But most nostr users already have more than 3 apps installed. So, it's not really that far out. It won't be long until we see 10+ apps. And then, it will jump very quickly.
What’s your source on that 3 apps installed info?
Just from what users tell me. Fountain is onboarding a lot of people. Vast majority of users have 2 kind 1 clients installed. Amber is really common now.
Honestly, and I’ll say this as nicely as possible (doing my best not to sound like a doomer or ungrateful to the devs), Nostr apps first need a serious boost in quality. While I appreciate Nostr’s focus on future user experience, there’s a considerable amount of technical debt in existing apps. I’d much prefer a handful of well-functioning apps over 30 or even 100 buggy ones struggling to integrate with each other.
💯
True. I don't think most of our current apps will survive the micro app dominion. The best apps today already have too much technical debt and are falling behind most of the new ones in terms of architecture. That's kinda the point of smaller apps, they can easily be replaced by new tech stacks.
I'm not sure about this. Users will read about Nostr and end up trying something like Nostrudel, Primal, Damus, or Amethyst. If they encounter bad UX, they’ll bounce and likely won’t come back. If we don’t build a solid experience today, there won’t be enough users willing to try all of the “micro apps” for Nostr. At the very least, we need a functional, pleasant, easy-to-use Twitter clone. Just look at ActivityPub software: as much as I like Peertube, Lemmy, Pixelfeed, etc., it’s the plain, “boring” Mastodon that really brings users into the ecosystem.
As for downloading multiple micro apps, like a “Signer,” “Local Relay,” and “Notification Receiver” just to use “Twitterst,” “TickTockstr,” or “Spotifiestr”… I don’t think that’s going to fly with anyone outside the dev community. Bundle or no bundle, there’s very little incentive for the average person to jump through all these hoops. But, as always, I’m happy to be proven wrong.
I don't disagree on the solid experience. But that doesn't need to be centralized in massive apps. In fact, I will say that there is no point in building nostr at all if in the end all we have is a few apps that control everything because they are the only ones with good experience.
I like that there are many different types of clients. Different people have different needs, and having options is an attractive feature, IMO.
A nostr web app that did everything is my preference. Then no one cares about apps, crappy mobile OSes, or forced gateways called "stores". Wasm could do it all in a browser, whether desktop, mobile, or other.
Under what scenario would this happen and why? Maybe I lack imagination, but I don't see why anyone would want a nostr backend for most of the apps they use. Most people still don't want to use it for social media.
Because people will realize that most of the current apps they use are modifying what users have said/made in the past without their permission. You probably didn't notice, but I am willing to bet every time you export your photos from a preferred server (Google/Apple/Next cloud/etc) a few of them are missing and other have been changed. Same for documents, PDFs and so on. I have lost many pictures/documents in that way.
I don't think nostr fixes that problem, because a relay can delete data if they want to as well. If we want redundancy and data integrity we can already get that by encrypting data locally and backing it up to more than one place (no nostr required).
Yep, but in nostr you have to hash every single item you publish, making checks very easy to implement, compare and reshare. You don't have to think about that before you start using the service. It's backed in.
"Micro apps" will be the death of user experience. Who needs 100 clients for a single phone? Sounds like a recipe for chaos.
So, you want centralization in a few players that control everything you do in nostr?
This is not realistic. If each app takes only 1min of my time, that would sum to 30-100 mins. who has this much free time?
Right now I usually only use 13 or so apps of my phone, like a dictionary, a map, a mail, a search engine, 3 socials, 4 language apps, camera, music.
And they take most of my screen time.
But a lot more apps are running in the background that manage things without my interaction. If by clients you mean those , sure, maybe.
