Nostr: An Open Super App
The super app is something like WeChat, a single app where you do everything, book a car service, talk to your friends, make purchases online or in person. It's a monolithic do everything app and it's very popular, especially in China.
Silicon Valley tends to make apps that are nothing like the super app. It's because western tech companies don't work anything like Chinese internet companies. Western tech tends to rely on a huge base of open source software but then create these vertically integrated silos of apps that do one thing well with elegant design and not many options. When an app does try to do lots of things we hate it, just look at MS Word.
The vertical integration is narrow. The Chinese super app does everything broadly, but it's not so pretty. SV tends to stagnate, companies are afraid to compete with themselves so they get stuck at a local maximum. Our culture of product development find something that works, and sticks with it. That's why in the west, big companies buy the upstarts. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, you quit and create a new startup. Most likely you'll fail, but you might do well enough that a big company will you buy you out, or you'll do so well you replace the incumbents.
The last western super app was AOL. And we celebrated its death. Since then it's just been a dream. It was Elon Musk's goal when he bought twitter, it was the story that SBF sold to investors as he pumped up FTX. An app to rule them all.
We don't make a super app because our culture, politics, and economic system don't work like that. We hated being stuck on AOL. Silicon Valley's real super app is the web itself, the browser, linux, smart phones, etc... They're more open, less controlled, more competitive. Our legal system punishes companies that become dominate to eliminate monopolies. Out business culture causes big tech companies to be safe and consistent. Google had the lead in AI yet it was OpenAI that launched ChatGPT in a chaotic barely coordinated 6 week sprint.
Even after AOL, there was a time when silicon valley was moving towards its model of a more open super app. Facebook launched their platform, twitter's api enabled a tremendous app ecosystem. But both companies chose to lock things down. They did it because their only economic model was based on advertising and required their control. The web was slowly enclosed from an open chaotic ecosystem to a platform which monitors users behavior and captured their attention to sell to advertisers.
I think open social protocols we're seeing emerge today, and in particular nostr, could be our super app. Instead a single app that does everything. It's a common social protocol where many apps can be created and run. We've created a system that reflects a set of values around autonomy, openness, decentralization, permissionless participation, privacy, encryption, and yes cryptocurrencies. Without the financial part, we can't make the ecosystem thrive.
We can make a super app, but not one, rather a family of apps, a style of apps that let there be a choices on a common platform. Smart clients, dumb relays, and just enough cryptography to keep it all functioning.
When we build this new open super app protocol, we'll need to create all the things that existed on the centralized social media apps, but also the giant closed super apps. The old model was vertically integrated. Lots of services and businesses were needed to keep it running but they were all controlled by a single company, hidden off from the public. The advertising marketplace, the content moderation, the CDN for fast media delivery, the transcoders for making images and video the right size, the algorithms for deciding what to show you or who you should connect with, the bug tracking, customer support, business development team, legal, compliance, public relations.
We don't like how the vertically integrated ecosystem worked, it didn't provide us agency and autonomy. But most importantly, we didn't have the space to innovate and create. In this new open system, we still need all those services provided by the big companies is needed somehow. We need to meet those same needs, but in new ways.
Users see the frontend of an app, the UX, their experience as a user. But there is so much more, middleware, backend, business operations. All of that will need to be created in a new open ecosystem.
To take one example, moderation, so we don't have to see a constant flow of ISIS beheading videos, some that we can handle with algorithms, but that's also how big social does it today. Even with the best AI minds in the world, a lot slips through. People need to be able to make judgements, and figure out edge cases. I don't like the choices that Facebook, TIkTok, or Elon's Twitter makes, but it doesn't mean we won't need to make those choices. Now we can make it a service where we pay people who do that social labor. And we can choose who we want to do it, making sure their values are alined. We can use a stead stream of payments to all of these services.
Nostr can be the protocol upon which we build an open super app ecosystem which contains multitudes.
