Just some internal ramblings triggered by this debate, but part of me likes the idea of an all-text nostr. Everything on the relays, no outside-hosted media, no CP, super-fast loading, much less motivation to aggregate, easy outbox implementation, everything would all just work. Plus something quirky to stand out from the other networks. And writers would love it; you'd have to earn your zaps with words.
I don't actually want this, but I did want to ramble that out.
It wouldn't be hard to fork a client and strip any post with a link embed.
Yup. But also fun to imagine if nostr was text-only from the start, and the whole nostr culture developed around this. Feels like the internet is at a time where text-only plus decentralisation could combine to make an actually pretty good marketing pitch.
Would be trivial to add this, but most people would not use it. We already have this option in damus and noone uses it
Yeah it'd never work as a toggle, would have to be a forced limit from the start, with the whole network culture emerging from it. Without a text-only culture a text-only mode is kinda meaningless. Fun thought experiment though.
Would definitely be a cool client. There was a terminal client at one point that was similar to this
If a text-only 'side nostr' emerged, and a super fun and quirky text-only culture emerged with it, then I'd be all for it. Text-only solves so many problems nostr has right now.
Thanks, Oddbean is a good name. These things only kind of work if you have the whole text-only culture around them though. Stacker news works cause it has a text-only culture (with the odd gif). Same for reddit comments in communities that have turned off media in comments, which is most (media can only be in the thing that people are commenting on). You gotta force it. Here there's too much media sharing for a text-only culture to take root, so when you strip out the media here a lot of notes don't make sense anymore.
I think people just wouldn't use it tbh. There's a reason the 1st gen of decentralized protocols were abandoned in favor of Web2.
Sure, but Harry Potter is pure words, and a lot of people read them books. Books haven't died. Humans like pure words. There's a huge market for pure words. The problem is the day you make it possible to add an image is the day you end any chance of a pure-word culture emerging—and without that culture then you're right, nobody would want it.
