Two weeks ago, I took a break from posting from this account.
Went on vacation and it was pool and beach, every day, for a week. #blessed
The end of summer is hard, you only get so many of them, and you really need to make them count, no do overs.
Because of some work deadlines, I really needed to allocate my time and saw that I would need to pause my shitposting and scrolling. Didn’t mean to be too “provocative”, thank you for the love while I was away, I took screenshots.
With a little bit more time this past week, I found myself using nostr with fresh nym accounts. Sometimes I would use two or three accounts in a day. I did this to see what it’s like for new users to just jump in and interact. From the Damus TestFlight perspective, discoverability is getting better and the Universe relay selection is keeping the spam way down. Having decentralized content moderation that’s being done by relays, clients, and/or users, still looks like the best path forward, but there is still a major learning curve with it. Breaking the social bone of central planning and resetting it to a leaderless model is so incredible hard and will take many years to feel normal.
And maybe that’s ok, because nostr can’t compete against centrally controlled platforms, at least not yet.
And perhaps there is too much emphasis on identity being associated with keys. That’s a very bitcoin mindset, and for good reason, but here, there is a history of people moving on from keys, intentionally or not, and that should be normalized for new users. You are not your phone number, it can change, and you can have many phone numbers and apps where you can be reached. Plus, who doesn’t think the idea of having unlimited burner phone numbers would be cool?
Maybe during this time there can be new use cases that can be explored that help teach these ideas. For example, “Guess Who?”, an app that lets influencers post only anonymously, and once someone guesses it’s them, the influencer has to zap them and then pick a new nym, for a new game, and yes influencers could get paid by advertisers for participating and post as many links to whatever they want. Or “Rage”, an app that let’s you scream at a crowd of fresh followers, but your anonymous account only last 24 hours, and you are randomly followed by 150 people and following a different group of 150 people.
Apps like these might remind people that they can selectively reveal themselves to the world. Leaning into social anonymity/pseudonymity, easy account generation, zaps, the things nostr is leading on, could be explored more in gamifying apps.
The harvest is plentiful, but the devs are few.
I also made the decision to be more intentional to try to understand nostr technically. I was spending some time learning how devs be devs. Nostr had a lot of energy to create a GitHub alternative earlier this year. Until that happens it would be good for non devs to create an account on GitHub and find your favorite apps and look around, maybe open a new Issue with a feature request that you can’t find, but just don’t get yourself banned from a repository (awkward). It turns out, GitHub is a social app, but for code, and if a dev is being too quiet on nostr, you can see them being active on there. Nostr has so many great people working on it because they want to make this happen. They have to mine fiat all day and are busy with life. And for those that work full time on nostr, there will never be a stopping point. Be sure to zap a dev today to say thank you.
Lastly, part of the reason for my absence was that I was seeing other people with larger reach start to post stuff that had been talked about previously. Feeling a little exhausted, I saw that nostr was starting to click for them and I could take some rest. When you see new users carrying the nostr torch, it feels really fucking good.
