what kind of problems are you getting writing to relays?
I don't think its fair to say that. Just because they didn't have all the federation features available at day one doesn't mean its bad.
I don't seem to have the same experience as you reading their docs, before they even had a web app or android client available, I was able to create an account and follow #[4] just by reading their docs and making http requests.
Just recently I made a silly bot that posts on both Nostr and Bluesky, for Bluesky it just worked, but on Nostr I had problems getting relays to accept my notes. #[5]
Zaps on Bluesky are entirely possible, in fact my account already has a hidden lud16 in its profile data, I made a document about it already. https://github.com/MichaelPriebe/bluesky-zaps/blob/master/README.md For now there would need to be a custom client, but reading some things that the very active developers are saying, it might not be needed in the future.
Discussion
I would send the note, and then... nothing... They didn't even give me any reply saying that something was invalid, my solution was to just add some more hoping at least a few of them will take it. And yes I already made sure they were not paid relays. It was especially true for the damus relay, and the snort one seems to be working again now. I fear websockets might not be as scalable as we think.
I've been doing a lot of development on nostr for months and have never experienced that at all 😕 back in January or so the Damus relay was struggling but I would not be able to connect to it at all
maybe you were having a connectivity issue or something? 🤷♂️
I was even manually connecting to them using a online websocket tester, sending the note and then just watching nothing happen. Then I would purposefully mess up the note so the signature doesn't match, and then it immediately gave me an error like its supposed to.
jb55 already said that this is happening: #[6]
And if I could add anything more controversial, no shade, but Nostr is basically Damus. Here I am with the other 70% of people that don't use iPhones, using multiple apps and webapps to figure out which one will load correctly today.