Everyone is wondering why I didn't include a link (it's https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu), but this wasn't a rhetorical question. I was legit wondering why there's so little interest in the project. Seems so weird to me because it seems like a cool project.
I'm genuinely, pleasantly surprised that so many responded. 🤷♀️
Because some people are actively hindering the dissemination of good ideas that they haven't thought of or can't wrap their heads around or don't like to be challenged on.
Well, I guess it is very difficult to understand, as it's adding a novel data structure (indexes) on top of a novel data structure (Nostr events). So, it doubles the complexity. It might have been too #thoon, to demonstrate this. Should maybe have kept it offline, for longer, but then they bitch about us programming in secret, so we really can't win.
And then we hid the complexity in the app, without yet adding in the features that leverage that complexity, so it just looks like one long text file, and everyone is like
Love it.
looking forward to a client suited specifically to read Nostr ebooks (kind of RSS reader , but better)
Is this something that could replace https://annas-archive.org/
Ultimately something not censorable that maintains human knowledge is of great value.
Interest will build. Just keep working at it.
It's a really cool project but it's also clearly very early. Keep building, i.e. reference clients, specs, etc. Scientific papers (I guess that's what the Euler release is about?) will be a big use case.
Yeah, it's really early, on the road map, but we spent 6 months just doing trial-and-error on the basic data structure and backend (including relays), and tightening performance enough to make it usable enough to demo.
Will take at least 2 more years, and four minor versions (Gutenberg, Euler, Defoe, #Biblestr), to get to v1.0. And we're developing our own Nostr SDK (in C++), and working with the relay devs on the side, and we have all the infrastructure and DevOps to support this, which is its own subproject and is being successively Nostr-ized.
It's actually sort of amazing because we're a bunch of volunteers doing this in parallel to our day jobs and subsisting entirely off of crowdfunding, tips, and relay subscriptions. 😅
Whole thing is sort of insane and the grant funds have just been like no way go away, but we've kept right on grinding for over a year, and we keep gaining steam and adding members, because it's just an inspiring project that is worth building, for its own sake.
The project is fascinating. But. If I can be completely honest, I think that the main problem here is that the communication is unoptimized, if I may put it mildly.
I am quite interested in books and reading, one of the first features I added to njump is a print/pdf friendly rendering to be able to read long formats on my reader, but in the beginning I also had some difficulties understanding what you were developing.
Just starting with the brand/domain: it contains "gitcitadel" and "alexandria", both the subdomain and the domain contain the same app with no notable differences. This alone is really confusing. What's the project name?
As a side note, Alexandria is probably a too common name, it will be really difficult to find it without a "nostr" companion search term.
Going on, the app itself is a little confusing for a newcomer, it seems just a long-form reader like Habla, it has this weird hover effect on every part on which I cannot interact with (I know you will fix it), but nothing specific to ebooks. Where is the index? The chapters? And mainly, how can I read this stuff on my ebook reader?
The homepage itself has no information, no roadmap, nothing. It should at least shout “books”! The About page is really minimal, and it points to github instead taking the opportunity to use the tool itself to explain its purpose. There is no way to easily find the npub of the project's developers.
I think you should invest a little energy on fixing the brand/domain part and building a good homepage that is really explicative and communicates the project strengths. This is usually useful as a team exercise to review the strategies, goals and priorities.
Do a great job!
PS: If you need some help with design and communication feel free to ping me
It is a cool project, never heard of it until just now
