We almost decided _against_ starting our project because of the grants.
The ubiquitous nature of the grants leaves the impression that working on Nostr is futile, unless you receive a grant. Users are also reluctant to pay full price for anything because they expect you to be paid by OpenSats, so that you either offer everying "free" or at heavily-subsidized prices.
This centralizes decision making about the protocol, indirectly.
If there are two dev teams, and one is independently financed, whilst the other receives grants, the grant app can undercut in price until the other one goes broke and gives up.
Since implementations determine the protocol, they either have to finance every app, or they skew the protocol, involuntarily. Both of these situations distort the market and would be difficult to unwind because they cement expectations among the users.
Not so bright of a future emerges from the way it seems to work now. How you see it work out in the future?
Well, they're actually sort of trapped, now, as they're sitting on a gigantic money bag and they are legally obligated to spend it, according to the principles defined by their nonprofit.
What they could do, is disintermediate the spending of the money, more, so that users have more direct say in where the funding goes and devs don't have to become de defacto employees, in order to receive foundation monies.
#Geyserfund does this with contribution amplification, where individuals are encouraged to contribute and they top-up the most popular projects.
We had the idea of arranging a Geyserfund #zapathon, with OpenSats contributing x-amount to the amplification effort, but the idea seems to have gone nowhere.
One of the things you can see on the Geyserfund page for Nostr projects is the higher heterogenity of the projects. The users don't only want funding going to devs. They find a lot of value in stuff like marketing, merchandise, documentation, meetups, etc. Nostr is a whole ecosystem, not merely a software project.
Nostrocket by nostr:npub1mygerccwqpzyh9pvp6pv44rskv40zutkfs38t0hqhkvnwlhagp6s3psn5p also kind of solves this
How does that work?
