Nobody has built a social web client for people with crappy Internet and old phones.
Discussion
I'm on the train, for over 2 hours in either direction, at least once per week, but the clients don't work. 😭
I just see spinners, everywhere, and notes from yesterday.
Switching to writing directly onto the relay. Sorry, if it gets a bit disjointed.
Your note, aside. Your follows list is exactly as it sounds be👌🏻. You actually used to follow one of my old npubs but with this one, I'm following your lead. Zero follows👌🏻🙋🏻♂️.
People are totally horrified by it. 😂
And they write nasty comments in their little gossip threads:
Of _course_ nobody follows her. We follow npubs who follow other npubs, not npubs who REFUSE TO FOLLOW and don't say GM.
Hoes mad. 😂
I'm not some influencer; I'm just a normal person. Read my stuff, if you like it and find it interesting. Or don't.
Why do they care so much?
Because they use clients and relays that require you to be followed, to be seen, so they feel like I'm a free-rider because they have a crappy setup cuz they're cheap and/or lazy.
To be fair, I'm sometimes okay with only seeing those I explicitly want to see. But I'm am interested in figuring out how to not need that sort of setup. I can see a case for it.
It’s like coming to the theater and sitting in the first row facing the back. Everyone will notice and many will gossip about it trying to figure out what you know that they don’t while trying desperately to appear as if they know what they are doing and agreeing that conventions need to be followed or we all devolve into wildlings.
I've been thinking about this for years. No one gives a fuck about efficiency anymore. I saw it when I was a web developer at a smaller scale. I suspect hardware is good enough in developed markets that developers can get away with not caring. There also seems to be a lack of care for basic engineering principles. Just fire it together and out the door as fast as possible.
They get paid for functional requirements, but it's actually the nonfunctional requirements that make a product enjoyable to use, in the mid-term.
I complained to some Nostr client devs and always got some variant of "Buy a better phone and get better Internet." Or they're like, "You are speaking from a scarcity mindset."
But I'm my own client dev, now, and I started coding in the 1990s, and I'm rage-coding and have an AI, and I'm testing on an old cell phone and an old netbook with 2 cores, so look out, below! 😂
Let's bring Nostr to the Great Unwashed Masses, including people commuting with the Deutsche Bahn.
"Works on my expensive, perfectly configured dev machine" has been a growing mentality.
Which is why I tend to favor software that's as independent as possible. For example, Tuta building their own notifications so people who use a fully FOSS stack don't just get fucked for not having Google spy services installed. It's the understanding that certain design choices will open the product up to as many people as possible, which should be the goal in most situations. I think it's goofy how much "open and decentralized" tech requires Google services to function properly or some other centralized stack.
you can't give nostr to deutche bahn customers, there's no wifi 🤪
I‘ve got a Firefox phone to test it, if you find one 🙂
so much this 👆
i have crappy intetnets most of the time, and some older devices...
have noticed this for years.
Most devs have never even experienced this combo.
I get what you're saying, but even good connections shouldn't be clobbered if they don't need to be. Technical debt adds up when you start looking at infrastructure as a whole. It's ridiculous that we are all spending a lot more money on capacity that we really wouldn't need if not for careless engineering.
I need this.
Did you know you can just send packets? You can design a protocol that can send several thousand characters messages; compressed, encrypted, and signed; all in a single packet?
You could also use E-Mail to send notes.
Notes are just documents. Put them in the email content or hang them on as a zipped file.
My point is that even protocols like nostr are built with the assumption that data transfer is cheap and fast. A single note isn't going to break anyone's connection, but 1000 will.
If we really care about users we'd take a hard look at what data actually needs to be sent. That includes curly braces and whatnot. You can probably do 10x the speed on client devices just by making different format choices.
It isn't nostr by the time you are done and maybe it isn't developer friendly anymore, but libraries can fix that last part... If they don't suck.
I can tell that you've been AWOL for a while, as you've missed all of our backend convos.
Yeah. I'll be ready to rock in about ten years. This is what I get for starting a family 10 years after my peers. I'll be to old guy with an airMac iBook Pro and a fanny pack, trying to join a startup with a bunch of 20 year olds.