Tricky question, actually; big business jumping on new tech brings a whole lot of opportunity and funding to an ecosystem. Funding brings new possibilities for “killer apps” to hit the scene and change the game, but could be perceived as diluting the free, exciting spirit of newness, shaking the feathers of those who are clinging to “how it was”. The “spirit of the internet” may have changed, but the environment has become much more accessible and rich with content (from a certain point of view; another is that it’s become flooded with copy-crap and misinformation… quite nuanced).
I’m sure the internet was a total blast at the time, despite it being young, buggy, less-accessible, and tougher to navigate for non-technical users. Being a platform developed by passionate individuals with self-driven interest less-externally-incentivized to succeed at their chosen tasks… sounds a bit like Nostr to me.
De-commerce is a fun lil’ tag word that popped in my head today (I’m sure it’s been used before) which turns the current e-commerce ecosystem on its head by allowing anyone to run a store, post a product, completely free, and have it propagate the network for visibility and checkout on any marketplace the customer likes to use. It means a community of developers creating killer apps that make e-commerce a breeze, and push the limits of what's possible, motivated by the desire to make the ecosystem, not just their own apps, totally awesome. It means direct connection between customer and merchant, without a middle-man taking a harmful scoop of the merchant’s take-home earnings. And, it means e-commerce driven by customers and merchants, not big tech companies forcing people into a box and making it impossible for non-dev users to easily escape. Nostr and Bitcoin enable all of this to be possible in new, stable, approachable ways.
It’s an evolving field, as the Internet, and Nostr, are evolving ecosystems, and we are so excited to be a part of it.
