People criticizing nostr apps for their quality are making multiple category errors:
- Individuals (or very small teams) can't produce the same level of quality as large teams, but teams can't exercise as much creativity as individuals
- Optimal UX comes from a need for growth, stemming from a need for profit. Grantees and hobbyists do not have this motive. But for-profit businesses won't be principled about putting the protocol first, while grantees and hobbyists may be.
- Good UX partly comes from experience, and existing best practices. Very little of this is established yet for nostr, both from a design and engineering perspective. We're making it up as we go along.
If you want something new, you have to take the bad with the good. When I started this, my expectation was that it would be a ten year project with a 0% chance of success. Two years in, I'd say we're doing extremely well.
I don't care about growth, and won't for a while. I'm not in it for user numbers or zaps, I want to use software to give my kids a better life. Drop the high time preference, and dig in, because this is going to be a long ride.
With all that said, I do feel a new wave coming in the next year or so, as best practices crystallize, and as existing projects reach a point of maturity where their developers recognize their own limits and need for help. I look forward to seeing teams coalesce to push forward what the creatives started.
This might take the form of more for-profit businesses, but I hope that devs (including myself) will be able to swallow their ego and pitch in on projects that don't belong to them without having to get "hired". The difficulty of this on nostr is of course that the scope of the protocol leaves so many tantalizing possibilities to work on.
For myself, I remain focused on my original mission of serving real-life communities. However, the longer I work on the problem, the larger it becomes. It turns out that there has in fact been decades of work in the space, and there continue to exist many unsolved problems, even without introducing decentralization. It would be hubristic to think that my first attempt at the problem would be either correct or successful. Iteration, exploration, and education are all necessary.
It's very likely that it's impossible for a single developer to cover even a single use case of nostr satisfactorily. We'll all eventually need help. This is just the nature of the project we've set for ourselves.
