Yup, nostrapp.link has what, 20? Although it does seem to be growing fast!
As long as the voting system isn’t in the protocol, then the App Store is just another app and people use it if they like it or make their own if they don’t. At some point though, apps that some would consider controversial will pop up and so it would be nice to have a WoT solution figured out before that happens. Which is a nontrivial problem.
I’m not sure if there’s a fully decentralized solution at the end of the day or if you’d even want that. The entire point of app stores is to discover what’s new and good. If everyone is making their own, there’s no central discovery mechanism that benefits you. You can find new apps through other apps but that will be at someone’s discretion (developer’s).
Also, if you are ok with ANY app remaining in the store automatically then you’d have to be ok with hate and violence promoting apps. This would make the App Store lose all appeal quickly and make anything else attached to (news, education) irrelevant.
I think there will always need to be some moderation and curation or you end up with a bunch or garbage.
A fully decentralized solution is definitely possible. And desirable. Not just the App Store, but all sorts of questions and decisions. Many of them, including the App Store, boil down to the tools that we use to communicate with each other: what are those tools and more importantly who is in charge of deciding how they work.
The question is not whether we want moderation and curation, yes or no. Bc the answer to that question is yes. The real question is who decides, and how does the moderation and curation take place. Saying it should be done in a decentralized fashion does not equal let’s have zero moderation or curation, although it understandably might seem that way without having a clear vision of how it is even possible, or without even believing that it is possible.
But it is possible. Consider the English language, a tool for communication in the analog world. Who’s in charge of deciding what words mean what? Answer: nobody is in charge. No centralized bodies at all. And yet we — seemingly magically — somehow manage to agree to call a pencil a pencil. No committees, no standards bodies, yet we agree on most of these tools of communication. That is an example of loose consensus, in the non-digital world.
In the digital world, I think loose consensus is very much possible. We just haven’t implemented it yet. What would happen to the English language if websters dictionary shut down, and no one took their place? Basically nothing. Old words would still work, new ones would still churn into existence. But what would happen if the w3c stopped issuing standards, and no one took their place? Chaos, relatively speaking. No one would be able to agree on new standards for anything. Just like the cartoon, every attempt at fixing the problem of “too many standards” would just mean adding one more standard to the pile. Without centralized standards bodies, it would be a digital Tower of Babel.
But the thing is, I think loose consensus is actually not that complex to implement digitally. It’s just that we haven’t done it yet. 🤷🏻♂️
That’s all fine. Im just thinking practically what’s possible today and doing it tomorrow.
day after tomorrow is what I’m focused on
Awesome post!
I think we are mainly hesitant about building solutions because the simple solutions would require a lot of data to be duplicated and stored. If I like your "app store" and want to make sure it sticks around, I'd not only give it a like, I would copy it and every iteration that I approve of. And thousands would do that to signal what's a worthy app repository, right?
In nostr, relays could de-duplicate events by tracking the hash of
Now Bob would have to
* rally support for resisting the change Alice introduced or
* join Alice or
* fund the full blob or
* curate the blob down to what he can afford to maintain as a separate - niche - "App Store"
