Nostr Web Client

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.

pam 1y ago

Some thoughts:

Nostr is revolutionising the world, with the way it connects digitally.

The majority of the world are programmed to the current ways of the internet ie letting govt and corporate decide what they should say and how they should think.

Nostr is changing that censorship behaviour - but subtly.

Randy Pausch in his last lecture coined the term “head fake”. He taught his students programming - but through various fun projects and performances - so much so the students didn’t realise they were learning to code.

Nostr is that head fake. It subtly helps people understand that they have a right to their voice and thoughts.

And the fun projects or use cases that attract people - are the clients and micro apps

The work that all of you are doing is extremely important for the world, and much appreciated. When everything seems doom and gloom, these are the things that give hope.

I do believe user feedback is important. You can’t please everyone, but all these feedback can be consolidated so that devs can see what they want to resolve or improve next

You are right that this is a long journey. It won’t take 10 years of development, but it might take 10 years of trial and error with users - which is painful and challenging and emotional and tiring - but with it comes immense learning that opens doors for the mainstream market

In your case, its incredible how you have been very active in exploring large volumes of users. You would have seen many positive outcomes and also many challenges. But more importantly, plenty of learning for you to strategise the next step, and the next. And it slowly gets better.

It might be easier to reach out to the early adopters - those who would fundamentally appreciate Nostr’s long term impact for the world. They could be anybody - other tech folks, global leaders and corporate leaders or anyone who have seen the dirty little secrets of the gov’ts, marginalised folks, curious folks, people who just want to give you a chance etc.

These groups of people will be kind to you - and you can use this opportunity to understand what they like and dislike, their behaviour and usage - to continually make clients, apps and nostr in general, better.

I think the back and forth of users coming and going can be very disappointing, but it's also an opportunity for everyone to learn, strategise and re-strategise, and get creative with solutions.

You will make a lot of mistakes - but you will also learn from it and bounce back higher each time. And you will keep getting better.

I appreciate your courage in putting yourself out there. I'm sure you have heard of this : The only people who fail are those who do not try, and You miss 100% of the shots you do not take.

I also appreciate your wisdom with both short term execution and long term goals in place

And in 10 years, you and your products will be more than ready for the mainstream market when Nostr goes viral - and in 20 year, there might be a generation that will be able to maintain their autonomy - and that is a precious gift to give to the world.

Keep going, keep moving forward.

You got this!

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Discussion

hodlbod 1y ago

Much appreciated Pam! 🫂