Who the heck are these people? π
Ghost devs.
Discussion
Ah, the article says it almost all goes to Bitcoiny/Twittery stuff.
That makes sense, since I'm hanging out with more backend/other-stuff people who have to work much harder for much longer, before they have anything finished that they could show.
And then nobody cares about what they built because it's too obscure and technical for anyone to get the point, but oh well. π
Well, did they apply? Did they show their work? I worked on my backend project for 7 months full time before I got a grant. Whoever you're talking about should open their code and apply before they burn out. δΉβ ΰΌΌβ β―β βΏβ β―β βΏβ ΰΌ½β γ
You said it. 7 months. We've been working on ours since before Christmas and the code is open and we publish announcements regularly.
Nobody responds, nobody looks, nobody cares. It's simply too low-level and complex to market. We have to finish the entire tech stack and build out the infrastructure, and then use it to build some clicky thing, and then we can ask for money for the clicky thing.
So, whatever. Project survivorship bias is real.
That's strange to think that I haven't really seen you talk about what your project is.. nostr network is very lossy sometimes and also people tell me I'm terrible at marketing, so I will pass that message on like an annoying little π. Whatcha working on?
Here's some feedback if you want...
I read that landing page twice, and clicked on each project, and then started clicking the libraries. I still am not sure what exactly the citadel is about. My best guess is it's a repository of libraries with respective projects, but the projects I looked through were all just empty repos.
And I'm a coder, most people won't click through on any of this.
I would say, you should have a mission statement / goals top center. Links to where the active dev is happening, and links to demos or videos of demos in action. And a latest updates, milestones, or something like this. Who is this being built for? Is it a product for other devs, to use these libs?
The libraries are not in those repos, yes. And we're working on lower-level libraries, so there's no demo possible.
I am working on more project documentation, so that we can at least describe the plans to outsiders.
Was it 7 months before getting a reply?
Hehe, no. When I started building there was no opensats. Only a dream of nostr business, that was based on corn, working for myself and saying fU to the man. I had finally launched it, took a lot longer to build the first parts to where it was working than I thought it would. When I saw opensats start and the first couple of cohorts get in I applied. It seems like they do a review every month or so of the applications.
oh. i guess i got rejected and never notified. i'll reapply.
Ah, that's lame, yeah keep pinging them, they sounded like they got overwhelmed there for a while.. now is probably good timing.
They don't just take every project that applies.
Lmk if either of you would like a proof reader for opensats applications.. I'm a good proof reader/editor π€
If you look at the lists you'll see it's almost every project that exists on nostr.. having a grant doesn't guarantee success, but a few hundred of them and that will likely mean some will succeed. Or it's an experiment that won't work. I've never seen it tried till now. I think it's strange when people shit talk opensats, the thing that brought to life all this stuff, but also, not surprising. Everyone should apply for one that wants to code in the open because the fund got more sats.
You're conflating projects with people. Some people have multiple projects that were funded, most people have none.
The costs for maintaining projects is high, so the projects that don't receive grants, or where grants have ended, just let the infrastructure contracts run out and abandon the repos. What we see leftover and heavily-marketed is grant stuff, but that doesn't mean that nothing else was created or that nobody is working on anything else.
And they don't just give out grants for whatever. They have specific themes and topics and they select projects that fit.
I don't know, I don't really spend time on seeing why a project dies, that seems entirely possible that projects after running out of a grant would not be successful if they have not somehow created a revenue stream. Open code never dies though. Even if no one picks up the project, it's that much more code to feed into the AI so the next devs can chatGPT their way to success. Opensource can never truly die or be useless once it is published.
Yeah, but that leads to a bunch of thin clients and simple webscripts. Low investment, so that if it doesn't catch on, you can just walk away without a major loss.
I guess I'm just kinda lost as to what your point is π mine is to defend what opensats is doing cause I think it's really cool and I saw what you said and thought maybe you hadn't seen the list of projects.
If you do the math, you'll see that the grants are not paid all that much. There is no secret cabal getting all the funds. (5 million / 100)
It's a good opportunity to work in opensource should anyone want to try. I encourage it. Don't be afraid of failure, and just go for it. A VC firm in silicon valley last I checked will only give you 50-80k and control your company from the start. There are very few jobs where you can be this open and work on this new of technology and try to bootstrap something.
I think also, it is an extremely difficult thing to do, given that grantees could easily get a job that pays far more and be stable and not have all the risks that come with making software that is trying to change the internet. So I applaud opensats for helping, I highly doubt nostr would have come this far without it.