Nostr Web Client

I've had a LOT of conversations with people about Nostr, really people who are aware of Nostr but don't use it.

There are a few things that come up.

* General admiration for Nostr and how it does tons of interesting things in terms of tech. It's way more flexible than ATprotocol or ActivityPub.

* Frustration with the way user accounts / logins / keys work. It's very confusing if you're not somebody who already understands crypto. Mostly it's confusing because of how we talk about it. If we tell people, here's your magic user text, paste this in places and you'll be magically logged in, they love it. If we try and explain custody and wallets and keys and browser extensions and all the ways you can login with Nostr, their eyes glaze over.

* Not feeling like it's a place for them. Everybody is talking about Bitcoin and Nostr. Most folks don't care very much about the underlying tools or how payments work. They want to talk about their interests, surfing, food, travel, their friends. or ten million other things. They see Nostr as a bitcoin place. Most people have either no opinion or a negative opinion of bitcoin because somebody tried to evangelize it too hard.

* Zaps, folks love zaps. I've heard from board members and the executives of Bluesky that they want zaps. Folks don't like bitcoin and bitcoin content but they do want the functionality. The problem is when creators come to Nostr, they only get zaps for content that is about nostr or bitcoin. There's no good way to build and sustain themselves with other content.

* Algorithms - we all have a love hate relationship with algorithms. We say we don't want them, but we choose to use systems with algorithms. We have them in nostr with DVM's and it works. But it's not well integrated in to the apps and most feed services via DVM's are way too slow. The algorithm helps people be seen, grow an audience, find their people, keep being engaged. We built the proof of concept but didn't make it in to a good product.

These things that keep people from Nostr are fixable. What i'm going at with my podcast is to build a larger movement, Nostr is a solution, but people on Nostr aren't my intended audience. ;-D

Tim 3mo ago

The hard part is login.. telling them this is their magic whatever paste it in is a bad idea and not a habit we want to be teaching people. But some super easy way to onboard to nip-07 extension or something would be the key... I don't know how to make using an extension easier, but there must be a way.

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Discussion

JOE2o 3mo ago

Think of the minimum amount of time you need with a non-technical person to successfully impart what a public key is, and what a private key is, and what a signature is, and what an event is, and what a Chrome extension is, and what managing a Chrome extension entails, and so on.

And if you don't want to impart all that then just abstract it all away to username and password like atproto does.

There is no halfway option, really.

Tim 3mo ago

I do t think an extension is a hard sell, a large portion of people have already accepted adding ad blockers.

JOE2o 3mo ago

I think it's a pretty hard sell.

For extensions, people have to understand why they're installing them. For ad blockers that's pretty easy. No ads!

For event signers that's not easy at all. It is extremely hard to explain to someone new to this why they can't log in the way they log in to everything else on the internet and why they need this Chrome extension (and what it does) without losing that someone to a pair glazed-over eyes. And if they don't understand the basics of what the extension is then why are they going to install and use it? They won't. Or they will to please you and then never use it again.

That and pretty much everyone who uses social does so cross-device, and extensions in the end just get in the way of actual cross-device solutions.