Let’s dissect this: What is the “town square” in the first place? It’s a place to interact with your community. To exchange ideas, argue, laugh, shout, make allies, friends, and enemies. It’s a place where we express our social human nature. While not a formal institution, like a congress or parliament, it is an important place to build consensus and steer the ship of society.
Discussion
So then what’s the “global town square”? It almost doesn’t even make sense as a concept. I suppose it refers to the global nature of the internet community. But it doesn’t seem to perform the same function. In its current incarnation (twitter, instagram, etc), the global town square is a place to score dopamine hits. It’s a place to indulge our basest desires: scantily clad bodies, videos of violence, excoriating people who hold contrary opinion, cat videos.
If nostr becomes the platform for this global town square, will it be so different? Yes, the current algos make things worse by optimizing for keeping your attention. But they also sift through the noise to yield some signal. And at the end of the day, any algo to bring you the “top” or “trending” content is going to serve you lowest common denominator bullshit. And that’s my word of caution. When you expose your mind to this you are granting the weakest points of your human psychology free reign.
So I say fuck the “global town square”. That’s not what we should be building on nostr.
Instead, we should be building a grand library surrounded by hundreds of thousands of local town squares.
I like your ideas. Is there a model or concept for building the local town squares on nostr?
I’m not a networking minded person, so maybe I’m about to say something dumb. But I feel like changing the way we use relays would be a step toward this.
Rather than aggregating the growing set of relays and treating them like a distributed twitter database, building tools that allow people to explore little community hubs of relays is how I picture it.