Yeah it'd never work as a toggle, would have to be a forced limit from the start, with the whole network culture emerging from it. Without a text-only culture a text-only mode is kinda meaningless. Fun thought experiment though.
Discussion
Would definitely be a cool client. There was a terminal client at one point that was similar to this
If a text-only 'side nostr' emerged, and a super fun and quirky text-only culture emerged with it, then I'd be all for it. Text-only solves so many problems nostr has right now.
Thanks, Oddbean is a good name. These things only kind of work if you have the whole text-only culture around them though. Stacker news works cause it has a text-only culture (with the odd gif). Same for reddit comments in communities that have turned off media in comments, which is most (media can only be in the thing that people are commenting on). You gotta force it. Here there's too much media sharing for a text-only culture to take root, so when you strip out the media here a lot of notes don't make sense anymore.