Nostr Web Client

I'm not sure I should write down these thoughts right now while I'm not sure about them, but if you are reading this apparently I did.

I think nostr may already be doomed for two reasons. And as a result of that, if I conclude as such, it would make sense to start working on a successor protocol. I've been taking some notes about what we should change if we started over, but that's the extent of it, I'm not working on a successor protocol. I'm only working on nostr. So don't misinterpret this note, which just represents some thoughts I've been having.

Reason one is the misaligned incentives of note copying. The incentives are to copy your notes to every relay you can, blast them out everywhere, to get more reach. That incentive doesn't go away until and unless all the clients do the outbox model. But they don't have an incentive to change, and there are people who don't give a fuck about fixing this and argue against fixing it and argue for note copying, and there is no way in a free society to make them care. So we can never fix this, and nostr will always be centralized in practice and never what it could have been. That means nostr is doomed and unfixable and we should make sure to start differently next time so this doesn't happen again.

Reason two is that the seed culture of nostr was far too monolithic: bitcoiners. What a culture develops into probably depends on how diverse its seed was. It's quite hard to get people onto nostr unless they are at least very bitcoin tolerant. Most people (yes, I think most) are put off by so much bitcoin promotion and related posts. Certainly people can follow anybody they want, and make their own independent cultures, perhaps even on a disjoint set of relays. But this isn't likely to happen due to the law of large numbers - there are far more ways for them to encounter and interact with the nest of bitcoiners then to not encounter and interact with them.

These are thoughts I'm entirely unsure about. Maybe I'm wrong in both cases. These are my worries.

Nice and Kind Vic 1y ago 💬 2

I think the technical shortcomings of Nostr can be overcome, but not without some growing pains. The design from the get go was inefficient at the data layer, so its no surprise that this bleeds into how events are exchanged to finally be seen by someone. Ultimately people who publish something want as many eyes on it as they can get, unless they are tollgating access at the outset (but even still, the preference is for everyone to know about it). This alone means things like blastr are going to be a benefit for them. On the flip side, people want to be fed quality (signal over noise) in the most efficient manner. I want less posts of the same, and I want one or few places to go to get it. I think some of this is only enhanced by paid services were all parties have skin in the game, vs just the relay operators footing the cost, and client devs giving up their labor for free (no, v4v does not work to cover labor costs).

I also agree on the seed culture to an extent. Nostr is still overly weighted to Bitcoin, and its repetitive NPC style postings, and is even plagued by Bitcoin centric features. To date, there are still no zapless polls available in Nostr, cutting out a good mechanism to get quick tallies of peoples choices, and the seemingly forced usage of Bitcoin for relays and services that charge fees can also be a turnoff to those more used to a world where they can pay with a credit card on a recurring basis. On topics, I want to see more of the variety of posts about peoples hobbies and interests, events they've attended or trips taken etc but this still is in short supply compared to Bitcoin and Memes which handidly dominate nostr discourse.

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Discussion

Joshua 1y ago

Zapless polls would be a nice feature. I don't see fiat for services being a viable option because the infrastructural overhead required to accept fiat payments. Perhaps if clients or wallets included options to buy sats on lightning we could improve the onboarding UX for normies.

I believe Primal uses Strike on the back-end of the built-in wallet. If that is correct, couldn't the option to purchase sats via debit card be a relatively straightforward add?

Moss 1y ago

I know your concern. I'm sure most people would worry about the second point.

The first point is not a problem, it is just that you are the faster client developer. Other developers are catching up.

The second point I think is the unique advantage of Nostr. I've talked to most of my friends and the people who haven't been censored and the people who hold shitcoins don't care about decentralized censorship-resistant social networks at all. Only Bitcoin holders pay attention. Bitcoin talent is Nostr's strongest foundation. We are now building censorship resistant networks that are easy to use. Just like Bitcoin in 2009, very few people paid attention at first. We're just getting started, but we're already growing a lot faster than Bitcoin.

I think there's something else we should be worried about. How can we create a client on Nostr's decentralized network that is different, but better, simpler, and more engaging than traditional social networks? That's the hard part, and that's one of the things Nostr should be breaking through. The average user does not choose Nostr because it is censor-resistant. That's what we need to work on.