Nostr Web Client

Always UX first, for a product. You shouldn't even be thinking about the tech stack, during the initial design phase.

1. Figure out, what you want to do.

2. Figure out, how to do it.

I feel increasingly like the Nostr ecosystem is sort of crumbling under the weight of devs doing this backward. They have a Nostr hammer and just go around, hammering things, hoping it might be a nail.

Figure out where you want to place the painting, first. Figure out if you'll need a nail to hang it. _Then_ bring out the hammer... or a drill or tape or carve out a shelf, or whatnot.

This requires you to have a real product vision, tho. You have to focus on "display the painting", not "build with Nostr". Which means you need at least one person on the team who is obsessed with the idea of displaying paintings.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Cameri🐦‍🔥 11mo ago

I agree with you.

I think Primal and Damus are perfect examples of two products that are built UX-first and technology-first mindsets, respectively.

You can tell Primal is all about UX, the interface is gorgeus and intuitive. For all we know their backend could be a horrible spaguetti mess and we nobody would know or care. They are willing to make sacrifices in terms of technology choices (e.g. using centralized servers) but they try and make up for that in other ways like open sourcing some of it. Pragmatic users will find Primal a better choice, but for those with a strong ideological stance using Primal may leave them feeling… dirty. If people wan’t a feature you can bet the Primal team is listening and will make it happen, eventually.

Damus family of products on the other hand, built by the prolific William Casarin and team, have a focus on performance and don’t make compromises in terms of the protocol, censorship resistance, and other idelogical stances held by the devs. Their roadmap is laid with the features they themselves want. This means some features won’t see the light of day because they aren’t worth pursuing (in their view) or would jeopardize the integrity of their software. "GIFs" and "badges" straight to /dev/null.

None are wrong, IMO, they just cater to different kinds of users.

Using the wrong software may make people feel alienatd, frustrated, and disappointed though, so instead of trying to change the devs people should just change the software. At least on Nostr there’s plenty of options.

jb55 11mo ago

instead of trying to constantly point this out all the time we are changing our focus to just promoting damus to technical users. I want to build tech for the people who appreciate nostr core values. this is still a large untapped market, and will allow us to focus on building value for those users instead of trying to compete with centralized features which won't be possible after awhile.

John 11mo ago

I just wish there was more high-quality content. X's data is large, but it's also full of low-quality content. Technical users will also like it and it can also reflect the value. But how can the distribution guarantee quality?

jb55 11mo ago

I think this is too focused on the global-microblogging aspect of nostr. technical users will appreciate other aspects, such as the ability to run your own uncensorable community with a large set of compatible tools. We can purple pill way more people this way.

mattaroo 11mo ago

Touché. Primal is addressing the centralized version of nostr.