I am starting to think the whole "Nostr is simple and easy" is just a fallacy. It's easy to develop a shitty client. It's very hard to develop a good one that people actually want to use.
Discussion
That's exactly my experience.
Especially for mobile with restricted resources.
This is definitely true, but it's still simple to do simple stuff like make a bot or embed a custom naïve feed in your HTML website, or make a relay browser client like https://jumble.social/, I don't know, stuff like that. But still it's nice that it's possible to make a shitty client very fast and grow from there.
I also think that making a Twitter-like client is the hardest task, while a NIP-29 client is much easier -- but still, making it really good, anything, will require a ton of work, even a stupid note-taking app is very hard to do well.
Maybe the culture being focused on simplicity and not quality makes devs think everything should be easy give up way too early. 🤷
It's hard to expand off a shitty base, tho. Shitty little clients tend to be disposable code because something larger requires architecture and engineering. Even if you are working alone and don't write anything down, you're still going to need to fall back to patterns and etc.
A small, shitty client usually just stays that way.
This is true for software in general
Development is also just one piece of the pie
Usually in software we think everything is hard. We fight our way through massive APIs all the time. Nostr is refreshing from that point of view. But everything else is still hard.
Nostr may be hard, but what other option is there? ActivityPub is harder and Bluesky is nearly impossible.
true
This is the key.
Proof of concept. Easy.
Quality execution. Deceptively hard.
Also, I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t have a lot of appetite to try/use lots of different apps. They’re mostly happy with one thing that does a passable job at everything they want. You’ve more than nailed that bar with Amethyst.
Yo nostr:npub1yvgrrzf4dnmu30qfhw95x87ruu0g2kpv3a64h8hpvqsre8qeuspsgd6pv9 easy to develop a shitty client. 😂
Sounds exactly like PHP and Javascript to me 🤓