Having loads of open-source client choices is exciting at first, but after a while I think you end up with fragmentation. It would probably be better to have a small number of more feature-rich clients with more collaboration between the teams and roadmaps that are less scattershot.
Discussion
It’s how the internet was built, wasn’t it?
Yes, and it’s why we had to go through a consolidation phase. We can do that here but there isn’t the kind of capital investment at this stage to attract talent and pay them for their work.
There can’t be coordination and consolidation without capital investment? Too many competing ideas and interests and the money would incentive people to follow a plan? But then I guess the problem becomes whose plan gets followed?
It’s a balancing act. You do want people working together but you also want explorers. This protocol is wide open for discovery of new experience and it’s great to have people explore. It also helps with the monotony of working on the same thing 24/7. Can’t forget devs are not machines - they get tired too.
Collaboration would definitely help though. It’s just less fun working on someone else’s thing than building the next exciting shining objects. In bootstrapped startups this is very common - jumping from one idea to the next and never brining the other to full life. It has pros and cons though. Sometimes you are working on a stupid thing and jumping frequently is good. Other times you jump too often to make the good thing great.
Some of this could be accomplished by funding the best projects and giving them the resources to work on them full time with larger teams, perhaps comprised of some of the independent contributors, but I get your point of how people don’t want to let go of their passion projects.
most devs that i've talked to don't really want to collaborate all that much. they want to build their own things and have full control over their own things, with others helping out from time to time. it's kind of the nature of the devs we have working in bitcoin and nostr :)
Very true, ive had my fair share of opensource pull request github commits closed because it wasnt good code or because it wasnt aligned with the project owner 😅 probably bad code …
Upwards and onwards 🤙
I dont think its the nature of devs working in bitcoin or nostr, but the nature of devs period haha.
IT'S BOTH.
without experimentation we'd miss building the non-obvious stuff
but nailing the execution of the obvious stuff is absolutely fundamental.