Canât help but wonder where development here would be if the community here viewed cousin protocols like Bluesky as inspiration, not opposition.
Bluesky rolling out a great new feature should be motivation to find a way to nostrfy it, but it instead seems to be a guarantee that nostr will never have it. Feeds, gifs, self-moderation, and app passwords all come to mind.
But we already have all those things?
nostr:npub1gz7uczyg3kvdf8grlwfmllguc3kehrcc05yvnlypkjklptgql5kqa0zkqj yes but not in a way thatâs easy to use and makes sense to the users. And we donât have easy ways to discover them either. Our DVM feeds are slow and only work in a couple of apps. We donât have good follower suggestions that go beyond showing the most popular people on Nostr.
Itâs not about making sure the feature exists, but making sure itâs usable.
the ease of use of bsky has a cost.
The ease of use and blueskyâs trade offs are very often not related. Decentralization and usability are not and do not have to be mutually exclusive.
One of the internet's greatest centralizing pressures has always been good UX. It's true they aren't mutually exclusive. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that being able to have both is A) very new B) still very hard
Of course. To say one isnât to concede the other. I think the major trade offs mostly happen at the protocol layer, which much of those issues are being solved very well, itâs simply about extending them up to those who can use them properly.
Again nsec bunker like tools are a great example. Literally all of the tools are there, itâs just never been made intuitive and the edges havenât been cleaned up. And if that doesnât happen then thereâs no demand from clients to support it. Circular problem.
I think itâs less of a problem of trade offs for a lot of these, and more a problem of people excited to build a tool that they can use, but not interested in building it for someone who doesnât understand anything about it. Devs I think get lost in chasing the next awesome thing, rather than doing the slow, difficult process of making the last thing built really streamlined, intuitive, and reliable.
Not saying I am not guilty of the same. Itâs like building a house but never painting it or putting up trim. Itâs just the annoying part of building because itâs slower and it feels like progress isnât moving at all. But it makes all the difference in the world from the userâs perspective.
I also donât think we should depend on the devs to do this. I think we need âanother layerâ of developers, who work with this stuff and try to clean it up for the regular user.
Part of the direction Iâm trying to take our team is related to that. Hoping I can help, but I also know how much harder it is to get it done vs *wanting* to make it happen.
Very well said. Totally agree
you build your own house, and it takes longer than buying a house, and you don't paint it for a good long while and maybe people don't understand the type of person that would live in such a house.
but you're the user of the house. it serves your needs. you can see a lot of people from your windows, and that is fun and exciting.
and then when you have time you can paint it and filigree the edges., or not.
even better, the house that Nostr built has blueprints, that anyone can look at and copy and use, without restriction.
i honestly don't give many fucks about usability beyond this sort of use, as a tool for people that need a Nostr.
if you don't like the state of the tool, or you so very much want it to be better for your needs, great. build your house.
this isn't particularly aimed at you, but i've recognized, or just recently discovered, a trend where some Nostr folks look to a desired future when we'll have more users, more content, more zaps, better users, better content, better UX, better steaks, more steaks, etc.
today i realized exactly how much the nak cli does. it's not hard to use, it's just typing into a program i already have on my computer.
If you build a cool feature but ignore its usability, you might have well not wasted time on the feature.
This is a very seriously under appreciated reality in both #Bitcoin and #Nostr generally.
(Not saying there arenât tons of great tools, but it does seem to be a broadly present issue)
Yea I gotcha, and don't disagree. But I think generally when it's a case of "we both have a feature, but blueskys UX is much better" that the better UX can almost always be attributing to a level of centralization that bluesky employs which Nostr devs/users take a much harder line on. Might hurt adoption in the short term, but hopefully pays off long term
Because there is no such thing as a good follower suggestion.
Good follower for who? Based on what, my other follows? Base on ai reading their content? The whole premise is silly.
Twitter/x recommends are absolute trash. There is no need for them on nostr.
As someone who has tried very hard on multiple occasions to have secondary/sub keys and using nsec bunker to let others post with limited permissions to my key⌠I can confidently say itâs all trash. And I donât mean that like nobody worked hard to build something cool, because I know people did, but itâs practically all unusable.
Totally fair. It's all tradeoffs. Getting the UX right while preserving our core principles is reallllllly difficult.
As a comparison, âapp passwordsâ on Bluesky have been in the app longer than feeds, gifs, videos, and any moderation tools other than mute.
They are easy to create, revokable, single use passwords for use on third party apps and tools. The interface is stupidly simple, and it dramatically increases security of your main password for those that choose to use it.
No, first principles thinking is more important
If they implement something and itâs overwhelmingly successful then it should be considered. Copying a feature for no real reason is a great way to build technical debt and fade into obscurity.
