IT’S ALL I KNOW SHUT UP DAVE

BEEF.

Hey nostriches,

BOLT 12: yay or nay? Why?

That’s insane.

Nah, that's just you. I'm still torrenting today, & more.

Friends, I want a low-data text-only nostr client. Does it exist?

nostr is still mainly used alongside twitter. in the best rare case, as a replacement. and only because people are running away from something about twitter they don't like.

there is nothing that people want to run to nostr for yet. zaps were promising, but bitcoin is still a hurdle (one that primal is doing the best at overcoming), and it's doubtful lightning could scale to a massive adoption moment.

nostr needs a feature or experience that's unique and sets it apart. i *think* that is the ecosystem of microapps over the long term...but it's definitely not in the short term. and that might be ok.

for twitter the initial draw was the simplicity and weirdness of 140 characters (we started with zero network effect, facebook had it all...that's built over time). later it became the conversation which lead to the "public square" (owned by a private corporation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). and then as it grew, it had a single point of control/failure people could attack.

nostr doesn't have to worry about that last bit. it's an incredible feature. but not one the average person cares about (no matter how much they yell "FREE SPEECH!"...if people actually cared about free speech, bitcoin and nostr would be all they used...they don't).

all this to say, we're not doomed. but what we think is the killer feature isn't right now. who's going to discover the one that is?

My husband recently observed to me how important conditioning is for people to accept things as normal.

He said that when he first began reading my articles, he was like “Okay but I mean, fiat currency censorship isn’t really *that bad* as you describe”. But then in the years that followed, he was like “oh shit, it actually is. The fact that we have to ask permission to access significant amounts of our own money at banks and say what we will do with it is fucking insane. Why is this normal now?”

In Europe especially but also elsewhere, it’s increasingly common to make cash transactions illegal above a certain threshold value. Above that value, you have to go through centralized, surveilled, corporate/government systems, or you’re doing an illegal transaction.

That seems absolutely insane if introduced out of nowhere, but instead it has been introduced gradually through conditioning and so people are like, “well I don’t use cash anyway so that’s okay I guess, in fact I don’t even know that’s a law now”.

The same is generally true for social media. Filtering communications through centralized pipes is actually a radical position but it’s increasingly the new normal. In fact, the centralization of banking and communications in the hands of the state were two of their ten steps proposed in the Communist Manifesto.