Around 800 million people worldwide make less than $10 a month.

I earn about 10k sats a day through zaps.

Just wait till the world catches on, Nostr could lift so many out of poverty and oppression, keep building.

Men without LinkedIn built this.

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

My interest in Nostr has lost its spark. I think I’m done being curious about it.

I don’t know if it’s because I have a growing family I want to dedicate 100% of all that I have on them or Nostr and the internet in general have never really added any lasting value to my life… unless of course if it’s necessary for work.

This is my personal call to retreat from the digital life and live fully offline in the real. I’ve always known this time was coming and I believe that time has come.

I’ll drop by once in a while to see how some of you are doing. I’ll leave my Signal down people if you want to say hi. The people do make the place and there are people here I do cherish. You know who you are. ♥️

Be well and Godspeed!

I create, therefore I exist.

the act of creation is the only thing that justifies existence