I was homeschooling my son today. We were reading his science & reading book today. The book, "Nonfiction Reading Comprehension Science Grade 3" said, "Scientists learn things by asking questions."

This made me think. Over the past 3 years, we are constantly told to trust the science, but these people will not allow anyone to question the narrative. If "scientists learn things by asking questions" then they aren't scientists and/or they aren't learning anything. Science isn't science if you aren't allowed to question it and continue seeking the whole truth. Even in 3rd grade that is obvious.

#grownostr #science #homeschool

This is gold. Thanks for taking the time to write it all up!! Going to make a changes in Nostr.how to hopefully help others based on this feedback.

Where I'm coming from: software dev, comfortable with SSH keys, has been on Mastodon & several other ActivityPub platforms for years, remembers the days when "crypto" unambiguously referred to cryptography for security, tried SSB briefly, dabbled in IPFS a while ago but otherwise not involved in the crypto ecosystem or community at all.

Read through the docs at nostr.com. It was not immediately clear that a public key could be generated using a Nostr client. Confused by the contradiction between needing a private key on a client to be able to use it and being advised to avoid giving the private key to a client. Finally just picked an Android client (#amethyst) to mess around with it and see what happened.

Had to dig around for how to set up a profile. Surprised that it uploads to imgurl. No idea wtf NIP-05, LL, etc were. Dug around github & found the list of NIPs, saw that 05 was sort of like what AP servers do for user lookup but not really. Pondered where/whether i would implement it.

Looked at the global timeline & mostly saw crypto memes and that was about it.

Did a couple of test posts.

It wasn't clear from the documentation that copying the private key to another clients (which, again, it said not to do) would log me into the same profile. Found one of the browser extensions and tried #Coracle in a desktop, which at first couldn't find my profile until I looked up the list of relays in Amethyst and entered one of those in Coracle.

There are a lot of icons that aren't clear what they even do from a newbie perspective. I gather the lightning bolt has something to do with cryptocurrency? I think the extra icons appearing next to posts indicate which relays they've been seen on, but again that's not clear.

I still haven't found an explanation of what "proof" is needed for indicating a Twitter or Mastodon profile, or why the concept exists for social networks but not for, say, your website url.

I also found the AP/Nostr bridge at (iirc) mostr.pub, but didn't get a sense from the home page of how I would go about linking a Mastodon account to it.

Overall, it really feels like the docs and the clients I've tried so far are assuming a certain domain-specific knowledge and not providing any of the connective tissue. Kind of like the "missing stair" analogy except about how to do something instead of who to avoid.

Question for recently joined new users: what was your signup experience like? Impression? And what app/client are you using?