aa
Exodia38
aa902c06496dd51e22521ed77aa9f8b1edcaab329b439990e369411f6b490e71
Replying to Avatar Cyph3rp9nk

Poor bearscobar

Would You vote for giant douche or turd sandwich?

Don't worry, in 5 years it will be pretty easy

Look at me, I'm the chieftain now

Replying to Avatar santos

⚡️Forumstr: Empowering Community with Nostr Microapps 💜

There was once a time where the internet seemed like a free place to me. I was able to live so freely. I was 12 years old; I lived in a rough neighborhood and I was a total nerd, so I didn’t really fit in very well. Though, there were these incredible places I could spend my time where I did fit in and my curiosities were satisfied as a teenager. This place was the internet.

On the internet, there were many federated communities ran on forum software like phpBB and vBulletin. These forums were for specific communities, my interests ranged from counter strike: source, private game servers, world of warcraft, warez, and hacking forums. They all taught me so much. The first of which I became a contributing member of was RaGEZONE: https://forum.ragezone.com

The forums were magical in a way. Locally, at school outside the classroom I would get into fights daily due to bullying and me standing up for myself. While in the classroom, most of the time the teachers at school would be screaming at us, fearful of being challenged or asked difficult questions, tyrants, or just completely not noteworthy. I think out of all my years of going to public school, I had two great teachers that actually dramatically impacted me in a positive way.

On the forums, contrary to school, had their own distinct culture that made it really fun to participate in and learn from. For example, I was a humble kid from Phoenix, AZ but the forum allowed me to interact with many folks from the UK and all over Europe, all while learning about design of signatures using tools like Adobe Photoshop, develop personality over the internet with avatars and written prose, then hacking together SQL databases and PHP web apps that can interact with private game servers for games such as Mu Online, World of Warcraft, Maple Story, and much more.

For fun, you could head to the WoW forums to gossip and watch big personalities on a server clash. It made the world in-game actually feel somewhat real like a small town, which was really cool. **It felt like true belongingness and a real community**. Occasionally, you would get really toxic types, but we all embraced them and knew that was their personality. They would become somewhat infamous on the server and epic when you would run across them in-game. It made for entertaining drama.

There was little moderation and community control, which really allowed you to get to know someone and for them to still have presence. There were plugins that the server admin of the forum could install, with one of the prominent uses as reputation, join date and awards to allow for status and reputation. Because of this, you could have a positive or negative reputation because a user of a forum could + / - your rep of points, with a limit on the amount of times you could do so and the amount of rep you, yourself had the amount of rep points vary based on how much positive or negative reputation points you had accrued. You could also find some very cool effects with usernames that were visible on these forums.

Lots of cliques would emerge from this and even allow for a deeper culture within the forum to emerge amongst its members, along with some great perks such as getting a new status when you hit 1,000+ posts, been a member longer than 5 years, get a special rank from an admin of the server, or something of that nature, which could grant you access to restricted access forums.

Again, this created an even deeper sense of community and strong retention.

Sadly, over-time, these forums became less and less active as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and prominently Reddit became more popular. These forums slowly died out as people slowly consolidated to these massive social media hubs. People stopped visiting, content became curated rather than organic from the community members themselves, & social media founders and managers gained a significant amount of power due to being able to censor user’s posts whether they’re true or not, choose ultimately who becomes a moderator, or banning users out right, limiting the freeness of the internet.

Previously, it was fine because if you got banned from a forum, you could easily register a new account and start over again under a new alias or move to a new forum. It was a learning opportunity, especially for folks like myself. With centralized services like Reddit and Facebook, it became really easily to prevent users from registering again, detecting them, censoring them with content moderators, staff, and AI without a chance for growth in one’s personality or social skills.

Reputation really didn’t exist beyond basic forms like karma and now you were posting under your personal identity, which is tied directly to your family members. It becomes more restrictive to post freely what you think, crack jokes, not take sides, or interact with people from faraway places that you would not normally chat with.

The posts become flooded with memes and other mindless things rather than new and interesting topics to explore, debate ideas, and find other who shares your same interests.

Introduce other new problems that have previously been outlined by nostriches and the protocol creator himself, fiatjaf. For example, when a user gets banned, they lose everything as you cannot take your following with you, and have no backups of your data (for most folks). It’s possible to get shadow banned without even knowing it for political beliefs, getting cancelled for something you posted a decade ago, ads, and prioritized content based on proprietary algorithms.

I think this presents a new opportunity to solve with nostr: **Forumstr**. Forums over nostr. We can rebuild the internet that was in my opinion great and solve a lot of the old problems that existed with these forums.

We can bring micro applications such as forumstr into any experience. A gaming portal of HTML5 where users can show off their nostr badges, carry their achievements with them, or perhaps a developer platform that wants a forum to discuss things and retain knowledge the knowledge.

My vision:

- New Events

- Events are super flexible allowing for iterative development starting simple and gradually building out more sophisticated functionality.

- Build their own aggregated “Reddit” with the forums and communities they most care about.

- Just like a user can create an event for preferred relays, they can do the same for preferred forums.

- Can use events to create subscriptions to specific forums and notify based on threads or new posts or certain from authors. Similar to RSS.

- Using Zaps we can prioritize content based on a combination of factors:

- Earn from your creations and support other high signal creators.

- Scarce and limited money rather than hidden algorithms we don’t have any insight into how they work to prioritize content

- Ignore ads because you can use any forum app of your choosing, all of which follows the same spec more or less, allowing for multiple monetization models to be experimented with.

- Activity data such as the latest post, number of posts, etc.

- Aggregated zaps by user on the platform to determine reputation, along with a points event that can be positive or negative.

- Followings can be brought with them since the user can set their preferred relay, so even if they are banned from a forum, they can still be found and be seen in other nostr forum apps. This will allow putting the user in control of who they care to interact with and see. Possibly their own curated block or mute lists.

- Badges

- We can use this to allow users to take their reputation with them and proudly display it on their profile if they so choose on multiple platforms.

- Use badges + encrypted messages to grant access to special forums.

- Access management such as enabling content moderators for specific forums.

- Relays

- Relays can be federated by forum community owner, or if they are advanced, they can send the events to the relays they wish to participate with for redundancy / resiliency and the user can save a copy of all the data to their own relay if they so choose.

- Make data accessible

- Nostr relays can charge a fee for access of data priced in satoshis allowing for the fetching of data as a subscription (monthly / yearly), pay-per-use using LNURL withdrawals so the user don’t incur mental transaction costs, life-time membership for a single payment as a member, or allow data to be accessed for free. Sophisticated users could even send every event they fetch and create to their own relay so they can have all their data widely accessible. Nostr relay business models can also be experimented with to see what works for what user personas.

- Enable multiple forum apps to be built all following the same spec

- This is the beauty of open networks and protocols. Apps like Apollo will never run into the Reddit issue ever again. They can start building and testing things right now while running their own relay and connecting to other relays without concern since there isn’t a central party making pricing decisions that can destroy your business.

Obviously, that is a lot of work to get there. I have started small and humble with a PoC implementation of forums over nostr. It just proves the event structure works with basic functionality. You can try it out at forumstr.lol.

As I mentioned before, it just a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation meaning that there are basic creating and reading functionality related to forums, threads, and comments. It’s enough to prove the event structure for forums, threads, and comments, and that this can work. We can iteratively add support for multiple relays, zaps, amongst the other features I mention above.

This is a free and open source project; I welcome your feedback and PRs:

https://github.com/zantoshi/forumstr

My goal is to make the internet feel fun and free again, inspire curiosity and action, and new communities possible everywhere.

Much love,

Santos, some guy on the internet.

P.S. john_d, if you're still out there somewhere, thanks for believing in a kid and helping me learn hacky PHP <3.

Good luck with this project. I'm happy with this because I like forums much more than the big platforms. I also grew a lot with them and were more natural for someone like me

For me, highlights and food. I'm starting to like communities and the go.yondar.me client

Consider this: the path not yet taken, does it truly exist if we never tread upon its promise? Here we stand, on the precipice of choice, our toes grazing the edge of "what if." It's here that we often falter, isn't it? The daunting expanse of the unknown stretching before us, whispering tales of risk and reward.

Yet, what if that whisper is the very wind meant to fill our sails? Imagine for a moment that every doubt is a shadow cast by the luminous light of potential we each hold. It flickers, robust and eager, within the caverns of our spirit, doesn't it? Why then do we shroud it with the veil of hesitation?

In the grand scheme of our conscious existence, our threads are vibrant, yearning to weave patterns of extraordinary texture and color. It's not the prowess of the extraordinary that creates masterpieces, but rather the courage of the ordinary hand, daring to move with purpose and passion. What could we weave if we chose to dance with possibility, to step in rhythm with our aspirations?

The journey, as they say, begins with a single step. Yet, what they often omit is the symphony of steps that follow, each a note in the melody of progress. How will your symphony sound? Will it be a cacophony of doubts or a harmony of actions, each step a deliberate chord in the music of your making?

We should not be content with the horizon we've inherited but instead chase a horizon of our own making. In the pursuit of the extraordinary, we find the most profound truth: that in the very act of striving, we transcend the ordinary.

As you stand at your starting line, know this: the race is not to the swift but to those who keep running. Run, then, not from fear but towards the reality of your greatest self. In that pursuit lies the essence of all that we are, all that we can be. There are no limits, only the ones we accept.

Shall we then accept the challenge? Shall we redefine the possible? Take that step, the journey awaits, and so does your story—the story of no limits, only beginnings.

#artstr #writer #grownostr #thenostr #nostr #plebchain

I recently realized that the purpose of division of labor is to expand the frontiers of human exploration. All these things that you say resonate with that thought 😁

Hello, npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w. Is it possible in yondar to repost the locations my follows (or even my network) have posted, all at once?

#asknostr

Replying to Avatar semisol

Nostr has a funding problem. Developers and infrastructure is severely underfunded and reliant on flawed economic models, and this could pose a risk to the future of Nostr as a protocol.

To understand it, we need to understand what resources are needed to make Nostr work, how they aren't funded properly and what could happen next.

# The costs of what makes Nostr work

Nostr works because:

1. Developers build clients on it

2. There is infrastructure to support clients

If there are no developers, there are no clients. If there is no infrastructure, clients have no purpose.

## The costs of developing a client, and the reliance on developers

Clients require time to develop the client, and money to run infrastructure for it.

Without developers, there would be no clients, and no Nostr.

Developers have lives and need to make money somehow in exchange for the time they spend. Developing a client is a significant cost, even for small ones (assuming 1 hr/day, no infrastructure costs and the average salary of a software developer, **$1500**) and needs to be covered somehow.

We have multiple models, all of which have large downsides:

1. Donations/V4V/Bounties:

This model suffers from the problem that a minority pays for the majority, which will lead to the majority demanding exclusive benefits for their money or otherwise cutting off funding since they have no reason to pay.

This also suffers from the fact that donations are unreliable.

2. Grants from OpenSats and similar non-profits:

These suffer from the same problems as the donations model, but also suffer from the following problems:

- the managers of these non-profits may have views not aligned with their donors, leading to misfunding.

- that such projects are mostly stopgaps that add additional complexity to a direct donation model.

3. Paywalled features:

It is very hard to find the balance between paywalling enough features to make money, and discouraging too many users from using the client. There may not even be such a sweet spot.

4. Cuts:

It is extremely hard to balance these so that people don't complain, and it is likely that there will be forks of FOSS clients that remove these features by some users.

5. Paid clients:

People do not want to spend a lot on services that they expect to be free or cheap, and spending $5/month on this client, $10/month on that client, so on won't scale, even though that is way less than the actual value they are getting.

6. Ads:

Ads are usually underpaying and mostly make money for the ad companies instead of the client developers. Ads are also an invasion of privacy and may not be well received by some users.

7. VC funding:

VCs put profit above protocol health, which may accelerate some issues that I will discuss later. They also may disincentivize the development of some apps (uncensored social media for example) for pushing their own agenda.

Even if we find some good way to fund clients, it doesn't end there...

## The cost of infrastructure

There are multiple types of infrastructure for Nostr, such as relays, services like Noswhere's search relay, push notifications, etc. All of these cost money to operate, and are the other half of what make Nostr work.

These have even more limited funding options, which have even bigger downsides:

1. Client funding:

Clients already struggle on funding as I discussed in the previous section. This would mean infrastructure is even more underfunded.

2. User payments:

Users do not understand the details and importance of infrastructure, and have no reason to fund it. Making this problem worse, infrastructure providers can falsely advertise their services, diverting money away from infrastructure that is higher quality and should be funded. This is already happening.

3. Grants from OpenSats and similar non-profits (*relays only*):

Again, these suffer from problems specified in the last section about grants. These entities will likely want the highest value from their donations, therefore leading them to encouraging a few big relays than many medium sized ones. Since relays are more important infrastructure, and they could have more control, these entities can also exert more control over the network.

4. Data harvesting and selling:

This would discourage people from using their providers, but this is likely going to happen to some extent. The issue is that it would not generate sufficient revenue for the amount of users it will drive away.

Both infrastructure and developers being underfunded can lead to issues that may kill the protocol, which I'll discuss in the next section.

# The risks of improper funding

## 1. The protocol fizzles out and dies without reaching critical mass

This is one of the less likely options since there will probably be people developing for the sake of it, but is likely. With client developers being underfunded and infrastructure shutting down, Nostr would become smaller and worse to use until it completely fizzled out except maybe a few people.

## 2. The enshittification of Nostr

This is the most likely outcome, and the worst one. As Nostr continues developing, developers and infrastructure developers will want to maximize revenue, so they will begin by making good products to attract users at a loss.

After they have a sufficiently large user base, they would slowly erode bridges to their competitors, only leaving what is required so that their users won't complain.

After this stage, it is likely that clients will start merging with other ones to make larger "everything" apps and kill the last bridges, turning them into proprietary walled gardens, returning us to where we are today.

# How do we fix this?

I have no idea. Please share your opinions if you do :)

Sorry, I Will explain you why 😅

If I have problems trying to consistently fund a relay, I just make a fund with some bitcoins in it and spend them in a convergent series of polynomial decay. With polinomial decay(e.g x^-2) your funds are depleted polynomially BUT also your expenditure decays polynomially. If we assume the value of bitcoin grows exponentially, then both (my remaining funds and my expenditure in some point of time) grow exponentially in real world value because the l'hopital rule. If my expenditure and my hodling grow exponentially at the same time, it means funding infrastructure or devs is not a real problem in terms of magnitude of wealth (maybe it's more an organizational problem🤷)

Replying to Avatar semisol

Nostr has a funding problem. Developers and infrastructure is severely underfunded and reliant on flawed economic models, and this could pose a risk to the future of Nostr as a protocol.

To understand it, we need to understand what resources are needed to make Nostr work, how they aren't funded properly and what could happen next.

# The costs of what makes Nostr work

Nostr works because:

1. Developers build clients on it

2. There is infrastructure to support clients

If there are no developers, there are no clients. If there is no infrastructure, clients have no purpose.

## The costs of developing a client, and the reliance on developers

Clients require time to develop the client, and money to run infrastructure for it.

Without developers, there would be no clients, and no Nostr.

Developers have lives and need to make money somehow in exchange for the time they spend. Developing a client is a significant cost, even for small ones (assuming 1 hr/day, no infrastructure costs and the average salary of a software developer, **$1500**) and needs to be covered somehow.

We have multiple models, all of which have large downsides:

1. Donations/V4V/Bounties:

This model suffers from the problem that a minority pays for the majority, which will lead to the majority demanding exclusive benefits for their money or otherwise cutting off funding since they have no reason to pay.

This also suffers from the fact that donations are unreliable.

2. Grants from OpenSats and similar non-profits:

These suffer from the same problems as the donations model, but also suffer from the following problems:

- the managers of these non-profits may have views not aligned with their donors, leading to misfunding.

- that such projects are mostly stopgaps that add additional complexity to a direct donation model.

3. Paywalled features:

It is very hard to find the balance between paywalling enough features to make money, and discouraging too many users from using the client. There may not even be such a sweet spot.

4. Cuts:

It is extremely hard to balance these so that people don't complain, and it is likely that there will be forks of FOSS clients that remove these features by some users.

5. Paid clients:

People do not want to spend a lot on services that they expect to be free or cheap, and spending $5/month on this client, $10/month on that client, so on won't scale, even though that is way less than the actual value they are getting.

6. Ads:

Ads are usually underpaying and mostly make money for the ad companies instead of the client developers. Ads are also an invasion of privacy and may not be well received by some users.

7. VC funding:

VCs put profit above protocol health, which may accelerate some issues that I will discuss later. They also may disincentivize the development of some apps (uncensored social media for example) for pushing their own agenda.

Even if we find some good way to fund clients, it doesn't end there...

## The cost of infrastructure

There are multiple types of infrastructure for Nostr, such as relays, services like Noswhere's search relay, push notifications, etc. All of these cost money to operate, and are the other half of what make Nostr work.

These have even more limited funding options, which have even bigger downsides:

1. Client funding:

Clients already struggle on funding as I discussed in the previous section. This would mean infrastructure is even more underfunded.

2. User payments:

Users do not understand the details and importance of infrastructure, and have no reason to fund it. Making this problem worse, infrastructure providers can falsely advertise their services, diverting money away from infrastructure that is higher quality and should be funded. This is already happening.

3. Grants from OpenSats and similar non-profits (*relays only*):

Again, these suffer from problems specified in the last section about grants. These entities will likely want the highest value from their donations, therefore leading them to encouraging a few big relays than many medium sized ones. Since relays are more important infrastructure, and they could have more control, these entities can also exert more control over the network.

4. Data harvesting and selling:

This would discourage people from using their providers, but this is likely going to happen to some extent. The issue is that it would not generate sufficient revenue for the amount of users it will drive away.

Both infrastructure and developers being underfunded can lead to issues that may kill the protocol, which I'll discuss in the next section.

# The risks of improper funding

## 1. The protocol fizzles out and dies without reaching critical mass

This is one of the less likely options since there will probably be people developing for the sake of it, but is likely. With client developers being underfunded and infrastructure shutting down, Nostr would become smaller and worse to use until it completely fizzled out except maybe a few people.

## 2. The enshittification of Nostr

This is the most likely outcome, and the worst one. As Nostr continues developing, developers and infrastructure developers will want to maximize revenue, so they will begin by making good products to attract users at a loss.

After they have a sufficiently large user base, they would slowly erode bridges to their competitors, only leaving what is required so that their users won't complain.

After this stage, it is likely that clients will start merging with other ones to make larger "everything" apps and kill the last bridges, turning them into proprietary walled gardens, returning us to where we are today.

# How do we fix this?

I have no idea. Please share your opinions if you do :)

I don't see the things you describe as a problem at all and I will explain You why?

I call this phenomenon abortion of maturity. You try to run before crawling and you end up like a disturbing abortion.

Well, I like to see cartoons and anime, play games and do math all the way around. I'm thinking that combination probably made me almost immune to the news 😂