the chemicals man
they get into the blood stream
there are these recordings of interviews with Donald Trump from the 1980s where he actually seems like a reasonable and eloquent guy but then he grew the yellow hair and the orange skin
i can't help but hear Donald Trump's voice in my when i read "billion dollars" 😂
"one billion dollars" isn't even a real number
i mean, come on
really?
"billion"
one bajillion dollars isn't a credible sum
over here on our side of the pond, 1000 million is called a "milliard"
once designed this map of the Fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon) that i put up on a webshop i was running. i sold a few of them and people sent me photos of putting it in their homes and stuff. it was amazing. i had to do it all manually too. i was accepting submissions, using spreadsheets, going to the library to trace out old naval maps and all sorts of stuff.
i'm very much NOT here for the Bitcoins and very MUCH here to post about life and to code stuff. i feel i'm getting a lot of encouragement to make stuff for the Nostrverse.
i'm not drowning in sats but if i get a nice or clever reply, it's getting a zap and a repost.
i wouldn't know how to do that without making another tool that checks it.
i ran a merch webshop once and designed this for a mouse pad
i have a tendency to be the 1 in the 90-9-1 rule when i begin to actively use microblogging service such as Twitter, Mastodon or Nostr. among the 1% who post the most frequently.
the 90-9-1 rule says that for any service that's based on user content, 90% lurk, 9% contribute a little and 1% contribute the most.
if 2 million is the total user count, that gives 20k for the 1%, which roughly agrees with what i saw.
yeah, so, what i did was i wrote a program that listened in on relay.damus.io and ran it over the course of hours/days and each time it saw a user or any follow lists, it added those to an index. that relay doesn't represent the entire network and hours/days doesn't represent all users, but i think i got a pretty good idea of the most active parts of it.
if you're on Nostr and are using it successfully, you're probably quite patient and willing to wrangle glitchy technology to get it working properly. accepting of things that aren't working quite right without some TLC.
based on what i've seen trying to index Nostr, there's tens of thousands of accounts on here, at the very least. someone used the phrase "if Nostr is successful" a bit earlier today, but i'd argue that tens of thousands of users, for such an immature product, is pretty damned good already.
for those unfamiliar with the Nostr web tools i recently dropped:
NRCheck: see which relays a note made it to: https://nrcheck.tigerville.no
Nosy: find the top relays your follows/followers are using: https://nosy.tigerville.no
i'm starting to think maybe i should just drop the part where i run queries against relays to gather data because they're very slow. might make more sense to just listen for events, and given enough time, people will update their profiles, change their relays, etc, and the database will be more and more complete just from listening in.
ahhh, you know, i might want to split this Nostr indexing crawler into several microservices. one service would just be busy slurping up pubkeys and another would fire off queries to index them.
but tbh, it would probably save a fair bit of time if the owner of a big relay just let me replicate their database, lol
while the base protocol of Nostr is simple enough to implement, it's asynchronous, distributed and flexible nature makes it challenging in other ways.
distributed = you don't know where
asynchronous = you don't know when
flexible = you don't know what
still working on the user/relay indexer and i'm coming to realise that "complete" and "up to date" are pretty hard to pinpoint in the Nostr network. no single relay really knows if what it's got is either of those things, so neither do the clients.
things that are nearly impossible to debug in the Nostr protocol: you sent a badly formed message and the only error reporting mechanism is NOTICE messages and they're just plain text and don't refer back to the message in question. which is a challenge, since the protocol is asynchronous.