Teach me something empowering that can improve the quality of my life.

Go!

Writing a sci fi manuscript, and continuing to fine tune it, made me do a ton of extra research on current trends in AI, biotech, material science, and VR. Like a big refresh.

Not because the text focuses in detail on this tech (it doesn’t), but rather so that I have a general idea of what technologies are likely to come before or after other ones, to create what seems (at least to me) a reasonably coherent future world (with one big unrealistic extra thing I threw in there for fun).

There are a lot of different path dependencies or “alternate timelines” for how the world could look in say 2030, 2040, 2050, and so on. So no sci fi vision can be said to fully predict things. And for example, we don’t fault the movie Blade Runner for not accurately predicting what 2019 would be like in 1982.

But my goal is to be “well-considered.” Plausible. Or at least, plausible in the places where I am intending to be the most plausible.

For example if I read a space opera set 500 years in the future and AI is nowhere to be found, or minimally so, I am distracted by this unless given a plausible explanation. The explanation of “the author didn’t think about it” isn’t good enough, at least for something that big.

What technologies do you expect to surprise to the upside or downside in the next few decades?

What wild controversial feature would you like to see in a nostr client?

Most Nostr developers have never worked at a company, university, church, or other large organisation, so they don't know what software they could build, to appeal to an entity that might pay them for their work, even if the code base is FOSS.

And the ones that do have this experience, rarely gained it as software developers, so their experience is too shallow, to architect such a system.

We're probably launching #Alexandria v0.1.0 this month (so keeping to our Road Map yay!), and we started in July, working part-time. Although, it's a whole platform, with multiple sysadmins and a data analyst, and a new SDK, and stuff, and multiple new NUDs, and not just a list microclient, or something.

But still, building it is way harder than building the original Kind 01 clients because there are so many "Basic NIPs", now, and they're complex. You have to build all of them and then add your own twist on top. Have to really have a tight story board, unless you're a lone wolf, and lone wolf development has become onerous.

And there's no real market for microclients because it's much easier to add one more feature to a bigger app, than to create a new app containing that feature. The friction of moving end users from one app to another is too high. Making a market for plug-ins or extensions, is better, so we're concentrating on that.

We realized that, early on, after I did some market research, and decided we need to Go Big Or Go Home. We're sticking to enterprise-level development, where we have a strategic advantage because we're professionals and used to handling larger projects.

Nostr is supposed to be easy. Most clients are done in a couple months, max. Maybe that's the problem. Because nostr is easy, devs give up way too early.

But IMO, one year is a HUGE amount of dev time for any app, even outside of nostr.

Was I wrong?

I always assumed that specialty clients should be able to easily outperform Amethyst on the quality of the features related to their specialty. Users would gradually move away from Amethyst as more and more specialty clients move forward. This culminates with a slow death of Amethyst, but towards a more exciting and decentralized future for Nostr. I have accepted this fate since the early days of the super app project.

This assumption was based on the fact that our development team would simply not have the resources to dedicate the same level of attention and support to every single specialty within Amethyst.

It has been one year and I am sad to report that I have been proven wrong over and over again.

For some reason, developing specialty clients is harder than developing the same features inside of Amethyst.

And that is a loss for decentralization.

Web of Trust feels a lot like Proof of Stake 🧐

Trust is like social capital: the more trusted you are, the more influence you have, which can leave new users stuck in the shadows. Their less trusted (but often valuable!) opinions barely get noticed.

Trust works as a resource—it’s built and extended through explicit endorsements (like Alice following Bob). But here’s the catch: the early adopters hold all the cards. If you weren’t here first, your influence depends on whether the big players decide to trust you. And trust? It’s scarce, especially the kind that matters most—follows from users with high social capital. These endorsements aren’t handed out easily.

The system has a built-in centralization problem 😬. Popular users with a ton of followers tend to grow their influence exponentially, while newcomers struggle to get noticed. People are incentivized to follow others they trust to protect their reputation, which just makes the rich get richer in terms of trust.

And let’s talk about power imbalance 🔥. A follow from Alice, who’s been on Nostr for two years and climbed her way to the top, is a big deal. Compare that to a follow from Charlie, who just signed up and posted a humble #introduction . Alice’s social capital makes her endorsement hit way harder 🥊.

To top it off, there’s some “pre-mining” going on. New users often automatically follow certain developers, making them super-trusted by default. It’s like trust farming for the OGs, giving them a massive head start over everyone else.

Not your keys. Not your stuff.

🥸

My presumption is my events posted are mine. My keys are my proof. Any client worth its salt won't try to undermine that ownership.

#brainfart: Would it be possible to embed in other devices an image shared on nostr in such a away that it is like a #stockphoto which users can zap as #value4value. The original event containing the photo is being referenced and thus making it possible to zap the original creator...

me: “my kingdom for a good longform nostr editor”

me: “my kingdom for a good longform nostr editor”

I see people and whole countries freaking out about low birth rates and trying to come up with ways to get women to have more babies… Why don’t you just make it not a shitty deal for women?

Instead of trying to shame women into giving up all that they are to produce children, why don’t we make the world friendlier to parents and families? A why not get fathers more involved? This way women can have children and still participate in the world! That might actually work.

But if you just keep asking women to give up all of their humanity besides this one part of it, if you ask them to give up all of their ambitions in life for children… they are going to keep opting out.

You don't understand how insidious open-borders propaganda is, until you realize that _it's an attempt to remove all differentiating traits from humans_. They call this "strengthening individuality by removing nationality" (hello, newspeak), but what makes humans individual is their particular collection of traits, and nationality (and ethnicity, religion, etc. -- nationality is just the first domino they want to topple) is one of those.

![Newspeak]()

Humans are not blank slates. Like DNA or physiognomy, our personalities are differing jumbles of cultural "letters". Each person selects consciously and subconsciously from amongst these letters, adding to or rejecting them, amplifying or suppressing them, twisting or combining them, building on top of them... and that's what makes you into You.

Open borders is an attempt to reduce the number of cultural letters you can build your "You" out of. If you take away the word "German", I am not liberated. There is simply one less adjective, with which I can describe myself. You have merely eradicated information, crippled language, and reduced my choices. I can then no longer define myself according to "German things", but I can also no longer define myself in opposition to German things.

## Enter the Borg

![Borg Queen]()

We are easier to control and brainwash and persecute, if we are centralized and homogenized. As if the entire world were one, big prison and we were all forced to undergo the same education, wear the same clothes, follow the same rules, eat the same foods, enjoy the same entertainment, live the same lifestyle, share the same diseases and cures, enjoy the same lockdowns, join in the same cancel culture, fight the same wars.

That is what globalization brings. That is the end game of Open Borders:

* No more cultural evolution or revolution.

* Genes, but no memes.

* You can go everywhere, but everywhere is the same, so you just stay home.

* You can meet people from all over, but they are all the same, so you just don't bother.

* One mass of humanity, that can be easily molded and manipulated.

GM Nostr 🌞

How many of you have bucket lists of things you want to do in life? How many of you are making progress on those items?

I want concrete examples of stuff on your list and how you're working towards it!

I'll share a bunch of mine a bit later...

I think we care about authorship/identity because we care about reputation/trustworthiness. The original organizer of good ideas will be who people seek out when they have new questions. People who copy (including AIs) will only be able to answer with summaries of already answered questions.