What's a lightning prism?

I like habla.news and the other apps using nip-23 & kind:30023. What I’m thinking though is if you start posting that then you’ll lose most readers who only display the unformatted kind:3 events.

I think one solution would be to post a linked kind:3 post with a short summary and linking to the longer form one in a couple of ways. One with the hash reference, one with an http:// link in the body to a nostr viewer.

Sometimes you don’t want the long form post to be in people’s feeds, but often you do.

We’re going to be exploring options regarding this with nos.social but at this point it’s just ideas and speculation.

Nostr: An Open Super App

The super app is something like WeChat, a single app where you do everything, book a car service, talk to your friends, make purchases online or in person. It's a monolithic do everything app and it's very popular, especially in China.

Silicon Valley tends to make apps that are nothing like the super app. It's because western tech companies don't work anything like Chinese internet companies. Western tech tends to rely on a huge base of open source software but then create these vertically integrated silos of apps that do one thing well with elegant design and not many options. When an app does try to do lots of things we hate it, just look at MS Word.

The vertical integration is narrow. The Chinese super app does everything broadly, but it's not so pretty. SV tends to stagnate, companies are afraid to compete with themselves so they get stuck at a local maximum. Our culture of product development find something that works, and sticks with it. That's why in the west, big companies buy the upstarts. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, you quit and create a new startup. Most likely you'll fail, but you might do well enough that a big company will you buy you out, or you'll do so well you replace the incumbents.

The last western super app was AOL. And we celebrated its death. Since then it's just been a dream. It was Elon Musk's goal when he bought twitter, it was the story that SBF sold to investors as he pumped up FTX. An app to rule them all.

We don't make a super app because our culture, politics, and economic system don't work like that. We hated being stuck on AOL. Silicon Valley's real super app is the web itself, the browser, linux, smart phones, etc... They're more open, less controlled, more competitive. Our legal system punishes companies that become dominate to eliminate monopolies. Out business culture causes big tech companies to be safe and consistent. Google had the lead in AI yet it was OpenAI that launched ChatGPT in a chaotic barely coordinated 6 week sprint.

Even after AOL, there was a time when silicon valley was moving towards its model of a more open super app. Facebook launched their platform, twitter's api enabled a tremendous app ecosystem. But both companies chose to lock things down. They did it because their only economic model was based on advertising and required their control. The web was slowly enclosed from an open chaotic ecosystem to a platform which monitors users behavior and captured their attention to sell to advertisers.

I think open social protocols we're seeing emerge today, and in particular nostr, could be our super app. Instead a single app that does everything. It's a common social protocol where many apps can be created and run. We've created a system that reflects a set of values around autonomy, openness, decentralization, permissionless participation, privacy, encryption, and yes cryptocurrencies. Without the financial part, we can't make the ecosystem thrive.

We can make a super app, but not one, rather a family of apps, a style of apps that let there be a choices on a common platform. Smart clients, dumb relays, and just enough cryptography to keep it all functioning.

When we build this new open super app protocol, we'll need to create all the things that existed on the centralized social media apps, but also the giant closed super apps. The old model was vertically integrated. Lots of services and businesses were needed to keep it running but they were all controlled by a single company, hidden off from the public. The advertising marketplace, the content moderation, the CDN for fast media delivery, the transcoders for making images and video the right size, the algorithms for deciding what to show you or who you should connect with, the bug tracking, customer support, business development team, legal, compliance, public relations.

We don't like how the vertically integrated ecosystem worked, it didn't provide us agency and autonomy. But most importantly, we didn't have the space to innovate and create. In this new open system, we still need all those services provided by the big companies is needed somehow. We need to meet those same needs, but in new ways.

Users see the frontend of an app, the UX, their experience as a user. But there is so much more, middleware, backend, business operations. All of that will need to be created in a new open ecosystem.

To take one example, moderation, so we don't have to see a constant flow of ISIS beheading videos, some that we can handle with algorithms, but that's also how big social does it today. Even with the best AI minds in the world, a lot slips through. People need to be able to make judgements, and figure out edge cases. I don't like the choices that Facebook, TIkTok, or Elon's Twitter makes, but it doesn't mean we won't need to make those choices. Now we can make it a service where we pay people who do that social labor. And we can choose who we want to do it, making sure their values are alined. We can use a stead stream of payments to all of these services.

Nostr can be the protocol upon which we build an open super app ecosystem which contains multitudes.

🤨 why isn’t Nostr good enough for you?

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, there were a lot of capital controls, lending restrictions, securities restrictions, etc. And it was for two different but intertwined reasons.

One obvious reason was that, among countries involved in trade wars or shooting wars, they wanted to reduce capital flows to the enemy.

A second reason was that, due to the war, sovereign debts became so high relative to GDP that they had to inflate away the debt, which was a form of default. It wasn't just 6102; it was a broad range of controls. Carmen Reinhart described it well as “creating a captive audience” in an

IMF Working paper:

“High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or belowmarket real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative ½ of the time during 1945–1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12—country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945–1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies.”

-IMF Working Paper No. 2015/007

Unfortunately, as most here know, both conditions are once again present in the 2020s. The US/Europe vs Russia/China contest is providing a useful excuse for governments to crack down on privacy, p2p exchange, money transfer, etc. Meanwhile, western governments have a similar sovereign debt problem that ultimately necessitates inflating the debt away.

Some of this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 stuff is just targeting scammy crypto companies and things like that. And the SEC enforcement actions are also going after crypto securities fraud and so forth. For bitcoiners, those things are not particularly relevant.

But under the surface, the bigger risk is all of the ongoing pressure on privacy, p2p, and the free flow of capital, including tighter bank restrictions and debanking.

One of Satoshi's disciples hid the Bitcoin Whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" in every Mac for the world to find out.

What’s our next move?

plebstr corrupts contact lists and breaks accounts in damus. I will have to add a fix for this.

Hi, we dont want to open source the code for now. And we have been always transparent about it

#[3]​ can you not destroy content on contact lists ? Other clients still use that.

I don't always write PRO/CONS about Shamir-secret-sharing, but when I do, I start with the CONS

settings view was triggering my ocd so I cleaned it up 🧹