Oddbean

i do think there's some risk in nostr reinventing too many wheels, especially if there are already interoperable protocols for things but clearly an everything protocol is a much better outcome for a free society than a centralized everything app

the risk is complication and fragmentation, turning both users and developers away centralized platforms provide an easy to go solution, a popular interoperable protocol can provide a good alternative but if there's too many that defeats the purpose

We’re a long way away from “too many” options. Even then, it’s just more options for people. Users will gravitate towards better clients so devs will have to get smart fast or risk getting left behind. The beautiful thing about nostr is that when one client wins, everyone wins. An improvement in use case A can mean an automatic improvement in clients that make use of that use case. The same goes for pretty much all development effort.

i agree let's just not get too insular (nostr versus "the rest"), i've seen this happen before with otherwise open protocols like retroshare and to some extent, fediverse, it's important to consider what is already been invented and work towards integration instead of rolling your own (even if that seems easier) anyhow let's hope for the best 🤷‍♀️

Seems to me anyway it's not nostr that matters, its the idea of an open protocol for social media per se. This is a difference to bitcoin, which really has to succeed because you couldn't plausibly launch / bootstrap an alternative decentralized money now - it's a one-shot game. But it doesn't matter if nostr is superceded by some other open protocol. As long as something exists with those properties all the free world will inevitably end up using it. (Though it would be nice if the entirety of future human discourse would turn out to originate from a bunch of shitposting btc maxis 😂)