Oddbean

Obligatory contrarian Lightning Maxi take coming in hot... Nostr's roots are as an iteration on how GUN was used in ShockWallet and Lightning Pages, as a means to have a web-friendly overlay network to connect Lightning to WebApps This continues to the primary usecase for Nostr today even as a leaner and more flexible successor to GUN. Users are funneled through the Lightning ecosystem for connecting LN to WebApps: Zap Signaling, NWC, kind 21000, accessing sat monetized services, and and more, is why any users are here to begin with. Heck, even these notes are about Lightning. Without the network effect of Lightning as a native payments layer, Nostr its just another combination of websockets and json. Anything that it's capable of is only in context of it making better Lightning Apps, because key-based identities, webservers, and json aren't otherwise novel.

Not very familiar with SSB but im assuming it doesn't use web relays, that's the key feature inherited from our use of GUN Enabling apps that work in any browser and solve the networking issue is and ultimately what enables distribution where lightning can't reach.. keys and data only matter where they can be delivered to

I appreciate the contrarian take. I don’t have as much background on the full history of nostr — so thanks for contributing that. I wrote what I did because some people look at nostr as tribalist around bitcoiners and I just wanted to say that the beauty to me is that it’s a different layer of technology that’s not closely coupled to a cryptocurrency belief — at least not today. However, I don’t think the incentives of nostr will work long term without internet native money. At some point relays need to get compensated for the resources they contribute. Bitcoin is the only reasonable way to do this, imo. I also don’t think advertising-based business models will work given the protocol structure, so again, we need bitcoin to help mediate the value exchange among people who create/consume on the protocol.

Yep the death of advertising is my thesis in lightning.video, the incentives of users paying for hosting are a micro level are much better.. nostr as the overlay for that transaction metadata is going to reshape the Internet

yup, we’ve all gotta be the customers! Have you explored recommendations in the video context? seems like a needlessly polarizing topic. I suspect it’ll be important to have something like that before video will become a mainstream usecase on nostr.

Kinda, I think the first page you see (discover) when you land there was a waste of time for us... we did it because it's what people expected to see when visiting a video site not because it adds any real value. The overwhelming majority of our traffic is direct links to content or channel pages. I plan on replacing it with a landing page that better explains the value prop of the site. My long range thoughts on the direction of discovery is that ultimately everyone is a curator, who you follow should ultimately dictates what you discover, and that apps will support bring your own algorithms that recommend stuff from your extended social graph. This won't be possible in a performant/scalable way with existing nostr clients that directly talk to the relays unfortunately. I'm hoping we'll get time to work on a indexer with reproducible results that would enable it... Once we do we'll inject it into LVa and finally get that fully Nostrfied