Oddbean

The only thing we don’t know, and I am not trying to be negative or make judgments. But the Damus team could be working on features users don’t care about, and not delivering on features they need. I’m not saying they are miss managing, what I am try to say this is that all of this very very new. Alignment between the dev team and what the users want is probably so ambiguous makes development very hard. This clarity only comes with identifying very super freaking clearly who your users are. Creating a user persona, and serving them first. Developing for “the people” is near damn impossible at this stage.

I appreciate your post. I think users funding development solves a great deal of this concern. Especially if a lot of the income cycles monthly. If developers aren’t serving the needs of their users, then they will see that funding dry up. I’ve also had direct interactions with the entire team a few times. I’ve attended a dev call, submitted a very badly done patch, and reported bugs a few times to the team. During that process, I’ve found each and every one of them to be open, responsive, professional, patient, and kind. I know not everyone has had the opportunity to have that experience, so I thought id share mine with you as some anecdotal evidence that this is a good team trying to steward what they’ve been given in as good a way as they can. There are very few projects or teams that I give blanket endorsements to like this (indeed, I am one of the angry, critical, kermudgeonly purple cats) but team #damus has my support. I am not terribly worried about changes in the future, because while Damus is the flagship on iOS right now, we have alternatives if things go bad (and those apps are *good*) and Damus is open source under a permissive license. If I donate money and find out later I no longer support the decisions made by the team, I can move or fork. I consider supporting app developers of FOSS apps for Nostr very low risk because I always have access to the code I helped fund. As far as running out of money, Damus, Inc is doing a lot more than they started out doing. There are two clients (at least) in devlopment, two developers being paid, travel, and tons of other code Will contributes to the whole community. I follow him on GitHub - I see the repos going up and commits happening. Again, a lot of this is based on experiences I know non-devs may not have had the opportunity to have with the team, so I thought id share. If I missed your point, or if I didn’t touch on anything, let me know. It’s late where I am. 😵‍💫

Really appreciate sharing your experience with the team. While I don’t know any of them personally, I can easily sense their values and ethics in all of their interactions. I now live on Damus. So I might be biased as well. I like your idea of user funded features. I even mentioned this to Will and other nostr devs before. I think it’s a great way to provide the teams with predictability and help them plan. I don’t believe it will pay the bills, but it will sure help with direction. 💜💜

I totally agree with your final assessment. I believe the road to a sovereign Damus will be paved with several streams of revenue (donors, subs, merch, purple) that could in aggregate support it. I’m reminded of streamers. That reminds me. I was going to suggest to Will he hosts some coding streams working on Damus. People like to zap dev streams. 😃