Oddbean

I don't think the problem is lack of UX research. At least not from my perspective. Taking Blowater as an example, my biggest problem is that there are always performance problems before the UX problem. For example, I know the onboard is bad, but to fix onboard, I need to fix some other things first. I simply don't have enough manpower to work on top level UX and bottom level infrastructure at the same time. Adding UX research or designing only extends the todo list. But my problem is about checking off todo items. One UI/UX designer can produce 10 weeks of work for a developer in a week.

Most OpenSats grants are to solo developers. But I feel it's time for some projects to have 2-3 full-time developers to work on it or at least that's my goal. Even though there are 3 developers working on Blowater, I am still the only full-time person doing 80%+ of the total work. Therefore, I believe that OpenSats can't be the only source of funding for Nostr. Different projects, be it client or not, have to find their funding independently. OpenSats is just a good starting point. Having 50 projects going on is fun, similar to genetic selection, but the late game needs to be 5-10 really good projects that cover 95% of the known use cases. Of course, we will always find new use cases and new projects will be born.

I think a great designer can come up with a solution based on the limitations and available developer resources for the features. Of course if it’s not straightforward and requires a lot of testing + basic things take long and you’re solo, designer can also help prioritize things for the user experience first.

Is that what nostrdesign was recently set to be doing? There surely can be a generic approach because all nostr apps share the same onboarding etc. that comes from the protocol fundamentals. But on the other side, if we were to fund/design/build the best in class client including UX that’s possible on nostr, with a great design system - all other devs will want to at least copy the way it works. Can open the design files and a design system for other to copy and adapt. The work can include User journey maps, basic design heuristics in general and examples from best in class apps so solo devs are better equipped not to make obvious mistakes that hurt UX

What if we redesigned nostr.com primarily for non devs? People would arrive on that page to understand in the simplest terms what nostr is and get to the CTA which will be Get started or something like that Then we can guide them through the account creation (keys), basically do the onboarding once and on nostr - don’t delegate that to all the clients to figure themselves The next question will be about lightning wallet and how it works which is a different issue in terms of understanding, but it’s not required to get into nostr and can be done later also Then we can share a list of clients that work with the platforms the person is using and tell them how to sign up there, maybe a few tips or notes So in summary that experience can save a lot of dev time, be the single source of truth and a place to get started with nostr and then get directed somewhere with lots of clients and apps built with nostr, in a visual way, almost like an app store with similar screenshot images for people to get how it looks etc before they try it This is something a solo designer can conceptualize even, myself included.

I’d need help for sure from someone understanding nostr better. But overall that may be the radical choice needed to push things further, one possible solution I could think of. When there is no marketing people need to make a lot more effort to learn how it works and get in. The way world currently is, that’s already pushing few people to learn about nostr, unless something really bad happens, we could try a somewhat centralized approach for marketing/onboarding.

Something scary I can also imagine: imagine Meta coming to nostr, with the resources they have, they can build the best, most convenient client by far from what we have currently and which will work on all platforms. This way they could control the most users of nostr because most will choose that app because of marketing, convenience etc. But on the background they could still run ads and get every piece of data they can from nostr… is that something possible?

Technically totally possible. Nostr is open and any entity can exploit its data. Economically Meta may not have the incentive at this point. Therefore, the task for us Nostr devs is to build several really good clients with a strong enough user base before big tech realizes.

It is indeed hard. Because Nostr is a rare opportunity for developers to work on their own. Many developers are simply here to hack and have fun. A few are working on it with an entrepreneur ambition and efficient execution. But still, the current capittal utilization of Nostr, or simply OpenSats, is much higher than any VC. The 5M is not fully spent yet. No VC can support such a wide range of projects with just 5M. Nostr is not a single app where as Bluesky, as a single app, raised 8M in its seed. Therefore, it's not an apples to apples comparison. Most Nostr projects, be it a client or server, receives less than 0.05M funding. 160X less money! As far as I know, the whole Nostr ecosystem only has 6M so far, that is 1M to primal and 5M to OpenSats for 20+ projects.

Gossip would not have come so far so fast if we had to rely on pull requests to a library maintained by a different author. We've had to fork several upstream projects as well (egui, speedy) because it would be far too difficult to get our changes upstream. I think as things have settled down, the calculation has changed. But now the problem is merging or switching libraries is a huge undertaking with no benefit to the end-user.