Oddbean new post about login | logout Just being real, I wouldn't keep developing in this sort of environment. I'd just bounce. I've considered developing on Nostr but this concerns me. I simply won't do it.
The problem with that is that protocols have a network effect. I can't walk away and write my own protocol, nobody will use it. We have to work together, as hard as it is sometimes. And that is why I spent a week writing a custom JSON parser, even though the whole time I was thinking "if nostr was a binary protocol I wouldn't have to do this shit." But I have to do this shit, I know I have to do this shit, and I do it anyways. Then I see other people without a care in the world pissing on this and pissing on that, and it enrages me. Sorry, I'm human.
If only #Nostr hadn't gone with #JSON
With JSON, with WebSockets, with Bitcoin fanboyism, with specs on GitHub, with a lot of other things that actually hurt more than help.
Can't blame them for being fans of the best money ever created. Also, it's still really young. People forget that
"Best money ever created"? This is an perfect example of the fanboyism I was talking about. And no, being a fan is not the same a being a fanboy. Your "best money ever created" is traceable, slow, expensive, energy hungry, poorly scalable and non-quantum-resistant. Almost every blockchain created afterwards mitigates at least _some_ of these issues, while Bitcoin couldn't deal with any of them even after multiple hardforks and format changes. LN is a workaround, not a solution, and it doesn't address all of these issues either, just adding another layer of complexity on top. Besides, 2+ competing and incompatible LN implementations don't help mass adoption either. Why first create problems on your own and then heroically overcome them? No blockchain is ideal (IOTA was close to that but they dropped WOTS in favor of ECC), but almost every choice is better than Bitcoin in this or that aspect. I'd go with Monero if we're talking privacy-oriented environment here. But the broader question is: why even tie Nostr to the quirks of a specific blockchain, unless, of course, the notes are distributed directly on that blockchain? That would eliminate the need in separate relays either: blockchain nodes would be the relays.
You can do it, but you have to sort of stick to the lowest, most-basic concepts. As soon as something gets more topic-specific or detailed, expect it to change rapidly and/or go off on some tangent. The problem seems to be that active product developers own the repo, so they use it like a place to dump their product docs (so they change with every change to their implementation), instead of as a place to specifiy overarching concepts that everyone can agree on. We've learned to basically ignore the repo. 🤷♀️ I don't know if they're even aware of any devs outside of their little ingroup, anyway.
But Nostr is also very young. I think it's perhaps been adopted much faster than it should have. That is, in my opinion, how tech will be moving forward. 2-3 years is the new 10 years. It is important that developers start getting serious about Dev standard operating procedure in general if we ever want to see real freedom in our lifetimes. The stakes are higher than games now. End philosophy rant.