Oddbean new post about login | logout Proof of concept: e-mail style subscriptions on Nostr Problem: I love reading some authors on e.g. @Habla News or @NostReport but I tend to miss their updates. Could I get a DM every time they post something? Or on a weekly basis? So I built a tiny ~20kb fully functional web component for publishers that: - scans publisher DM inbox for messages with "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" and builds a subscriptor list on the fly - sends out a message to the list with a custom message including an URL - checks sent DMs to warn if that link was already shared Is kind 4 the way to go? Or could we have a better construct for subs/unsubs, maybe using shared lists? Please share and let me know! https://video.nostr.build/23ac80e5beab3f5ca17fe469986a2c0a781a0b832becf48938178d656b179b4c.mov
@verbiricha @Tony @Gzuuus #nostrdesign @fiatjaf thoughts on the above?
I want to build it into Habla but without requiring the publisher to do anything, thought about using a public list for user subscriptions (could be pubkey or hashtag) and send them a DM whenever someone from the list publishes a new poast. Weekly digests sound great too, usually long form are low frequency so probably good to send one DM per publication, perhaps make it configurable?
Interesting so users have lists with "subscribed" publications, you'd need to query for all lists that contain publisher X, is this possible? DMs leak metadata but are still more private than public lists
Yup we can filter by kind and #p to get lists that contain a publisher.
This seems like a good approach, although it still presents some challenges, users create a list, kind30000, this list can have a special title, or a specific 'l' tag for example to make it easy to find. Then when someone wants to publish and send notification, it fetches all the lists where its pubkey is included and sends a dm to these users. Of course, for example, another approach could be client side, without the author who publishes having to do anything. It could be a client where users create these lists of people they follow and don't want to miss anything, this client could be designed for this purpose and focus on this. Another idea could be to create an npub for an application that creates lists of subscribers, and people can sign up to that list, the flow would be that users access this app to subscribe to some lists, these lists are published by the npub of the application (so that it is possible to sign up individually to a common list) and then the user who publishes can choose to send a message to everyone on the list. Just throwing out some ideas, however they could be further developed and polished. In any case, I think it's a great use case!🔥🔥
I don't understand why involve DMs at all in this. If the entire flow involves a client asking relays for events, why not just ask directly for the articles?
So you can be on any client and get notified without having to remember to go to that one client where you read your subscribed stuff. You could just do both. Get DMs but also check out your favorite subscribed content client. This is essentially substack.
Can’t say anything in regards of technical implementation, but I love the idea! Especially the fact that it’s not limited to Nostr clients/apps. What will the process be for regular websites to “realize” that someone is subscribed? Can readers manually send a DM to a specified Nostr address to receive notifications?
Why not make a client that just fetches the articles directly from people you want to subscribe to and displays them for you?
he messaging part to "subscribe" is not the friendliest UX imo, but will work for people who are determined to get updates. Ideally, you'd have a way to subscribe to author updates from the clients they are reading from (e.g I click "Subscribe to franzap" in Habla OR, a client that is dedicated to subscription management. This is a big idea that we need to make Substack alternatives work! First make subs work, then add payments and we've got ourselves an open substack.