Oddbean

I listened to this interview as a podcast, talking to Jay Graber about bluesky. Again, a lot of what’s said about bluesky also applies to nostr when advocating for a protocol. Notice the difference in focus on censorship and monetization. We can’t just be claiming those are the two things that make nostr important. https://theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview

The biggest problem with Blue Sky is that noone wants to build on top of yet another Silicon Valley social media creation. If I'm going that route, I'll just pick way more adopted protocol / team. One thing I do agree though is that moderation can vastly improve experience... would be nice to make that easier on Nostr.

I think we can implement a composable moderation system similar to bluesky, where you can choose moderators or operate without any. The default should be some reasonable level of labeling and guardrails. Users should be allowed to run with no moderation or just with their network. Those just don’t work great for new users, nor a bunch of other communities who would greatly benifit from Nostr. Freespeech doesn’t mean you’ve got the freedom to force others to listen to you. ;-D

Easy packaging hasn’t arrived yet on Nostr. Could be a bundle of setup (onboarding) tools, moderation, infra (relays, file hosting & storage) etc. This becomes more pronounced with video content. For the end-user, it should be as easy as making a centralised social media account. The difference might be in the payment model (no-ads (subscription) / ads). If the composable service elements can be bought separately there could be even hosting companies offering these for more advanced uses and small-businesses but Wordpress.com type consumer offering is a more likely path. An interesting idea, how to replicate the Mastodon instance in Nostr? The community would mainly interact within its instance (private relays) but with moderation could ”federate”.

Nostr’s value prop today, as is, is neither moderation, nor making money for any of the nostr apps. Bluesky doesn’t have (as far as I can tell) 100 -1000 apps built by 100 - 1000 devs interoperating, as nostr does today. Is nostr interoperability chaotic, broken at times - 100%. The question to ask Bluesky’s CEO is how much VC money is needed to attract a vibrant dev ecosystem such as nostrs? Will these devs stick around post VC subsidy? The question for us is how many nostr devs do you see should nostr hit 5MM users?