I feel like I spent a lot of my life looking for that place on the internet where I could really spend time with who I chose, I could send or receive money freely, where our networks were actually ours, where we could share files and media without censorship, and I could keep my entire digital life connected and accessible without some huge centralized corporation controlling or watching everything I did.

There were many attempts and half solutions along the way. They were all promising, but always failed to cross some critical barrier, or died due to lack of motivation or funding.

I feel like after all that time I have not only found it, but there are actually multiple solutions that genuinely work, all emerging at the same time.

• I live on a bitcoin standard, I can zap people whenever I want from my own personal node that’s currently 180 miles away and it’s as fast and responsive as any other app I use. 
• I use a fully P2P and encrypted chat app more than basically any other for work and personal chat. 
• I’m working on an application that will finally make sending and receiving files as simple, intuitive, and as private as it always should have been. And I’m really just building it for me.
• I spend most of my social time on #Nostr with no complicated setup or constant technical issues to fight with. Everyday it just works and I post my GMs for all the other autists to see. 
• The UI and experience of these is basically what I would expect with most paid products today, in fact a lot of “traditional” products or those I pay for are annoying as shit. 
• I own my profile and contact list. 
• I have a stupid simple full backup of everything I’ve posted. The number of times I’ve been gatekept by a service or app I use so I couldn’t take my shit off of it is almost unbelievable.
• I can ⚡️zap people freely all day and I don’t even think about it. Nothing more than a tap and sats are delivered instantly. 
• I use genuine digital, sound, global money without third parties, no inflation, no censorship, and that no state on earth controls. I jump over to a fiat integrated service built by bitcoiners just to get a debit card and be able to spend fiat during the month. The dollar system is literally just at the edge of my monetary world, it is no longer the center.

Things that I’ve wanted for most of my life are actually here and I’m actually using them. And on top of this, we’ve only really just begun to round the corners, simplify the onboarding, and unravel everything we can accomplish now that these tools exist for us.

And lastly, for the first time, it feels like I can’t be rugged from it all! There were so many promising options in the past that just got bought, repurposed, re-centralized, and “corporatized.” But it feels like the ecosystem now has too many open source tools, too much diversity, too many builders, more than I’ve seen with anything yet before it, such that it seems like that risk is more behind us than in front. 

My son is gonna get to grow up in a better world, and it’s because of what everyone here has devoted themselves to and is building. 

Time is a crazy thing. It always seemed like a distant dream back while I was discovering this entirely different vision of the future in the weird corners of the internet. I really only had my brother nostr:npub1ajv7m32k0cpgzha32qszsh304qusjvwwmavus0ttktzldms4xzusuftppj to share it with and make it feel like it was something that could be possible. That one day there’d be a huge community that wanted to build everything open source, open access, censorship resistant, decentralized, and private tools… I wondered if it was just me being naive, or if maybe one day people would start to see why it mattered and how great it could all be.

From the POV of that naive kid years ago, we are already here. And from the POV I have today, it’s going to get so much better.

This is what I’m thankful for. 🫡 https://i.nostr.build/Y0hveyRTPu2YM1B1.jpg