Oddbean new post about login | logout "<thing> doesn't scale" is one of the dumbest things you can say to any new idea. Everything scales. If there are users using it, humans will find ways to scale it. Scaling issues are always the best problems to have. Now, if no one uses your thing though.. then it really won't scale. But not because it can't.
scaling issues just means that innovation needs to happen. this is what gets devs dick's hard. they have problems to solve. devs love problems. 🤣
That's why devs like printer software
there’s a great concept of extreme pmf introduced by todd jackson. when you have satisfaction, the growth engine is within reach, but it still needs a good efficiency model. maybe it’s a bit diff with foss, as time is less of a factor than when you’re backed by venture capital, but it still matters. thanks for the post, we definitely need more product-oriented conversations!
and that's why i'ma try to implement something down the line where people had that reason for it.
“Do things that don’t scale” actually is a good piece of traditional Silicon Valley startup advice k think we should consider more. Nothing is perfect to start. You need to get it out there, see if folks are interested, and iterate based on customer feedback. You have to start somewhere, and can’t wait forever for it to be “perfect”.
Protocols != Businesses A business that has lots of demand can buy its way out by raising money and directing lots of resources towards solving the problem. It also has the benefit of typically controlling all the infrastructure, so is able to replace the entire underlying stack. A protocol cannot do that, it's dependent on volunteers, grants or companies that, often against their commercial interest, keep improving it in a mostly backwards compatible way. The amount of resource that can be mobilized is smaller and the upgrade process harder (a whole ecosystem has to move). The most likely outcome imo is that companies will build very sophisticated scaling technology, that will likely not be open source so they can have a moat, and then dominate the end user market. Us nerds can still use the core protocol, but might not even be able to communicate with the majority of users. E-mail is a cautionary tale, try hosting your own and still reaching gmail users reliably. Or try getting ICS files for flight bookings, airlines just set the google calendar metadata since ~everyone uses GMail+GCal. It's a bit different since the centralizing force for e-mail was spam and not scaling, but I think it's a close enough analogy. Or look at the web stack, it historically evolved to become such a bloated monstrosity (because the inventors designed a document standard and we shoehorned it into becoming an application framework) that these days only companies with millions to burn can keep up with maintaining browser engines (and Google pretty much defines the direction of travel because Chrome is number one). So when I worry about scalability it is out of a deep care for decentralization and not seeing all that energy invested go to waste by ultimately ending up in the same place we started at. If we don't consider decentralized scaling from the beginning, the non-ideological VCs pouring money in once it gets traction certainly won't.
Scale Issues aren't good only in form of DDOS...
wise words, a product evolves as it grows
Yeah I love how folks keep saying Nostr won’t work…. It’s like. Cool. But it does work. Nobody will run relays. Yeah but a thousand people are happy to run relays. It won’t be possible to make apps if we don’t constrain and validate schemas. Uh sure clearly our apps don’t work.
Because this socialist can't figure out essential aspects of his ambitions he feels entitled to the outputs of other members of some larger group, in this case "humans". nostr:nevent1qqsq7d59kedndzda668epxvweajytheq7vjmy7me755j0z4f30rvepspz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygzxpsj7dqha57pjk5k37gkn6g4nzakewtmqmnwryyhd3jfwlpgxtspsgqqqqqqsm2m3n3
I think nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpzamhxue69uhhv6t5daezumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcscpyug is firmly in the blue zone. Unfortunately for him, green and blue compete for the same things in our society. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gifted nostr:nevent1qqsq7d59kedndzda668epxvweajytheq7vjmy7me755j0z4f30rvepspz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygzxpsj7dqha57pjk5k37gkn6g4nzakewtmqmnwryyhd3jfwlpgxtspsgqqqqqqsm2m3n3