Oddbean new post about login | logout You seem like a reasonable person. What do you think we should use Nostr for? yes, we have these conversations we random people about some topics that we forget about. Why do you use Nostr?
i use nostr because i control my feed nowhere else is this possible, even the fediverse systems have moderators who limit who can see what i even run my own infrastructure, currently in development, but it's practically my daily driver this hasn't been possible since the gigacorps took over forums and messaging on the internet... when it was just IRC and ICQ and email lists things were better... nostr is a return to that same DIY, see what you want to see, be in control the constant curation and filtering and manipulation of the social media is so boring if nostr went offline today somehow (which is very unlikely) i wouldn't be looking for any other place to fill the hole... this is the only way, and none of the companies seem to give a damn about what people actually want
I'm interested in how you control your feed. Do you have your own client? Do you use a DVM? I am on Nostr to find people that are here to solve the same problems as me. For example, privacy. Can you pay for the services you're using to run your node using Bitcoin? Can I exist on Nostr as a ghost? I believe I can, Amethyst has Tor built-in. Don't you think we're better off together than alone? If you share the knowledge you gain, I won't have to make the same mistakes and waste time. I would love help people coordinate better.
yes, paying for services is a big interest of mine which is why you'll find the term NIP-42 repeatedly in my notes, because almost no clients actually implement it properly and fully i'm working on a relay that properly supports it but actually testing this feature is currently nearly impossible... the client implementations are very very patchy getting more clients to fully support NIP-42 is critical to enabling pay-per-use and subscription models and modular storage back ends and search engine systems as they call them DVMs until this support is widespread we are all depending on donations and grants and investors paying devs to build there is a problem in the nostr dev culture that sprung out of the coming of jack and opensats that needs to be moved on from, the whole point of this system is exactly making it self-funded, as i see it
I was finding that peculiar as well. Open source and free softwares don't scale. It's a pipedream that Nostr can be like open source Bitcoin. Bitcoin aligned economic incentives. The only way forward for Nostr is if it aligns economic incentives. @npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl found another one to add to our pile of ideas.
i think it just will take a little more pushing at the guys in client dev most likely to get it working - @hodlbod and @hzrd149 in fact hodlbod is further ahead at getting NIP-42 working, and he is also the most advanced on markets, but nostrudel has got outbox model working which is also critical because relay development needs to not be a black box, @fiatjaf has contributed in a big way with building the khatru framework to make it easier for relays to be built, and i've worked on making proper CLI interfaces using direct messaging and cleaning up the organisation of his nostr library so it is more easy to understand, and fixing several concurrency bugs and improving the json processing
We need to coordinate better with the clients. So, NIP-42 enables paying for the relays, but how can we pay for the clients?
again @hodlbod is leading the way on this, you can already set a zap split to him
it is only his lack of adequate support of outbox model and the very slow response of the client to auth request envelopes from my relay (sometimes it sends a dozen before the client finally sends back a signed auth envelope) that i don't still have #coracle as my daily driver... the outbox model is basically not negotiable for a relay dev testing client, and without that it doesn't even matter if NIP-42 is working, really, outbox is > NIP-42 support this is my experience as a relay dev, and hodlbod recently got into this arena with his own fork of khatru but charging for access is not on his priority list, and it's only one guy, so i don't like to be too dark about the things missing, as it's trivial in comparison to everything else, primal, amethyst, iris in terms of completeness of their implementation of the critical protocol features
this is also why i am constantly berating fiatjaf, pablo, and others about their work on things that don't address or disregard the importance of making the protocol self-funding without self funding this thing will die like every VC funded attempt at social networks, it's really serious and these people just don't get it, comfortable with their fat grants
bitcoin is now bigger than the swiss franc because it is a self funding distributed system i can't say enough towards this and really want people to get hold of this and run with it because the sooner this protocol is its own circular ecosystem between users, devs and operators the sooner we are outside of the gates, right now we are just like a billy goat bashing against a fence that is strong enough to contain him self funding is like a set of heavy duty bolt cutters
We should start a company, issue a token and build a revenue model. 1. A client cannot start charging fees from the get go. It has to be a freemium model. 2. The client will abstract away all the underlying costs. Maybe a $1/year could be the minimum. 3. It cannot be ads based. It'll misalign the incentives again.
no need to register with the government for anything, why?
Why do we need to register with a government?
only if you want to serve them or be raped
Do not want to be raped, by anyone.
oh i forgot, not "serve" i meant "be the slaves of" so, yeah, i'll pass on being raped or any kind of slavery as well
I got what you meant ahaha. I don't want to be their servant!
Can you explain what you mean by outbox model?
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md mostly this... it enhances the old relay list by specifying which ones you read from and which ones you write to the outbox model means pulling this event type and using those for the relevant case, so, posting to where you read, and reading from where you post
Thanks. Seems like a good model, hopefully more clients use it like nostrudel
Do you think economic incentices are the only way forward with the Nostr? It would definitely speed up things, but I see that many people have started only for the freedom inventives and to build something they themselves want to use 🤔
And you also see that most of them eventually gave up offering it to others.
Why? Maybe they found out that somebody else have also been doing good job for the same cause and didn't wanted to waste their time to do dublicate work 🤔 I see new Nostr development and ideas popping up almost every day and people are still developing their own clients and relays even though we already have dozens of awesome of them! But of course everything would be faster if there were more economic incentives. I think people forgets that we're still very early and developing open source protocols takes a lot of time.
They give it up because it's hard work for free and they can get paid to do other hard work. Pay closer attention. You are missing the signal.
I try to, but some much is happening everywhere in the Nostr at same time, so I can't keep up with everything. Lower your time preference, you're rushing things.
LOL Last week the complaint was that my time preference is too low. This week, too high. Must be just right.
😄 I think we're both right in a sense. I've developed my own client and still developing it once in a while, but since Amethyst is so much better, I use it. Maybe if I see Amethyst going rogue and there were no other good clients, it would speed up my development. On on the other hand, I would not want to get paid for it, if it means that I would've to introduce features I don't like 🤔
That's the different between a business and a hobby.
Right, but social media doesn't have to be business for every one.
Sir, this isn't just about your tweets.
I know, it's about notes and other stuff. Many awesome things have developed without business support like bitcoin, lightning, pgp, first computer, printing press etc. I believe that the Nostr will not be much different, and when aligning something with only economic incentives, it will be shown in the end product. But I want to emphasize that I support for providing economic support for open source products for many reasons.
People will do this, for a while, haphazardly, as a hobby. A business operates reliably and has a service that is widely-available, like the wine relay, cloudfodder, or nostr.build. That is really tricky, on Nostr, unless you get big grants, at least, at first. The grant-funded freeware can always undercut the competition. They don't have to be better, so long as they are for free. But this means that the grant-givers get to decide which businesses there will be, and which ones there will not be.
Yes. Humans can not/should not live alone. If everyone built things for themselves, humanity would be so far behind. If I cook, you build stoves, someone farms, someone builds houses and someone generates energy. But if we expected a farmer to give out his yield for free, would he do that? A farmer's goal is to farm as much as possible, sell his crops, build a house, buy a stove and hire a cook. That's why, someone who is building a Nostr client needs to hire a frontend developer, a product manager, a designer and a quality assurance person. We need all these to succeed. Without a clear business model, we can't do anything of these things. I would say economic incentives are the biggest missing thing in Nostr. Donations don't scale well. It also misaligns incentives.
Agree. I like giving out grants and donating, but it's a very startup-y model. At some point, you should have paying customers, or you never achieve a broad, diverse market driven by customer needs.
Yep. And if your company has paying customers, you might have surplus. Who keeps the surplus? You need owners who build this machine. The surplus should go out as dividends. The owners can be the employees who built or the angels who funded it. This ownership needs to exist somewhere, not on NYSE but onchain. It feels like we are ignoring the very thing that brought humanity to where we are right now. Companies and ownership. The state is the culprit for inflating our money. The companies never did anything wrong. Why are we against companies? Can someone tag Jack?
@npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m I'm curious why you against companies owned by their builders.
Why Financial Regulations? Security and tech part is hard for sure. We were discussing a different problem related to building companies the other day. nostr:nevent1qqstnpv2u5swe3uzl7r4g8sgqh4u8907ed9xncy2cqhsgnsw9kkmg8qpz3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wcpzpwe42kl97st2z7kzp59s0k83fvgnwyuaxwjvr4htfyumx2rknpfzqvzqqqqqqy0ws8k6
Wen NIP-42 implementation? Pet peeve https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/42.md nostr:note15sgqsk3j88nrwy5mtzz0r5w3ftj7zn7jgqw4ye6qtmsecp8dhweqg23z9g
I agree, I'm struggling since last year about how to contribute to Nostr development in a financially sustainable way. I have some ideas, but it is a long way to go. I found #nostrocket is a promising approach, but it is still in a very initial state.
yeah, i honestly can't really say how much of a good idea it is because it resembles many other forms of consensus i've seen and i think it is reinventing the wheel because it could be implemented with RGB