Oddbean

We almost decided _against_ starting our project because of the grants. The ubiquitous nature of the grants leaves the impression that working on Nostr is futile, unless you receive a grant. Users are also reluctant to pay full price for anything because they expect you to be paid by OpenSats, so that you either offer everying "free" or at heavily-subsidized prices.

This centralizes decision making about the protocol, indirectly. If there are two dev teams, and one is independently financed, whilst the other receives grants, the grant app can undercut in price until the other one goes broke and gives up. Since implementations determine the protocol, they either have to finance every app, or they skew the protocol, involuntarily. Both of these situations distort the market and would be difficult to unwind because they cement expectations among the users.

Well, they're actually sort of trapped, now, as they're sitting on a gigantic money bag and they are legally obligated to spend it, according to the principles defined by their nonprofit. What they could do, is disintermediate the spending of the money, more, so that users have more direct say in where the funding goes and devs don't have to become de defacto employees, in order to receive foundation monies. #Geyserfund does this with contribution amplification, where individuals are encouraged to contribute and they top-up the most popular projects. We had the idea of arranging a Geyserfund #zapathon, with OpenSats contributing x-amount to the amplification effort, but the idea seems to have gone nowhere. One of the things you can see on the Geyserfund page for Nostr projects is the higher heterogenity of the projects. The users don't only want funding going to devs. They find a lot of value in stuff like marketing, merchandise, documentation, meetups, etc. Nostr is a whole ecosystem, not merely a software project. https://geyser.fund/?tagIds=2

kind of depends on what the funders want, but it can also go too far; for example Mozilla is often criticized for doing too many things outside browser development, while a lot of people just want to fund say, a faster or less memory-hogging browser... but sure, nostr still is in a much earlier phase where it's important to figure out what to even want

Yes, but Mozilla, like Signal or Wikipeedia, etc. is a software development project, not a protocol development project. If you donate to Mozilla, you expect to see software features coming out the other end. Nostriches, who are users, feel like part of the protocol. That's why the merchandise, meetup projects, marketing, is coming primarily from users, not from some foundation. That's the main strength of Nostr, after all: it's not a software project, it's a communications protocol project, so everyone who uses it to communicate, is part of the project.

Everything covered by the grant being open-source doesn't mean that every service or feature is entirely free to use or that there can't be additional related projects, occasions, benefits, services etc. that are for premium customers. There are a lot of freemium models or etc. Grants mean that the financial incentive is to just offer everything for free, which means we have to be grant-financed forever. Which is what a lot of people want, of course. Free shit forever.