Oddbean

I’ve been playing around with @PABLOF7z ⁤⁣ ‘s new client “Olas” and decided to take a queue from @⁣ @ODELL ⁤⁣ and contribute as a non-dev by giving some feedback. I have many artist friends who are tied to instagram (but interested in #nostr ) and i’m sure this kind of client can be a good incentive for them to try it out 🤙✨. Here goes the feedback by sections: HOME SCREEN - In the home feed we see both people we follow and people we don’t follow, but there is no way for us to curate our feed to choose if we only want to see our follows and not have other stuff cluttering your feed. It could be useful to be able to choose between your follows vs a kind of web-of-trust (follows of my follows) vs “global feed” with “no filtering” (which is what it currently feels like). - The filtering of good quality and low quality sounds interesting, but not knowing who from our follows uses which, we’re inclined to leave it at low quality to make sure we don’t leave people we follow out of the feed (which did happen on the high quality filter) - Also, when people are sharing photos or art, they use hashtags since it’s the best discoverability resource we have for the moment on nostr, but hashtags serve no functionality on olas. Could be something that would be useful to follow so you can also fill your feed according to the hashtags you’re interested in. - Bookmarking isn’t implemented (as it informs) IMAGE LOADING SECTION: -Tried uploading a video and it made the app crash. - Posted a picture but it doesn’t appear on other clients 😅. VIDEO FEED - Some videos work, but for other we simply get a logo (kinda like the quicktime logo) and it remains that way. - Clicking on the person’s name takes us to the profile, but there are not the pics that they post and there follower count is trapped in 1.5k for everyone and their followings at 890. OUR OWN PROFILE: The follower count trap also happens in our own profile. Also, When going to our own profile, our photos and videos don’t appear. In the case of our @DoShitters ⁤⁣ friends, the only photos they see in their own profile pics is the “portada” from the yakihonne videos they’s put up. Also saw that the wallet section is only for mints and there is no option for @Alby or other lightning addresses, which could be useful since ecash is still new to many in the nostr community. GENERALLY The only thing i missed from day one of trying Olas was the ability to search for people, specially since we didn’t know why some people where on our feed, and wanted to find directly some of the people we wanted to check out at that moment. In any case, hope this feedback is useful. I have a lot a respect for the work Pablo is doing and only wish to relay some thoughts that can help with the user experience as an insta user that doesn’t want to use insta anymore 😅 CHEERS, and thank you for the great work.💜

This is so amazing; thanks so much! I have a lot of this in the roadmap for #olas The main big thing I want to tackle next is supporting NIP-29 communities; so you can join and browse throughout different topics/themes - some could be created around, e.g art, some could be created around a specific artist or style. Some could be closed (for family pictures for example) and some could be open. This being nostr, those communities could later grow to other content types, a chat, a forum, live streams, in-person events, marketplaces, etc etc etc Do you think this is something your friends would be interested in?

It’s definitely stuff they would be interested in the long run! (Who wouldn’t? :) Communities, topics and themes to follow are very interesting for making it easy for them to find upon onboarding people who are interested in the same stuff they are, and not have to settle on either getting onto a client where you’re basically on your own at the beginning or being dumped into a feed full of bitcoin talk 😇 But as many others used to the siloed options they use such as instagram or tiktok, they will first be looking to be able to do most stuff they can do in those siloes, and are incapable of visualizing what #nostr uniting all these things like forum, chats, live streams and marketplaces means 😅 They have grown used to seamlessly share content (pictures and video), to navigate stories, to repost in their feeds/stories and share stuff they like directly with their friends and the people they follow via DM or group chats :) But they will learn to understand the awesome implications of it as they start playing around with it. 🤙 And i think we can’t underestimate the power of having something that feels like insta to them, but where their feed isn’t cluttered by stuff (mostly ads) that the algo pushes to you. This is looking great! THANK YOU FOR YOUR RELENTLESS CONTRIBUTIONS 🧡 Btw, also, a notifications tab would be great (although i’m sure that’s also on the roadmap ☺️) Cheers!

Visual-first marketplace + social linkage (# and DM and shareable and likable and with nested and editable comments) would kill any centralized alternatives dead. As an ethical-minded creative maker, that would be the dream itch #olas could scratch for me. Not my legacy media! Nostr to the stars!

Adding to this (not really an insta user but maybe a general comment) - on Android the login page is literally a box without any text and a login button + "new to nostr". I assume it wants an nsec but no way in hell I'm pasting my nsec into a general empty box. So no login for me I guess. Would love support for Amber. I'd love for best practices around login and feed filters to become common across apps. If those things aren't there, the apps become way less usable and more prone to people checking it out for a second and dropping off immediately. In this case understand it's a total beta (alpha?) app, but my personal sense was that Olas was kind of launched as an instagram killer (maybe I'm too hopeful) and well... it feels like it needs even more basic nostr plumbing at this point, let alone having me want to show this to any random instagram user as an alternative ... Same here, total respect for you @PABLOF7z - keep on building and hope these thoughts help.