After evaluating #Nostr for a week, here are the top 4 things I want to see focused on in order to take this promising alpha to a beta state.
#1 - Spam/porn prevention; clients and potentially relays should come with good defaults that filters out spam and porn. Users should have to go hunt for private relays that offer porn instead of being blasted with it in day to day relays. Paid relays, especially pay-per-event relays could play a big role here.
#2 - Data retention/self hosting; metadata is "backed up" via relays and cached to some extent in clients; users need a way to guarantee their own content is backed up. I see self-hosting on Start9/Umbrel/etc as an easy way to get this practice started.
#3 - Relay affinity/horizontal scaling; when a follow posts to relays you don't subscribe to, then their content is effectively nonexistent. To prevent the popularisation of massive centralized relays, clients need a standardized way to automatically peek into the relays of their follows. This will allow #Nostr to stay maximally decentralized.
#4 - Cold storage; pasting private keys into apps is great for this alpha stage, but we need an easy way to generate keys offline and then lease out access to our clients for a given time period (1 day/1 week/1 month). Luckily the #[0] folks are having a look at this.
cc #[1] #[2]