We’re so lucky to have @npub1yxpr...qud4 and his strfry in the Nostr ecosystem. View quoted note →

The next three days is the online fediverse conference the fediforum. It’s a great unconference talking about everything social media protocol. Nostr is part of the fediverse even if we’re very different from the classic Mastodon. It’d be great to get more folks from Nostr to attend.

FediForum

FediForum

FediForum: moving the Open Social Web forward

We don’t need a Nostr marketing team We do need a Nostr growth team. @David King just published a good essay discussing whether Nostr needs a marketing team. I believe the answer is yes—but not marketing in the same way cryptocurrency projects have typically approached it.

Curious DK

I share what I'm learning about technology including nostr, bitcoin, and startups I think are interesting. Click to read Curious DK, a Substack pub...

We don’t need people running around buying ads. While having booths at conferences is beneficial for a community-driven project, I'm skeptical about the value of billboards or sponsoring athletes as ways to promote Nostr. It’s fun, sure, but it mostly reaches people who are already aware of it. What we really need is a focused initiative to grow Nostr—distinct from the fantastic teams already building Nostr itself. In a typical company, this would be the Growth Team. They’d focus on how people discover and learn about Nostr, the path they take to join, how they choose their app, what their experience is when signing up, whether they find engaging content, and how to ensure they stick around and invite others. This is not to dismiss the great work OpenSats and HRF are doing, but a growth team is something distinct. Each app can handle some of this, and that's working to an extent. But Nostr is more than just a collection of apps using shared code. It’s a network that becomes more valuable with every new app built on Nostr. For example, when a user joins Primal, it enhances the experience for Amethyst users, but it also becomes much more interesting for someone using YakiHonne or Zap.streams. So, we need people focused on cultivating the Nostr ecosystem. This isn’t marketing in the traditional sense, like buying ads, but more of a Nostr Community Growth Team. We need people who can work with creators and community founders to help them get started on Nostr. There’s a lot to grasp, and some hand-holding will be necessary. We also need better internal Nostr news—something like @The Nostr Report but aimed at two different audiences. First, for users, fans, and developers on Nostr: how do you keep track of all the projects and what's happening? There’s so much going on that it’s hard to follow. The second is external: we’re doing tons of incredible stuff, and we should be building excitement about Nostr by showcasing these amazing projects and content to the wider world. The team at @We Distribute does cover Nostr, which is awesome, but their focus is on multiple social media protocols. Journalists write when they feel there's news to break, and we haven’t been doing a great job feeding stories to them. We can improve on this. One initiative coming out of Nostriga is better coordination on getting Nostr folks on podcasts, especially beyond the Bitcoin bubble where most people have heard of Nostr. At Nostriga, I talked to a lot of people about how Nostr keeps being framed as an alt-right protocol in the media. That’s simply not true, but we need to work on changing that narrative. Nostr is for everybody, how Nostr is framed does matter. People don’t join a social app because of its functionality, they join because of the other people who are already on the app. Projects like Trustroots.io, Causes.com, and Protest.net will help showcase a different side of Nostr and build new communities beyond our Bitcoin-focused core. Nostr has already grown in new languages and communities, thanks to creators sharing about it on centralized platforms. We saw this with the Thai community—it’s fantastic. Let’s develop a program to support these creators. We’ve been discussing with @Ainsley Costello how she wants a space to onboard her fans into a community together. There’s a lot of promise in Ditto, which I’m excited about—I’ve set up an instance at social.protest.net. What if we helped each of these creators build their own communities on Nostr? From that initial onboarding, their community would be able to connect across all Nostr apps. This isn’t exactly traditional marketing—it’s more like cultivating and nurturing a healthy Nostr ecosystem. If we make it easy for communities to create their own spaces on Nostr, we can grow organically in countless directions. Every new user will feel ownership and be inspired to bring more people along. To achieve that growth, we need to lay the groundwork. We’ve got the apps, but we need to work with the people. After all, we’re building social software, and both the technology and the people are equally important.

Which nostr relays and clientes support and use nip-29 relay based groups / communities?

GitHub

nips/29.md at master · nostr-protocol/nips

Nostr Implementation Possibilities. Contribute to nostr-protocol/nips development by creating an account on GitHub.

Looks like cohost.org is shutting down. They’re actually bringing in a lot of money each month with a high % of users supporting as paid members. But their expenses are really high for the kind of site it is. Anyway this is what happens to a community that builds itself on closed source centralized platforms. When the maintainers decide to give up the users and community have no say.

Wayback Machine

If we want Nostr to truly protect privacy and resist censorship—like when X faced a government ban—we need to stop relying on relays with known IPs or domain names. We need encrypted traffic between clients and servers by default. That means Tor (and networks like I2P and Nym) should just work right out of the box, ideally without leaving the mixnet where traffic could be exposed at the exit node. 💡 A lot of relay operators are already running Tor onion services, which is awesome—but we need to make them easier to discover and use. If a public relay becomes unavailable, we should be able to switch to the Onion service version seamlessly. What do we need to do to make this happen? First, it’s about getting Nostr relay software to publish the Onion address when it’s set up. Then, it’s about getting clients to handle alternative transports like Tor or I2P natively, letting users choose between IP (TCP/IP), Tor, or other options. We could also explore mapping DNS records to onion addresses or including the info in HTTP headers. But maybe the most straightforward approach is extending NIP-11 to include alternate transport details so that everything's baked into the protocol. What do you all think? How can we push this forward? Let’s brainstorm and figure out the best way to support these privacy-preserving networks and keep Nostr resilient. I think we need Tor support in native clients where users can turn it on with a single click. Or maybe even have it attempt Tor as a fallback when the normal way of connecting fails. This isn’t a big change current relay info ospec here: NIP-11

GitHub

nips/11.md at master · nostr-protocol/nips

Nostr Implementation Possibilities. Contribute to nostr-protocol/nips development by creating an account on GitHub.

One way to help Nostr grow would to make it easier to find content in languages you speak. Damus and others have nifty ‘translate this note’ features but there’s something different from the way people speak in their own langauge. Nostr already has the nips for this:

GitHub

nips/32.md at master · nostr-protocol/nips

Nostr Implementation Possibilities. Contribute to nostr-protocol/nips development by creating an account on GitHub.

We can easily add tags to events which would let clients request only events in a specific language, or set of languages. But do any clients write out the language tag and do any use it in the UI for helping people discover content in their own langauge? I’m thinking of this because most Brazilians prefer to talk to people in their own language, Brazilian Portuguese (yes it’s different written language than Portuguese du Portugal). It’d be so cool to have on boarding which saw that a user is in Brazil, or has their device set to pt-br and then show them primarily content in their own language. This is also true of Thai, Japanese, and Chinese which also have big sets of Nostr users. The latter two seem to use custom local Nostr clients to avoid this problem. I’m not sure what Thai users do. I know that although I speak Spanish, and there are lots of hispanohablantes on Nostr, we mostly seem to write in English. That’s because it’s hard to filter out by language community except for who you choose to put in your contact list. So, what Nostr clients do this well? How do get clients writing these language tags in their posts and make it so clients then display / use them for users.

Ever contemplated the different uses of the - hyphen, – en dash, and — em dash? After watching this video I’m curious about the grammatical use of the • interpunct.

Interpunct - Wikipedia