The problem with social media of any kind is that we by default become politicians in a lose-all game of popularity, spiraling into a race to the bottom. Nostr can change that but not by trying to fit the protocol to social media. It's the right primitives used in the wrong way and it is destined to fail. What we need is strong communities forming resilient networks, with easy forking/exit guarantees. As for specs NIP29 and 72 were close but not quite there. I am betting hard on #communikeys from now on designed by @Niel Liesmons , slightly tweaked and extended to my taste. The most important primitives are in place, now testing moderation features and adjusting #BudaBit to this spec. You can already start a community at

Budabit

Budabit

Social Git collaboration on Nostr

to or look at the BudaBit community: ncommunity://0a8ecba4868c13e1e84cc5cb58c02c1fd0880d9e5a25a5050ee96ad8a166d7c8?relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.primal.net%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fnos.lol%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fbudabit.nostr1.com%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.damus.io%2F

Package managers and platforms getting rekt over and over again. The "Trusted third parties are security holes" mantra playing out. But what can we do? Ditching these big platforms and service providers would leave a big hole for the ecosystem. The classic issue of getting addicted to something and suddenly realizing that cold turkey is really painful. This is true on so many levels, not just software engineering. Living in big cities, sending our children to state-licensed schools, buying food in supermarkets. Platforms. Faceless services. Monolith companies. Too many layers of abstraction. Too far removed. Of course we will have serious trust issues and backlashes from this system but we can't make a decent alternative based solely on the "Sovereign Individual". It's a myth. In real life only concerted effort makes substantial changes in the way we do things. Satoshi had like a thousand serious bugs in Bitcoin when he released it. It was a genius design. But it needed years of polish from hundreds of people in the community to make this usable today. And still does. The missing layer has always been the community. Those dozens or at most hundreds of ride or dies. These Communities can form a network that produces proper liquid markets and a culture without the central points of failure and the chaotic mess of what it means to do this all by yourself. Sovereign Individuals don't exist. Tyranny is terrible but it's the default. Community networks is the antidote. It's the model of #BudaBit

I like nutzaps because: 1. Better verification assuming the mint is widely trusted - > reputation builds up 2. Still some degree of plausible deniability: You could say ecash doesn't equal real money, it's an IOU (not a lawyer) 3. No peel-chain type of privacy leak like with Bitcoin 4. More stable from a developer standpoint because there is no third party involved in the publishing of the zap receipt like with LN zaps 5. Funny name LN zaps: - Less verifiable probably due to random LN nodes posting the zap receipt - Worse stability of receipt structure : it is third party publishing with whatever tags they want. You can just propose the event as a client app - Better deniability due to the above Onchain: - Very strong verifiability - Privacy ramifications most users can't calculate beforehand - Future fees and waiting times if bitcoin succeeds Most use a custodian LN wallet (99.9%) anyway and there's really no way to abstract away the privacy consequences of onchain so ecash is my winner. View quoted note →

The new GitHub will not be another platform. It will be a paradigm shift: The Community Network model. Platforms have easy onboarding but are walled gardens destined to rot. The current model of Nostr apps is Chaos As a Service, or a fallback to platform behavior with global services and hardcoded relays. It's the right ingredients but not the right model. We can do better: The missing layer is communities. Communities on nostr are neither tyranny nor chaos. If done well they are they cornerstones of a new way to exist on the internet. They can provide essential infrastructure and they are the trusted entrypoint to nostr. Not a faceless app, and not a server. Leaders caring for their groups. The network of these provides a distributed yet consistent system overall. Not giant metropolitan cities and not weak scattered villages. City states. More later. View quoted note →

The exodus from GitHub has begun. People are complaining: "Again, a platform that we used to build our reputation and discover new stuff and make high-stakes decisions has rugpulled us..." But the people are looking for the next GitHub not realizing what it truly was: - Hosting - Team Collaboration - Community - broader exploration and interactions beyond the team The next "GitHub" should be separate services / apps / projects and sharing identities and important metadata formats. Nostr has the most clean-cut separation and the best design long-term I believe. But it makes all of these aspects their own marketplaces (and even more like CI) and those take a lot of time and effort to bootstrap. Will #gitvianostr succeed? I am not sure but in times like this we have a chance to take a step forward.

Both AI users and providers will learn the hard way how subscription hell works. It will hit both ways and it will be painful. For us, it's another lesson how getting away from reality has serious ramifications. For Anthropic and OpenAI it might just be too late though.

People are whining about centralized enshittified platforms like citizens of a democracy about politicians. Especially GitHub lately. Solution? According to whining users of subsidized CI and hosting, the people are at fault: Replacing the scapegoats and getting better leaders. Perhaps migrate to another platform if this doesn't work. Cypherpunks write code and design protocols. They realize that the given word is not enough because relying fully on it incentivizes empty promises. This spirals into a chaotic world without any trust whatsoever. We build software that requires low trust, so people can trust each other and the system again: A system not merely based on people but cryptography. Bitcoin is the flagship product of the cypherpunks. Nostr-based markets and communities make coordination of prices and people unstoppable. It's the natural next step for freedom to flourish. Keep shipping

The Github situation is getting worse gradually then suddenly:

Mitchell Hashimoto

Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub

But Bluesky is not sleeping on this, they have been building out 'tangled' - social software collab similar to #gitvianostr . And they recently got a funding boost as well: The problem exists, and we got the right primitives to answer the need: - NIP34 - Grasp Some clients: -

gitworkshop - Decentralized Git

Decentralized GitHub alternative over Nostr

-

BudaBit

BudaBit - Sovereign software communities

BudaBit helps sovereign software communities ship the future with community chat, issues, pull requests, and repo workflows built on Nostr.

/

Budabit

Budabit

Social Git collaboration on Nostr

But we need more user feedback to improve, and more people talk about how Nostr solves this problem really well. Possibly more contributors if your time allows. I seriously think this is a great chance to get a bunch of new high-value users on Nostr. What's your answer anon? Keep going hard, keep building and keep shipping

Platforms have been enjoying a lot of success selling convenience for lock-in. This era is coming to an end with AI. Projects don't want lock-in in a world where custom solutions can be built in days. All they need is infrastructure. Bespoke compute and storage. So the ultimate platforms to get rid of are the Amazons and Microsofts of the world. We need to make a competitive free market for infra and Nostr can solve this problem really well. Without permissionless pubkey-addressed discovery AI is useless slop at best, a threat to humanity at worst. We build pieces of this future with #gitvianostr and #BudaBit.

PSA: Nostr is much more resilient than Bitcoin. Many people find this hard to believe but it's really simple to reason about: Bitcoin must come to a global consensus on the state of its ledger. Simply put, money must be universal. Nostr does not have this requirement of a consolidated 'global'. Stuff can be distributed anywhere and people still have their own microcosm of Nostr, even when others don't know about you at all.

Nip17 only works if ecash stamps proliferate. Otherwise it is trivial to spam relays into oblivion with giftwraps. As I said before: you pay (ecash, or by self hosting) or trust (eg web of trust relay, uncle jim, group relay). No other way I see around this. Also it is worth putting DMs in context: - Is it for a p2p marketplace? - A dissident / freedom-fighter group? - A developer community? - A group for random cat-memes? - One-to-one, few-to-few or many-to-many? Don't think black and white, and don't think that one spec rules all. It almost never is the case.

AI doom is now more justified but not because it is AGI. I don't expect the LLM architecture to solely bring about AGI but it will contribute to it. AI is dangerously useful for good and bad intentioned people as well. Depends on the perspective: - Dangerous for the state because it can be used to escape the control of the system - Dangerous for freedom-loving people because it can be used for mass surveillance, censorship, and engineering panics and psy-ops on a large scale Personal responsibility is key (pun intended) now more than ever.