GM verbiricha. Agreed. I have an interesting relationship with Nostr myself. It's been a while since I’ve spent this much time on any social media. The protocol itself is genuinely interesting, but…
Honestly, in a year, I’ve made very few meaningful connections. There are maybe a dozen people at most who even try to interact with me about anything (aside from technical support for HAVEN, I mean).
The fact that I’m not a Bitcoin maxi (and am vocally allergic to the scammy behaviour of some of the Nostr celebrity accounts pedalling paid services and "Bitcoiner busy boxes") doesn’t help either.
And yes, the culture of shutting down any "unapproved" ideas, only to later adopt them once one of the Nostr celebs "endorses" the criticism, is really annoying. It’s funny, for a bunch of folks who see themselves as free-thinking, sovereign, libertarian techno-enthusiasts, bla bla bla, most of the few humans still on Nostr act like a bunch of 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑.
I hope that one day, when someone mentions Nostr’s toxicity and its 20-year-old-crypto-bro monoculture, I can reply with something other than “Yes, but…”.
The best I can do right now is:
“Yes, but… there’s also half a dozen artsy and techy folks mostly talking to themselves with hashtags that I really like. Plus Japanese Nostr.”
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I couldn't have said it better myself my fren. fwiw I genuinely appreciate your thoughts and the work you do and I hope you find more meaningful connections here, i've made some really good frens in these last couple of years and i'm still enthusiastic about the protocol but nostr in its current form might end up dead and forgotten.
Hey 👋 I’m Sophia from Melbourne, Australia.
> And yes, the culture of shutting down any "unapproved" ideas, only to later adopt them once one of the Nostr celebs "endorses" the criticism, is really annoying.
LOL totally felt that one.


I'm only here for the "half a dozen artsy and techy folks" that are building the Community tools they need for themselves and their family and frens.
The Bitcoin-Twitter-Liberty-Scam-Cult use case is scaling down to (or as always been, lol) a small Community anyway. They'll need the tools too. If they realize how bad copy-pasting Twitter UX works out for 🐑 , that is.
Thanks, verbiricha. The appreciation is mutual. I feel like my first weeks on Nostr were the best, even though they coincided with the ReplyGuy attacks and my first real encounter with the Nostr monoculture defending itself by telling users to go touch grass. Hopefully, a few folks will have an experience similar to yours, or at least something resembling the Human Internet of old that attracted me to Nostr.
You're doing fine! Your accounts have gathered a decent following, enough for some of your content to reach my timeline organically. I know you catch a lot of crap for saying some of the things you say, and I really respect the effort you put into building your dev account from scratch without leaning on the popularity of your old one. So thanks for putting yourself in the shoes of new users.
Whatever you're doing, keep at it. Itt clearly resonates enough for folks to react, reshare, and show real enthusiasm. Actually, I think the only hell threads I've ever engaged with started from something you wrote (which also exposed a few cracks in Haven’s filters, so thanks for the unintended bug report). 🤣
Hey Sophia, how are you? Nice to meet you.
There are dozens of us. Thank you for your service, @Niel Liesmons. I appreciate your efforts as well. There's very little appreciation for independent devs on Nostr, and we should be more vocal about it.
Agreed, the business model for BTC/Lightning solutions marketing to new users will eventually eat itself. And I don’t mean in Ouroboros style (at current churn rates, there’s very little money to be made from naive new users anyway).
The bad news is that with its downfall, some of the funding keeping Nostr software alive will likely disappear. The good news is that… well, there are dozens of us trying to keep Nostr alive, regardless of financial incentives.
I agree, but it's not just Nostr. They're also in X now. Take for example the Cashu/ecash thing. They've been telling people that "not your keys, not your bitcoin" for years, but now having a custodial is good and we should integrate ecash in all the libraries and apps. Geez...