I don't think people see what I'm seeing on the horizon for the nsites paradigm, and it's pretty tough to put into words. Everyone should be vibing their own nsite meta browser right now, or some linux based nostr OS. I think client development was the first epoch of nostr, building windows onto the protocol. The plethora of web-apps and packages, downloaded and run across browsers and operating systems that share nothing. Each of them re-implements trust, identity, storage from scratch or tries to bridge the signing experience. The next epoch is nsite browsing. And the endgame is nostr-native OS. It completely shifts how we use the protocol. Nsites change where the app lives. It's a signed object now, addressed by a key, loaded and verified on your own machine. No host to trust. No gateway to demote it back into one. The browser verifies every blob itself and 'bad' servers get skipped, not trusted. So the layers collapse. Client, app, browser trust decisions become one nsite browser or OS running on your hardware, signing and verifying. You stop downloading separate apps or clients and start loading artifacts into a context that's already yours, already signed in. That's the epoch I see around the corner. Apps that compose because they share the same signed-in context. nostr is the entry point with no app store, no client. The same nostr, used the way it was always shaped to be. Yes, you still install the browser or OS once. But it needs to be nostr-native from the first touch. Same shape as http today, one runtime, infinite signed artifacts. The boundary you used to redraw per-app is now drawn once, at the runtime. The protocol doesn't change itself, just how it's applied. Software stops being something you download and assemble and simply starts being something you enter, signed in, private by default.
Jared Logan's avatar Jared Logan
Wild. image Disclaimer. I barely know what I'm talking about. View quoted note →
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Replies (9)

Brother, we’ve been drinking the same water this morning.
τέχνη's avatar τέχνη
It turns out that “stop trying to make a nostr version of X or Facebook” is actually *really bad advice*. Stop inventing new apps. There is only one app. People only want one app. Just make the one app and make it good.
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sandwich's avatar sandwich
While everyone was arguing about an experiment I built a nostr-native RISC-V microkernel that implements a variant of NIP-5D with a native transport. The applet pattern means that nostr applications can be written without in-depth knowledge of nostr protocol. It also means that the nostr connection, key management, crypto and optimization layers remain logically separated from the application layer. Unlike other similar solutions to date, few compromises are made: the application layer can be as creative as it wants and only has to focus on UX, while the shell handles the heavy lifting. I now have two implementations of NIP-5D, one via a web-based shell that has a runtime and another via native shell on RISC-V embedded in a RUST microkernel; with API parity. Both will be released when they are released, I cannot afford that much time for nostr anymore, and I will only release them when they are ready. I will block out some time soon to refine a Nostr Applet possibility.
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That's very close to my hope for Nostr. Something like WeChat, but fully decentralized where everything happens in the one app.