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.”

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.

I find that most of the time the critics are just complaining but offer zero solutions because this stuff is hard. The best thing to do is to not complain and keep doing your best (as many are doing already). Negative energy brings more negative energy and people leave. It’s like a vicious self-sabotaging loop and encouraging it is just doing more damage than anything. I think most devs are aware of all of the issues by now but can’t do much about it. So when “critics” come in and complain, they are not brining anything new to the table, but actually doing harm.

> 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.

I don't understand *your* rhetoric, it doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. nostr is a protocol, it is not too dissimilar from email or the web. viewing it any differently than you view email is a gross misjudgement. I don't know what critical voices you're talking about, nor do I care. Ever since day 1 of joining nostr I have selectively curated a list of people I follow that are creating the kind of content I want to see, and are sharing updates I want to see. I have had nothing but positive interactions here, with the exception of the spam a few times, which is to be expected. I'm also building my own app on nostr (animestr) to bring in the broader anime community into nostr. The decentralization aspect, and the single "language" nostr apps speak in, will allow me to do something that's harder to do in a centralized network (especially for a bad developer like me)

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.

hey Sophia, nice to meet you, I'm from Spain! what's your take on nostr? curious about other people's experiences in here.

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...

People keep complaining about me not being worth my Nostr salary and I don't know how to break it to them that I pay to be here. 😂

many such cases. often ideas are judged not by their merit but by the "pedigree" of the author. alas, we are such biased creatures.

ecash has its uses and tradeoffs and i don't think anyone is being disingenuous about those on nostr (I don't use X). it's well-understood and publicised that it's custodial and requires trusting the issuer. i think the apps and libraries that integrate it do it because they see utility in it and/or their users demand it, that's my experience at least.

for most of us being here is a net loss financially and in terms of time that could be spent doing something else. people earning big or just earning are a minority, do people think we're all sponsored or something?

i get it, i'm not critiquing the protocol but the prevalent culture and I'm glad that your nostr bubble brings you joy and positive interactions. best of luck with your project, I'm all for bringing niche communities like anime and gaming to nostr.

Agreed to an extent. Crucifying devs for something that’s mostly out of their control (it would be a nice world where devs and product folks could actually predict how people use their software) isn’t productive. So, to be clear, I don't think mobbing devs is the way to fix this! Especially since I’m not a believer in algorithmic solutions to complex social problems. However, I disagree with the "bad vibes bring bad vibes" argument, especially since the toxic Nostr monoculture block isn’t exactly passive either. They don’t just exclude you for saying something that goes against the grain. They ruthlessly sabotage people with different ideas, all so that the "GM Pura vida 🤙🤙🤙" bubble can keep monopolising the Nostr trending lists and pushing the same rehashed marketing over and over and over again, scamming users out of their first 10k sats or so to buy services they don't need. Refusing to talk about it or call it out just because "every dev already knows" reinforces the idea that everyone on Nostr is fine with it… or worse, that everyone’s part of it. New users don’t know what we know. Voicing user concerns, or at least showing some agreement, helps avoid churn. It shows there are real humans who care behind the machine. I could ask AI to create a more explicit illustration of what I think about the whole "let’s just not talk about it" situation, but hopefully this family-friendly version gets the idea across.

Not glorifying the "broken dev on Nostr donating to other broken devs on Nostr" movement. We're quickly heading down a "soon we’re all going to starve" spiral. Circular economy my arse… 🤣 But if it helps, I’m also spending sats and money I don’t necessarily, well… """have"""" at the moment to support Nostr initiatives I believe in. I can’t ask people to do something I’m not willing to do myself (although please don't do what I do. This is not good or even sane financial advice 🤣). And what do I get out of it? Mostly having my relays pwned by script kiddies on a semi-regular basis, lol. Funny how the same folks willing to put so much effort into bots and attacks aren’t willing to just open a PR and patch something.

Fair. I don't want to bash people who are genuinely trying to build something or lump everyone into the same boat. There’s some legitimate innovation happening in the ecash space, some interesting protocols blooming, and even some actual progress in the Lightning ecosystem. Nostr is pushing a lot of innovation forward in this space. That said, I’ll still call out the scammy Lightning/NWC service sales tactics: “Hey, new user, you need to self-custody or you don’t own your BTC. Install this free wallet, that I won’t disclose that that I’m financially associated with it! OK, now that you’ve installed my wallet and received your first welcome sats which the company behind th3 wallet is happy to custody for you (wait, wasn’t this meant to be self-custodial?), you can either try to self-host my Lightning software wrapper that mostly don't work or pay me $9.90/month and I’ll do it for you. Then you can have access to your sats. OK, paid the $9.90? Now let me tell you about Lightning channels and liquidity. So here, deposit another 10k sats and I’ll manage this for you. Then you can access your 200 or so welcome SATs.” This is beyond shady. It should be called out, and I don’t care if a lot of folks on Nostr like the companies behind this.

PRs are hard. 😂 I just did an external PR and he was really nice about it, but it felt a bit like a job interview. I already have to face internal PRs every day. 🙈

We pay in time. They in integrity.

I remember all the talk about sustainable businesses during SEC-01, about a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, zero businesses and the two businesses that were present and served as "north stars" are both gone. That's a lot of walking and talking, for very little walking the talk.

Yes, they think that. There is so much hype around the grant programs, and such big-sounding numbers being thrown around, that users think we're all getting lambos. 😂

VC/PE in a nutshell. Full disclosure: I used to work for investment banks (as a techie; not front office, M&A, or anything fancy but close enough to interact with VC and PE folks). I still get a personal laugh out of all the finance bro memes here on nostr, especially when folks end up parodying the very finance culture they mock. Add some laser eyes and a (a conveniently curated to allow him to profit from fiat) cypherpunk persona to the finance bro in a jumper meme, and you get the stereotypical Nostr VC-backed crypto bro. The difference is mainly that some people in traditional finance are actually making money out of it.

You're saying that to a group in this thread that has tables full of solutions that they're building themselves.

Nostr in its current form should end up dead and forgotten, but a p2p javascript-free future version of nostr should live forever

I'm sorry to hear it Kyle. I hope that you get your sats back. Ligthining can be simple. 99% of new users will be served just fine by a custodial wallets, when the dust is worth anything just move it onchain (and make sure to keep it in a cold wallet :).

Hum… tough one. Honestly, I get zapped like 1k sats per month on average, so for me it wouldn’t be worth it. Plus, Lightning channel management is a pain. Some folks zapping or getting zapped over 20k sats a month might have a better justification for it (other than just learning how to operate Lightning infrastructure). For Nostr, I’m using Wallet of Satoshi myself and doing some http redirection magic so I can use my own domain as a Lightning addresse. The same can be done with plenty of other wallets (Coinos, Minibits, Bitvora Wallet, etc.). Not discouraging you from exploring non-custodial lighting, but the honest answer to “Is it worth it for Nostr?” is: probably not.

Maybe try Coinos (although they did face some recent security incidents and temporarily froze a few wallets. But nobody lost any sats that I know of) or the new Bitvora Wallet. (Disclaimer: while I contribute code to Haven, I don’t get a dime from getting anyone to use Bitvora software. Well, @utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 and a few Haven users have personally zapped a few thousand sats tobke over time because I’m cute and all. You know, given the amazing BTC bull run, almost enough sats for a sandwich, a box of sausage rolls, four donuts, and a coffee at the best fast food place in the whole wide world: Greggs

Greggs

… For those not in the UK, that’s enough to pay for about 15 minutes of my time as a contractor 🤣)

Here's your 52 sats and a bit extra. Hopefully you will be able to recover your sats from Alby as well.

Lmao. No one gives a fuck about retaining you 😆

stay strong fren. i think the inboxes of the people who can solve the problems are just full.. the resources to solve the problems are thin. all in good time, i think we need a few more years to have solutions built to retain, until then there will be lots of churn, for better or worse. it is very tough for the marketing dept during this time. example: still havent solved the harrassment from spam bots despite them being here every time there is an uptick in users.

This is why I try to say dumb stuff as often as possible

Awesome to meet you too Anthony. It’s 5:44am here and bout to read some journal articles for a report me and my team a working on for uni

It’s me Verbiricha. Former CEO of tagging. I’m gonna be completely honest all the bitcoin I had I used in transactions on here -whether to buy tees or zaps. I was about onboarding experience and loved every minute of it. My take is that it feels that the point of difference is definitely the decentralisation aspect and zapping. But this is the thing right - you need legitimacy with the zap and Will and Apple consistently have a 🍎🍏 thing going. Educating people on the why is everything. Why decentralisation and why bitcoin? Cause like right now you log in and it’s all about price. My thing right now is studying incarceration rates and delving deeper into the why with the stats.

Sounds like a good Friday evening. 21:45 here, watching Squid Game Season 3 with the wifey and the cat and postponing working on a technical assessment lol. Enjoy your weekend!

Incorrect.

we all do sometimes hehe. now seriously: you are one of most articulate, deepest thinkers in the space. an inspiration and role model for me.

yeah the grind feels pointless some times, certain aspects of the culture suck but I still have a lot of love for the protocol and mission; my passion and autism will keep me going, i ain't stopping anytime soon. appreciate your words my fren, stay strong too!

oooh I see, I was suspecting it but wasn't sure hehe

Nobody else has my private key 🔑 it’s me

Can your specify? I see a lot of different thought. Some is more popular because it’s often the same Twitter influencers and ensure following here

Thank you, I appreciate that

Are there opinions out there we are supposed to care about? Must not have received the memo....

i think you need to consider trying jumble.social or something. i don't even see this.