Yes bitcoiners can help, but I wonder how many real bitcoiners there are on nostr, who have the skills and the time to onboard others. Very few I believe.
And even if that's true, it is a daunting challenge to make outbox really work, and the inevitable rough edges make user retention hard.
It is telling that apps with plenty at stake, e.g. Primal and Satlantis don't even connect to relays directly. Damus has not used outbox for a long time I don't know about nowadays.
Guess why?
When you want to publish a product that works, it is quite important for stuff to load.
If you hardcode relays or use some caching server shenanigan with your own api things will definitely load using the same app on both devices.
This is not the end goal but you can onboard ppl, things are still signed etc.
I disagree with specifically the proprietary api method but it showcases the problem:
We are told "outbox is an art so we don't make a spec out of it". Okay, but this is sort of a cup-out.
Outbox is a brand new paradigm to build apps. No one has proven to my knowledge that it works in production with more than a handful of users. How many web apps use 100s or thousands of server lists to calculate the right subset **for different contexts the user can navigate to in the app?** and you have to score relays that misbehave and handle disconnections, auth, timeouts, and resource management to not exhaust battery and data of the user rapidly. To name a few.
What if we take this to the labs and create sth we can use in the meantime that also showcases the fantastic properties if nostr?
Rather than chanting "outbox" on no-true-scotsmen ?
Communities are a better solution to these issues bc most of them will start out on one relay. If we make these compatible with each other, what we get is a Fediverse that is 100X better already, with opportunities for further development.
I love bitcoiners but outbox was born out of the bitcoiner mindset that diverted our attention prematurely I think.