It has a lot of signs of something that will be big - a toy1 that lots of smart people are playing with unpaid. Jack came along and brought everyone's attention to those signs.
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
Yup, it reminds me of this Chris Dixon article too… feels like the seeds of a new industry have been planted by a bunch of smart people playing with Nostr on weekends.
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