yes and no. i joined nostr around August 2022, but i didn't see the potential, i didn't understand it, and i laughed at it. i used it for a few notes and then promptly left. i did not return again until Jack started talking about nostr on Twitter around the middle of December. only then, did i understand that the ethos of nostr and bitcoin were aligned. only then did i understand it's value in the symbiotic relationship of the freedom to transact and the freedom to communicate.

Oh wow.... This is a good question... I don't know if hardly anyone agrees with this, but I know many people do NOT agree with this.

Nostr isn't going to grow more than it already has on it's own. I feel Nostr needs a marketing team, growth team, or something similar. In today's world, it's hard to gain traction outside of what people are seeing influencers doing or talking about on legacy social platforms. Even if we look at new platforms like Bluesky, that touts decentralization, but is not early as decentralized or open as Nostr, they have these departments and influencers and the media doing the talking for them. Bluesky is booming and growing. Nostr is stagnant. It's hard for a grassroots movement and a revolution to get started without traction or acknowledgement. We need to do constant outreach and sing Nostr's successes from the mountain tops.

hey man!

well obviously Fountain is my favorite! (i answered this earlier. as of right now, Notedeck is my favorite client.)

a TikTok and Instagram competitor. i know that a lot of people don't want to just create alternatives to existing platforms, but i think we're doing a disservice for users looking to leave these platforms. they are joining Bluesky's new alternatives instead, because we don't have viable alternatives. Olas is a start, but it has a long way to go.

zaps and wallets. this is the hardest issue that i deal with. telling people to install a nostr app, download a wallet, and then download another app to potentially buy bitcoin so that they can get started with zaps is a lot. it's too much. integrated wallets or one click solutions make this so much easier. my go-to for on-boarding has been Primal because their app solves a lot of these headaches.

I'd love to see SN become more of a Nostr client or have more nostr integration CC @k00b. We have similar goals and efforts. There's no need to go at it alone. Remember, interoperability is our superpower!

It all comes down to marketing. I know that sucks, but really that's where we are at. You need some big influencer to choose your platform and be it's advocate. Otherwise the masses don't hear about it and your product stays inside a niche market.

We need more community events and outreach. If we're going to treat nostr as a grassroots or community lead movement, then we need to actually do it! We have plenty of fantastic organizations providing grant money for developers. The other half of the equation is blank though.

This is the end goal of GNI. I am going to turn GNI into a non-profit organization and assign grants to people for nostr growth and education.

What if you wanted to host an event in your city or town, but you needed $500 or $2000 for it? Not a lot of money, but something to help it be a success? I'm sure more people would host meetups if they could afford to do it. And especially if we had an open source blueprint on how to run an event and we did promotion and development for you.

i truly believe we need a viable TikTok and Instagram competitor. people want to leave those platforms. they hate the censorship and the banning, but no viable alternatives exist. Bluesky is building them and they're gaining traction though. we're going to miss out again. we need to empower creators and give them the tools to on-board their community. sadly, i don't think we're ready in this area, yet. many of our apps need more polish.

we keep building alternatives, which i think is incredibly important, but i also think we need something that's truly unique or at least offers a truly unique spin on an existing use case. if i knew what this less obvious app would be, i would vibe code it ASAP.

i've vibe coded two nostr apps and i love this capability. im calling it advanced prototyping. i can build anything as an advanced prototype or proof of concept and then a more talented developer can work on the project or take my idea and run with it. it's amazing.

my apps are https://zappix.app and https://yakbak.app

zappix is an image sharing application. i plan to add flix or short videos.

yakbak is a voice messages application. (the audio won't load until you login with nostr. this is a new bug.) both are very new and buggy, but as a proof of concept, they're pretty great.

Stacker.news used to do these invites that would allow someone to signup and the invite would include like 500 sats to post and comment. Do you think a similar thing could be applicable to nostr?

Didnt get to edit og post in time

thanks brother. im glad to see you more active on nostr lately.

hmm. you really generated you keys on that date? are you sure it wasn't 12-28-22?

I don't know, when are you inviting me down for a Nostr event at Bitcoin Commons :) Maybe we'll do another music event in December? I'll talk to OpenMike about that one. Also, we are currently in talks with the team from LAUNCH for their upcoming Dallas event in Texas in the fall.

i use a wide variety of nostr apps on the daily an weekly, so this is pretty hard to answer. i'm going to say my favorite nostr app right now is Notedeck from the Damus team. it's my number one used desktop app. i use it daily, having it open all day long.

why is it my favorite? because of it's potential for not only power users, but for developers and for every day users too. Notedeck is a nostr browser, but looks and feels like a 'Tweetdeck' app having multiple configurable columns and decks.

it's still early and needs more features to be well rounded for everyone, but im bullish on it's potential to keep me organized and help me never miss a note or piece of content from nostr.

im really excited to see what developers and non-developers build for Notedeck.

We just hit 5 million zaps sent on Nostr. Our community is the largest by transaction volume in the world.

But as for Bitcoin itself, I'd like to see wider Bolt 12 adoption on Lightning

fwiw It's not a matter of convincing us of anything. It's a matter of priority.

Our medium term goal is to add a read-only relay of everyone's content here, like crossposting on steroids, like SN is a layer that provides a nostr backup of everything, so that people who think our servers are going to disappear or are afraid of what happens if they choose to leave SN, can feel more comfortable. It's just not as trivial as saying the words make it seem.

I'm sorry we're behind doing stuff like this ... but we're trying to get noncustodial lightning right first before we start bolting more stuff on that affects core aspects of the user experience, because the noncustodial switch already has the core UX in flux.

tldr We're not going to integrate with nostr for brownie points. We're going to do it because it makes the product better, when we can do it in a way that makes the product better.

i use primal.net, nostrudel.ninja, or notedeck as my primal desktop clients. i mostly use Notedeck. you should check it out. it's still early beta, but it has a lot of potential if you like Tweetdeck style clients with various columns of data and content to consume.

i used satlantis about a year ago. i honestly haven't used it since last summer. i should check it out again. before i would not have considered it much of a nostr client because it didn't post events to nostr, only scrapping data from nostr and allowing nostr login. im sure a lot has changed with it since then. what impressed me most about satlantis was the community vision. that resonated with me and i think it resonates with most bitcoiners. we'd rather get information and reviews from people we know and trust.

i mostly use Amber for Android for storing and managing my key. this is a remote signing application. i don't like to paste my key into random applications.

recently i've been working on on-boarding musicians. they get it immediately. they get that big tech and algorithms are harmful. they see what happens to them trying to make an impact on twitter, instagram, and spotify. they want something different. they understand that bitcoin and nostr are punk rock, opting out of the system. it's an easy sell to be honest.

what makes the sell hard is the amount of polish on applications. user experience and stability are some of nostr's largest issues at the moment. wallet and lightning is a big one, but apps like Primal are making this better.

hey! i would say the absolute easiest way to get on nostr would be to download download Primal or Android or iOS. you can use their built in wallet for zaps if you'd like. it makes it very easy. https://primal.net

when you're ready to go into the rabbit hole, let me know.

Meet Beef is obviously the superior soap fragrance.

two issues.

this seems harsh, but it's a harsh reality.

if you truly cared about decentralization and a revolution, you would use nostr more. you wouldn't care about polish and daily active users, because you're not there for that. you're there for the message. you're there for the revolution. you're there to build a better world.

myman dot gif

There are no books as far as I know, but at least one is coming and Nostr is mentioned by Lyn Alden in her Broken Money book.

I assume you're going to implement NIP-52? Though, I guess you'd have to backdate everything. That shouldn't be a problem. What are you planning to do? Now I'm going to ask the AMA questions :)

what have been the challenges with running a relay? I believe initially I paid to connect to one of yours, and I found it very performant, but I guess it also probably only had a few people on it. what challenges have you see?

an official AMA? i don't believe so, but i post a lot on nostr and im an open book. i like being transparent since i do so much for nostr and i have gotten a lot of zaps and funding for events. because of this, if you ask me something, ill answer it.

i think with the invention of NWC and implementation of it throughout nostr apps and now SN, it levels the playing field. SN used to be superior in this regard.

i think SN should become more of a nostr client :) maybe even migrate to NIP-72 communities. that would be amazing for nostr to be honest. it's always been a dream of mine for tighter integration or for SN to become a full fledged nostr client.

maybe someday SN will be one of GNI's next case studies?

i wanted to desperately make it happen this year since last year kicked off all of these booths after the first one i did at Prague. i tried to work with martin and matyas on this. however, it's truly expensive to do. to have the same size booth as last year i would have needed to raise about $40K USD again.

nostr has no centralized marketing team with funding. nostr has only one or two VC funded companies. im not a rich bitcoin whale. im trying to form a nonprofit.

i couldn't make it work.

nostr is like the web or email with various apps and addresses.

you can use chrome, or safari, or firefox and view the same web pages, but sometimes they'll look a little different.

nostr is like email, where you can use gmail, hotmail, or outlook, etc. and we can all email and communicate with one another.

EVERYWHERE!

The goal is to user Nostr and not realize that you're using it.

Do you know all of the protocols that you're using when you send an email? Maybe you do because you're a tech guy like me, but 99% of the world does not know the answer to this question! And that's how it should be!

Technology works best when it fades into the background.

i guess we don't really know and that's kind of the beauty of it, because entire segments of the network could be hidden behind the Great Firewall of China, for example, and we'd never know. there are also certain relays like Japanese relays, that only allow Japanese IP addresses to connect.

but if you check out https://nostr.watch that will give you a good idea on the size of the network and probably most of the relays that are available.

https://nostr.watch is all that you need

Info is available on https://stats.nostr.band (and surely a few more similar services). It now says 3000+ relays, but it is unclear whether all of them are active.

I was invited to the Global Bitcoin Summit in Nashville last fall, hosted by HRF, thanks to my efforts with Nostr. There, I listened to incredible stories of people using bitcoin as a monetary tool in life or death situations. I was fully orange pilled and purple pilled years before, however listening to these people tell their stories solidified my mission in what I'm doing. Hearing people tell their tales of peril, using bitcoin as a monetary tool, a vehicle for freedom, well that was surreal.

These people need Nostr more than I do. Millions and millions of people around the world need Nostr more than I do. I believe most people in the world need Nostr more than they know that they do, but humans have a problem seeing outside their social circles and outside of their own echo chambers. I learned that it's hard to convince people that they need freedom. You can't do that. They have to see it and experience the need for it themselves.

The Bitcoin Standard The Fiat Standard Broken Money The Blocksize War The Price of Tomorrow

Nostr Nests :)

Nostr Nests is my app. It's barely used though. I have large visions for it, but it's hard when I'm not a full stack developer. I could never find someone to work on it full time or even part time to make it better. Most of the issues are that people don't want to go to a third party website to chat. It's cumbersome doing so. Fully integration into all of the major clients would be ideal.

So far, only one client, Nostur has integrated Nests. Though, the Nests integration in Nostur is fantastic and makes it function just like Twitter Spaces.

Around the middle of December 2022 when Jack Dorsey asked on Twitter what projects needed funding. Many Bitcoin developers mentioned Nostr. Immediately I thought, what the hell is nostr? And, why are these Bitcoin developers so adamant about it needing funding? What's going on?