Absolutely. The Nostr protocol is a social protocol. It is 100% the secret sauce that makes it exciting. Especially with the flexibility it offers, and payments built-in. But it also creates developer space that leads to nowhere. “Omg check out what I can do with my HTTP app!” says nothing to a potential customer. “Play games with friends, trade and chat on all your devices” says something to a customer (demand and product TBD)

Yes. SuperApps are an over-and-over-again fail outside of WeChat. People thing purposefully: chat with friends, use chat app; order food, use food app.

Case in point: posts a couple of notes for the first time in a while, gets a load of bot follows and bullshit spam DMs. Yes, Twitter and Telegram have these problems, too, but that’s the same as “the restaurant next door has shit service, too”.

Yes. This experience is shit. As is the 3-4 different NIPs for DMs. I used to keep up to know the difference, but why should I? I’m basically only interested in White Noise as a project now, and absolutely no one’s using it. For me, Nostr as an ecosystem is pretty lost right now. Like Mastodon 10 years ago (and Mastodon is still nowhere).

Yes, I see potential for Nostr in B2B with multi-sig backup, lightning backup, etc. — not sure that’s a $100m+ business idea, however? Unless maybe someone builds the Snowflake or AWS equivalent of broad-based cryptographically-secure and distributed backup solutions? Like a Backblaze competitor, maybe? IDK I also think NWC is woefully under-utilised. Just seems to be an project that no one else gives a fuck about — which is a great shame. It seems to me to be extremely powerful, but the UX needs to be *way* more “Sign in with Google” and much less “Scan this QR/paste this string”.

Thanks for flagging Shosho. I’m looking, which is why I’m posting — nothing Antidote has been willing to back, yet. ZBD Social wasn’t needed for games with Nostr to succeed. That’s still compliant payments. When I think big, I think an EVE Online relay could speak to a Star Citizen relay… but that’s a way off and valuable use case for gaming still TBC. The low-hanging fruit is replicating what Zynga did with Words with Friends, but totally platform agnostic. It wouldn’t be the first game that demonstrates why this is powerful (the first Nostr game just needs to be a good game; it doesn’t even need Nostr). It would be games two and three that blow it up. Clash of Clans then Guilds of War, or whatever you want to call it, but with persistent guilds. And payments. And chat. Saves game devs massive of custom build effort, potentially. But the back-end is orders of magnitude less important than very, very strong game design.

These days, I tend to only find time to engage with Nostr when on holiday. That’s sort of just life, nowadays, but also a symptom of the fact that there are zero products to create daily engagement. For example: 1. Nothing new in social. Nostr does *not* have the social graph to compete, so it has to be innovation or games that drive engagement. There’s no innovation, and there are no games of note. 2. Productivity tools. This could be significant, but no one in Nostr seems to give a shit, because it’s just a big Bitcoin echo chamber. 3. Creator economy. Also could be good, but every project I see goes down some weird psychodrama path where there’s too much obsession with key ownership, anonymity or some other area that isn’t the problem a creator economy platform is meant to solve. The protocol is not the app. Are you working on the protocol, or are you creating an app? So many parallels with the Bitcoin ecosystem (unsurprisingly) as well.

Nostr clients still suck. Primal got worse, not better. Everything a poor twitter clone isn’t the way forward. Exciting projects: White Noise (stalled? No one cares?), NostrVPN, diVine (bad name, bad launch), zapstream, GitHub replacements… Nostr as “more-than-socials” basically. The medium/substack clones aren’t a big enough market.