Ever since I started designing #SatShoot back in 2023 I've been thinking about how markets come alive and what makes them flourish from first principles. All I saw back then is that most commerce was happening on big corporate platforms whether it be digital or physical products. Amazon. Ebay. Facebook Marketplace. Etsy. Fiverr. Upwork. And probably dozens more. I was not satisfied with this in the least: I myself ran a business on Shopify for a while so I had hands on experience what it means to be on the small merchant side of these platforms. Constant grinding on the latest algos, trying to manage multiple distribution and advertising channels, while trying to make a new and exciting product that stands out. It's almost impossible to keep up. But anytime someone came up to our shop we provided an excellent customer experience, and we had good relationships with a couple of important figures in our industry. They spread the word around. This contributed to most of our sales and recognition. - NOT the algo - NOT the shiny Shopify theme with optimized SEO - NOT that new Facebook campaign that had X amount of impressions and "funneled" people in. Sorry guys but this is a fucking myth and you better face the fact that these platforms don't want you to succeed. They want to milk you and your connections and your ideas and innovations as long as they can, then throw you away. How to break the network effects of these fiat platforms? The answer is very simple but not easy at all: We must recreate bottom-up organic markets from grassroots communities based on authentic relationships. NO platform will do this. NO politician can make this happen. NO social media viral bullshit circus will help you. It might give you the dopamine hit of 15-minutes fame then scam you into building your life on their walled garden. Nostr *can* achieve this but not by default: If you think technology will bring you salvation on its own you will be sorely mistaken and disappointed. It's always the people. The ones who care. The thousand true fans. YOUR thousand true fans. Not the number of clicks, shares, impressions, and views. Nostr has the right elements to build on but currently it still lacks authentic connections and grassroots communities. It's fun to shitpost memes and fight over petty protocol minutiae but who's going to put in real effort to make real communities happen? We're still playing the game of big tech overlords until we do. Individuals make communities that form markets. There's no other way. View quoted note →

Want to build your own sovereign community around your software project? Tired of having to use GitHub with a separate set of social tools like Discord, Telegram or Matrix? Take a look at

BudaBit

BudaBit - Sovereign software communities

BudaBit helps sovereign software communities ship the future with community chat, issues, pull requests, and repo workflows built on Nostr.

BudaBit takes a community-first approach to software development unifying public collaboration with deep nostr-git integration and community-curation as a first-class feature: - Create and manage Git Repos existing on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea/Forgejo and self-hosted servers. Import your existing ones with ease! Keep projects mirrored on multiple servers powered by Nostr nip34! - Code browsing, Issues and PR workflow - Full-fledged Moderation UX with fine-grained content-scoped permissions - Chat rooms, Forum Threads, Event Calendar and Fundraiser goals. Everything to keep your contributors and fans engaged! Get funding support from the thousand true fans and reward them with your own bespoke badges! - The community can curate important Repos and code snippets to its own collections. Admin and moderators can grant access to members to distribute the effort - Running Community infrastructure is optional but a good opportunity to monetize your efforts with a paid #blossom server, relay or git remote - No special relay needed like with NIP29 groups! ... Soon Nostr-based CI! Anyone will be able to offer CI via nostr offering it free for selected people or for #Cashu ecash! There's no real reason to stay locked into platforms now! Join the developer community network, running exclusively on Open Protocols! #openprotocoldevelopment #opd #BudaBit

Creating communities with content-level moderation and curation options is really hard. But I do think it is worth the effort because your role in the group as a member or moderator actually matters and comes with responsibilities. Mirrors real life so much better! If you want to see how real communities are made have a look at https://budabit.club. Peek in the BudaBit community or create your own test group to witness what I mean. Feedback appreciated! #budabit

A platform is highly stable but very much trusted to one entity. Freedom tech is an attempt to introduce multiple user-facing entities to solve the same user need: A marketplace app can offer remote signing, relay choices, ecash mints, Lightning services and blossom servers for media - none of those he is responsible for. This reduces stability but offers optionality - more freedom. The key is designing a system that is flexible but stable enough. The missing piece in Nostr to become usable freedom tech is communities. They are pillars of stabilization without capturing the user in a platform that packages everything into one product. Communities are not faceless companies and provide a much stronger model for nostr to not be a completely chaotic mess neither a platform. Look at the client app you are using right now: Try to count how many pieces it contains that you use directly. You can ask your agent if the source code is available. And then count how many people you actually exchanged words or messages with, that are responsible for those pieces. The number of user-facing entites a solution contains has a practical minimum and maximum. I cannot call Freedom tech where this entity number is one. That is a platform. But usable software has an upper limit as well and this is something we still have to explore. Software following protocols like Nostr can increase this number and still be usable. They are "APIs over APIs". But realistically we can hardly agree globally about almost anything and the NIPs repo is the proof of that. A community bundles the choices of the leader - someone who truly cares and has taste. They reduce the burden of choice in freedom tech. This models nature best and I can hardly imagine "sovereign identities" without any community association at this point. Not even for communities. They can form relationships with others as well, and they should.

Cryptography doesn't eliminate the need for trust. It merely lowers the cost of verification. It's a huge difference. Some people think they can somehow completely eliminate the need for trust once their new cryptographic scheme will prove sound or their new system be implemented. It's a red herring. If you take for granted that there are no perfect solutions just tradeoffs, you will design it right because you know you must distribute trust in the system *somewhere*. In other words: verification has a cost, and in real life you always have oracles asserting things you cannot fully verify. We live in a fundamentally uncertain world. What we can do is accept some fundamental limitations and get the most out of the rest.

Shipping software or seeking interesting technical conversations rather than a doomsrcoll experience? Now is the time to join or create your own moderated sovereign community, just a few clicks:

BudaBit

BudaBit - Sovereign software communities

BudaBit helps sovereign software communities ship the future with community chat, issues, pull requests, and repo workflows built on Nostr.

#grownostr #devstr #communikeys cc @Gamma Markets @TollGate @FIPS @fiatjaf We have been polishing community UX for a while now, and I can say #BudaBit is already a fully usable community experience with nip34 #gitvianostr deeply integrated. We'll keep being laser-focused on high-signal easy-to-moderate technical communities so the future won't be locked into walled gardens like github. Keep shipping.

The problem with social media of any kind is that we by default become politicians in a lose-all game of popularity, spiraling into a race to the bottom. Nostr can change that but not by trying to fit the protocol to social media. It's the right primitives used in the wrong way and it is destined to fail. What we need is strong communities forming resilient networks, with easy forking/exit guarantees. As for specs NIP29 and 72 were close but not quite there. I am betting hard on #communikeys from now on designed by @Niel Liesmons , slightly tweaked and extended to my taste. The most important primitives are in place, now testing moderation features and adjusting #BudaBit to this spec. You can already start a community at

Budabit

Budabit

Social Git collaboration on Nostr

to or look at the BudaBit community: ncommunity://0a8ecba4868c13e1e84cc5cb58c02c1fd0880d9e5a25a5050ee96ad8a166d7c8?relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.primal.net%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fnos.lol%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fbudabit.nostr1.com%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.damus.io%2F

Package managers and platforms getting rekt over and over again. The "Trusted third parties are security holes" mantra playing out. But what can we do? Ditching these big platforms and service providers would leave a big hole for the ecosystem. The classic issue of getting addicted to something and suddenly realizing that cold turkey is really painful. This is true on so many levels, not just software engineering. Living in big cities, sending our children to state-licensed schools, buying food in supermarkets. Platforms. Faceless services. Monolith companies. Too many layers of abstraction. Too far removed. Of course we will have serious trust issues and backlashes from this system but we can't make a decent alternative based solely on the "Sovereign Individual". It's a myth. In real life only concerted effort makes substantial changes in the way we do things. Satoshi had like a thousand serious bugs in Bitcoin when he released it. It was a genius design. But it needed years of polish from hundreds of people in the community to make this usable today. And still does. The missing layer has always been the community. Those dozens or at most hundreds of ride or dies. These Communities can form a network that produces proper liquid markets and a culture without the central points of failure and the chaotic mess of what it means to do this all by yourself. Sovereign Individuals don't exist. Tyranny is terrible but it's the default. Community networks is the antidote. It's the model of #BudaBit

I like nutzaps because: 1. Better verification assuming the mint is widely trusted - > reputation builds up 2. Still some degree of plausible deniability: You could say ecash doesn't equal real money, it's an IOU (not a lawyer) 3. No peel-chain type of privacy leak like with Bitcoin 4. More stable from a developer standpoint because there is no third party involved in the publishing of the zap receipt like with LN zaps 5. Funny name LN zaps: - Less verifiable probably due to random LN nodes posting the zap receipt - Worse stability of receipt structure : it is third party publishing with whatever tags they want. You can just propose the event as a client app - Better deniability due to the above Onchain: - Very strong verifiability - Privacy ramifications most users can't calculate beforehand - Future fees and waiting times if bitcoin succeeds Most use a custodian LN wallet (99.9%) anyway and there's really no way to abstract away the privacy consequences of onchain so ecash is my winner. View quoted note →

The new GitHub will not be another platform. It will be a paradigm shift: The Community Network model. Platforms have easy onboarding but are walled gardens destined to rot. The current model of Nostr apps is Chaos As a Service, or a fallback to platform behavior with global services and hardcoded relays. It's the right ingredients but not the right model. We can do better: The missing layer is communities. Communities on nostr are neither tyranny nor chaos. If done well they are they cornerstones of a new way to exist on the internet. They can provide essential infrastructure and they are the trusted entrypoint to nostr. Not a faceless app, and not a server. Leaders caring for their groups. The network of these provides a distributed yet consistent system overall. Not giant metropolitan cities and not weak scattered villages. City states. More later. View quoted note →

The exodus from GitHub has begun. People are complaining: "Again, a platform that we used to build our reputation and discover new stuff and make high-stakes decisions has rugpulled us..." But the people are looking for the next GitHub not realizing what it truly was: - Hosting - Team Collaboration - Community - broader exploration and interactions beyond the team The next "GitHub" should be separate services / apps / projects and sharing identities and important metadata formats. Nostr has the most clean-cut separation and the best design long-term I believe. But it makes all of these aspects their own marketplaces (and even more like CI) and those take a lot of time and effort to bootstrap. Will #gitvianostr succeed? I am not sure but in times like this we have a chance to take a step forward.

Both AI users and providers will learn the hard way how subscription hell works. It will hit both ways and it will be painful. For us, it's another lesson how getting away from reality has serious ramifications. For Anthropic and OpenAI it might just be too late though.

People are whining about centralized enshittified platforms like citizens of a democracy about politicians. Especially GitHub lately. Solution? According to whining users of subsidized CI and hosting, the people are at fault: Replacing the scapegoats and getting better leaders. Perhaps migrate to another platform if this doesn't work. Cypherpunks write code and design protocols. They realize that the given word is not enough because relying fully on it incentivizes empty promises. This spirals into a chaotic world without any trust whatsoever. We build software that requires low trust, so people can trust each other and the system again: A system not merely based on people but cryptography. Bitcoin is the flagship product of the cypherpunks. Nostr-based markets and communities make coordination of prices and people unstoppable. It's the natural next step for freedom to flourish. Keep shipping

The Github situation is getting worse gradually then suddenly:

Mitchell Hashimoto

Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub

But Bluesky is not sleeping on this, they have been building out 'tangled' - social software collab similar to #gitvianostr . And they recently got a funding boost as well: The problem exists, and we got the right primitives to answer the need: - NIP34 - Grasp Some clients: - https://Gitworkshop.dev -

BudaBit

BudaBit - Sovereign software communities

BudaBit helps sovereign software communities ship the future with community chat, issues, pull requests, and repo workflows built on Nostr.

/

Budabit

Budabit

Social Git collaboration on Nostr

But we need more user feedback to improve, and more people talk about how Nostr solves this problem really well. Possibly more contributors if your time allows. I seriously think this is a great chance to get a bunch of new high-value users on Nostr. What's your answer anon? Keep going hard, keep building and keep shipping

Platforms have been enjoying a lot of success selling convenience for lock-in. This era is coming to an end with AI. Projects don't want lock-in in a world where custom solutions can be built in days. All they need is infrastructure. Bespoke compute and storage. So the ultimate platforms to get rid of are the Amazons and Microsofts of the world. We need to make a competitive free market for infra and Nostr can solve this problem really well. Without permissionless pubkey-addressed discovery AI is useless slop at best, a threat to humanity at worst. We build pieces of this future with #gitvianostr and #BudaBit.

PSA: Nostr is much more resilient than Bitcoin. Many people find this hard to believe but it's really simple to reason about: Bitcoin must come to a global consensus on the state of its ledger. Simply put, money must be universal. Nostr does not have this requirement of a consolidated 'global'. Stuff can be distributed anywhere and people still have their own microcosm of Nostr, even when others don't know about you at all.

Nip17 only works if ecash stamps proliferate. Otherwise it is trivial to spam relays into oblivion with giftwraps. As I said before: you pay (ecash, or by self hosting) or trust (eg web of trust relay, uncle jim, group relay). No other way I see around this. Also it is worth putting DMs in context: - Is it for a p2p marketplace? - A dissident / freedom-fighter group? - A developer community? - A group for random cat-memes? - One-to-one, few-to-few or many-to-many? Don't think black and white, and don't think that one spec rules all. It almost never is the case.

AI doom is now more justified but not because it is AGI. I don't expect the LLM architecture to solely bring about AGI but it will contribute to it. AI is dangerously useful for good and bad intentioned people as well. Depends on the perspective: - Dangerous for the state because it can be used to escape the control of the system - Dangerous for freedom-loving people because it can be used for mass surveillance, censorship, and engineering panics and psy-ops on a large scale Personal responsibility is key (pun intended) now more than ever.