Hey folks, I was gone for a bit taking care of our new baby. What did I miss?
Matt Lorentz
matt@nos.social
npub16zsl...92l7
Technologist, solarpunk, gamer, backpacker, passionate about using the internet to push more power to more people.
I feel like a lot of the problems with social media today have to do with people participating in groups of humans that are too large. If a tribe/community is like <100 people you can probably have relationships with a lot of them and appreciate the diversity within the group. If your tribe/community is like 10 million people then views and identity seem to homogenize and breed problems: us vs them mentality, large volumes of feedback, echo chambers, etc. The human brain doesn’t work very well at that scale.
(side bar: I have pet theory that a lot of the celebrities we see slowly losing their minds in public on social media is caused by their social media addiction. Looking at you, Elon)
Part of the reason we ended up with a bunch of “large group” social media apps is because they mirror Web 2.0 technology architecture. All the data goes on one server and is owned by one company. Web 3 tech like Nostr actually has the opposite architecture, and imo we should be leaning into the scale that humans are optimized for: friends, families, and third space communities like clubs, churches, local activist groups, etc.
Today is my one year anniversary on Nostr 🎂. I’ve been thinking a lot
about my own social media and Nostr usage lately, in large part because @npub1ey39...dq23 has been leading us through product workshops at @nos .
In
the past year I think we've found solutions to most of the technical
problems I was most concerned about when we pivoted our company from
Secure Scuttlebutt to Nostr. These problems being spam, abuse, and
scaling. I think relays are doing a good job mitigating spam, the
decentralized moderation system we've built at Nos seems very promising
for dealing with abuse, and some innovation has been done to support
scaling (like the outbox/gossip replication model, and various set
replication schemes).
On the culture side, I'm just going to say
it - I don't like Nostr's culture. There are loads of lovely people on
here, that's not the problem. I think there are two factors going on for
me:
- Nos and much of Nostr is designed to work like Twitter. I personally don't like Twitter or the global-town-square feeling.
- I feel like no matter who I follow my feed is full of Bitcoin content. Bitcoin is cool, but I'm tired of hearing about it.
I'm
going to take another shot at finding folks on Nostr who don't talk
about Bitcoin. So far I have settled for people who talk about things
I'm interested in *and* Bitcoin but that's not working. This means today
I'm unfollowing a lot of people I really like. If you are one of them,
don't take it personally. I'm looking forward to 2024 being the year I
find "my people" on Nostr.
And you know what, if this resonates
with you maybe we can make it easier to find one another. I added
#nocoin to my Nostr bio, if you want to do the same I will be searching
for other profiles that use this hashtag and give them a follow. They
are easy to see using the Nostr.band search engine:
https://nostr.band/?q=nocoin+++kind%3A0
Plant inventory. Most of these are in desparate need of repotting which is why they are all line up. I’m trying to make up for a year of neglect this week 😅
Finally applied my Nostrasia sticker to my Nalgene. It fits nicely next to Hermies the Secure Scuttlebutt mascot.
One of the most exciting things to happen at @nos lately is the addition of nostr:npub1ey39gym4zlppcsvquqhv0cujnsn6uwuu9z9f4sxkzp5vjy8gfa9sprdq23to the team as our Chief Product Officer! She’s looking for folks to be part of a user research pool to answer questions about their social media usage and help us co-build Nos. If you are willing to contribute please sign up here:
Join nos.social's user research pool
@fiatjaf why does Primal get a big pink button at the top on njump.me?