Ok, seems we touched a nerve. We can agree to disagree; that’s fine. My argument in the article is that Nostr needs a better governance model to foster collaboration and provide clarity for newcomers. I mentioned Fiatjaf’s article because it’s another example showing that the community already recognizes problems with the current model.
From my point of view, Nostr needs clearer guidelines and specifications if it expects to be interoperable within a wider ecosystem. The “wild west” approach can remain for experimentation, but that’s why I mentioned the dual-layer approach used in Lightning (BOLTs and BLIPs). I think a similar approach could help people and communities feel comfortable building on Nostr and make it easier for newcomers to participate. It would also help defend and harden the protocol against political and influence attacks, something I think is quite feasible. In fact, rejecting any governance model increases the chance of capture by an organization that can exploit the general confusion and discomfort about “how the hell do I build on Nostr” without having to dig through hundred of unstructured threads, discussions, issues, and PRs to just grasp the rationale and philosophy behind the protocol.
If you read my article with fresh eyes rather than getting triggered, you’ll see that my proposals and key guidelines are intended to improve the clarity of the spec documents, restore attribution to organically create reputation, and define clear lifecycles for new proposals that expect to be interoperable. I’m not advocating for a “Nostr steering council” or anything like that. I mention these projects (peps, rfcs) because they effectively manage large ecosystems; even if Nostr isn’t that large yet, it will need some structures if we don’t want it to collapse as it grows.
Also, Conway’s Law describes a symptom of capture: complex projects tend to take the shape of the organizational structures that design them. This ties into the “embrace, extend, extinguish” methodology I mention in the article.
In short: it’s not about bureaucracy, it’s about resilience.
PS: LNURL specs are confusing too
