My daily experience on nostr:
- open coracle
- see stupid take on nostr development/grants/specs
- write a response explaining how stupid the take is
- delete it
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Replies (14)
chilling effects are working!
Yes. And I do wish the incentives around grants were better (they don't generally result in very good products). But grantors/grantees aren't the enemy. People who say they are are just virtue signaling and/or being marxists.
No, but I wish people on the internet weren't wrong so often
Yes, I'm also very wrong, very often as well. It's the default human state.
The intention was always to corrupt.
When works are built in service to others, value propositions are realised.
if you already wrote it, why not posting it?
Because I am too tired to continue arguing with the same people about the same things for multiple years running
I gotcha. I'll write one that I often think about.
Re grants: I believe one of the takes that is not talked about enough, besides a few individuals that non stop complain about grants, though they have a couple good points, but fail to communicate them in a constructive manner, is that grants essentially allow devs to be allowed to fail and continue to get funding.
This has both positive and negative impacts.
Positive: it's going to take a lot to failures and iterations before being successful. That is part of the process and there's nothing wrong with failure. It's how we learn and grow.
Negatives: the incentive to succeed is gone or misaligned, because you're getting paid no matter what. It doesn't matter if you spend a year building a failing app and no one uses it, you still go paid.
I've been a small business owner. If I didn't succeed, my family wouldn't have food or a place to live. Those were my incentives to succeed. Grants take some of that out of the equation.
I am indirectly paid with grant money.
For me personally, I took a risk and quit a job of 16 years where I could have worked for another 14 and retired. I don't want to go back to that life. I also have a family. These two points are what drive me to succeed. If I don't succeed, if we don't succeed, then the money goes away and I have to go back to the fiat mines. I can't do what I love to do. I can't continue to pursue my passion.
I think grant funding is needed. I think it's a better path forward than VC money. I think we are all so absolutely blessed and lucky to be at the receiving end of Jack's philanthropy and for this I will be forever grateful.
But I also feel we need to collectively step the fuck up. It's time.
And at Soapbox, we are full steam ahead and not slowing down. We bust our ass every single day. If something doesn't work, we move on to the next app or product. We iterate fast and often, trying to break out of our bubble.
Everyone wants muh users for nostr but that's a fiat/corporate mindset. Sovereign/sustainable computing is way cooler, and the thing that nostr and AI actually enable. It would be wonderful if schools taught kids what cryptographic identity was and how to write programs to solve your own problems. It would also be cool if we had good programming tools that were expressive and not just dozens of layers of garbage. In an ideal world, lisp/asm > js/swift/kotlin.
At the same time, attention/focus/competency/UX comes from money, and money comes from users. Everyone thinks user acquisition is a marketing problem, but it's not. It's a product discovery problem. What is cool about nostr, why might people want it, and what problems need to be solved in order for it to work? This is why I'm perennially bullish about signers, and constantly disappointed by every signer other than Amber (but also Amber) and clients with poor signer support or UX (pretty much all of them — it's an unsolved problem).
Anyway, this is why I try to focus. I'm trying to make Flotilla a Really Good Product. Unfortunately I'm just one person who is missing a lot of the skills necessary to do this, funded at level that is dwarfed by my competitors (discord, slack, matrix, etc).
The "funding is bad" people do have a point — zero funding would force us to lean into the small computing approach, which could be a good fit for nostr ultimately, and "good" in a zero-reach max-idealism sense. But by the same token that route comes with with a market cap of zero. Funding allows ICs like me to aspire to greatness (although realistically even the most elite grantees will arrive at mediocrity/mere profitability at best). To me, a small business serving real users and helping spread sovereignty is a win. But make up your own mind, do you want users or do you want cypherpunk hobbyist sovereign linux utils?
I don't know, don't @ me, send tweet.
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very much agree. also, devine is a very interesting dude
You should try building on Pubky.
why delete it?
Have you tried arguing with new people on new topics? :)