this is true

Those zaps would need to be bigger than most of the grants.

They should. Folks here are fighting for pennies. I mean, honestly, even in Germany, where salaries are relatively lower than in the US, how much would a Senior QA person like you earn? Around €100k a year base, at least in Berlin or Munich? And you’re going way, way, way beyond quality and testing here on Nostr. Plus, you have other people working with you. So I don’t see why anyone would expect something as ambitious as, say, Alexandria to get off the ground purely with grant money as, even in this awful market of ours. We need to move beyond the amateur Web3 full-stack TypeScript/Deno "vibecoder on a shoestring budget" phase before we can even start talking seriously about V2V on Nostr. Other than for maybe six people, Nostr is an absolute value sink for anyone building anything right now. And love, passion, and motivation alone aren’t sustainable long-term. We need a mix of proper businesses (beyond L2 payment stuff) and FOSS culture here. If Nostriches can buy raw milk, tallow soap, etc., they can also zap, say, 100k sats to the devs of the projects they use a few times a year. If enough people do this, Nostr becomes its own thing instead of just a BTC payment solution marketplace.

the community has already pushed away an absurd amount of competent people over the past decade. they're not coming.

Yea i might be one of the few crazies that don’t give a rats ass 🙈

To the builders that don't give a rats ass! 🍻

"Fat zap them" - but who is gonna zap? Will you zap them regularly with decent amounts so they can pay the bills without fiat contracting job? I think this is why those grants are there

I'm zapping way, way, way more than the average Nostrich... Plus I have been maintaining a lot of Nostr software. Can't do it alone though. And Grants won't pay my bills either, not in the UK. You know what could? Like 10 USD a month * one third of the regulars here on Nostr. That could pay for the bills of a lot of devs and operators. You know how many people do this? Well, none is doing it for anything that I built or maintained so far. You know how many people zap more on AI Generate memes and garbage copied from X than on Devs? A whole lot of people.

you propose we keep them around by zapping them $1k/day?

For a full-time senior developer in HCOL areas in the US (New York, San Francisco, etc.), yes, or at least close to it if you’d expect them to work 40+ hours a week, just like they would at Big Tech or Major Banks. Nostr already has plenty of active npubs. How many active users do we have right now, around 30k? If 10k of them paid $10 a month, that would be enough to fund three full-time developers; say, Fiafjaf and a couple of core US-based devs. Alternatively, you could fund six people in Germany, twelve in South America, or even more across most of Asia. Or a mix of all that. You could also have part-time developers... lots of possibilities. And as Nostr grows the funding would increase. Whatever the setup, I think donations should flow directly from plebs to devs . Not from BTC companies, not from billionaires, not from private equity and VC Funds. Otherwise, we’re essentially saying that Nostr (both the the protocol and the ecosystem) isn’t worth $10 a month to its users. And if that’s the case, then honestly, there are already plenty of centralised, extractive social media solutions out there with a much better architecture than Nostr for the "ADS and User data extraction" use cases