GM 🌞 Lately, I've been thinking less about building "Nostr" and more about building the free and open web. What does that mean? Maybe a metaphor can help: It used to be that traveling abroad was a big deal; cultures were super different, it felt alien to the traveler and they were challenged (and usually improved) by the experience. Now, in so many places (certainly across NA and Europe) the differences are so small as to be nearly unnoticeable. You have to go to parts of asia, india, or africa to get those experiences. And many of those parts of the world are perpetually held down in service to the western world's economic machine. Building a free and open web to me is about threading the needle of having a globally available communication network that allows information to spread at the speed of light but also allow for small pockets of extremely unique culture & economy to form and flourish. We want to create a substrate for people and agents (machines) to work together, using digitally native money, without any friction from imaginary lines drawn on maps or from whatever bureaucrat thinks they're in charge of our lives at any given moment. Just people and machines working together, of their own volition, on things they think are important. I want to be able to digitally travel to other parts of the web and feel out of my depth, feel challenged, and I want to improve because of those experiences. Our fight isn't against twitter or blue sky, and it's not a fight focused just on Bitcoin either. It's a fight against a globally homogenous future run by a handful of platforms full of newspeak-approved messages and ads.

Replies (18)

MLS would appear to be a pretty fundamental building block there. MLS can be a bridge between Nostr, atproto, Farcaster and others, and MLS can really scale. Example of one of the many ongoing atproto MLS discussions:
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 9 months ago
Have you, by any chance, seen anyone in the atproto space hint at ways to set up MLS groups for non-chat content types?
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 9 months ago
Yeah, that's why I'd look there, if they found a way → it's gonna be easier here. Still wrapping my head around how to group groups 🙃. Having all content types in one group isn't an option (limits we discussed). And having "links" to other MLS groups (of the same group) in the nostr_group_data extension seems like a dumb idea.
I’m not sure what door it is, but there’s exploration happening: Imagine that but with the FROST key signing / bunker… Letting bsky users have a hosted nsec bunker using their PDS. They’re already ok with the server holding their keys. Think of it it as custodial nostr vs non-custodial. Sure the latter is better if you want real security and control, but a lot of folks don’t want or wouldnt manage well self custody. In fact they don’t even have to know.
Really interesting. That makes a lot of sense as an entry point , pitching Nostr as a sort of off-piste thing for a certain subset Bluesky users.