In every Nostr project, there is this moment when the dev realizes that Nostr's decentralization is quite a burden and the project could be faster, simpler, and better if it didn't use Nostr at all. The dev then starts to drift away from Nostr into their own protocol spec, just to realize that they are now alone—the single user of a new protocol/platform—and most of the benefits of a decentralized social layer are gone. It's weird how much we underestimate the social benefits of Nostr in exchange for minor engineering benefits in our own projects.

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Mirrors Blockchain development. "Hey wouldn't this Bitcoin thing be better if there were instant transactions?" ... leads to massive centralization, and effectively a return to previous models.
The social benefit is good: Plug an app to Nostr and that app has an instant audience pool; The kind that Threads has because of Instagram. This is the thing what attracted me to be here, studying Nostr. But I realised that nobody would use AskNostr over Reddit, if it’s slower, or if the search algorithm is not there; Yes it’s cool to build something, but you have to be in love with the problem rather than with its solution - many app developers fall into that trap