Chilling and spilling (the beans)
That dude that keeps showing up in your inbox with unfiltered rants...
What’s up good people?
I’m sitting here sipping my late night decaf cup of coffee listening to some smooth beats on Kieran’s live stream and thought… I should write an update to all the good people who continue reading this weird personal newsletter 🤔
So… the update!
I’m working for nostr (and loving it 😻)
Yep. Got a grant and all. Thanks to the super generous people at OpenSats I’ve been able to dedicate all of my time to the protocol! Wild… I’m very grateful to be able to do this and take a break from freelancing for startups.
What am I doing, you ask?
My work is 2-fold:
Create and update
Help existing and new nostr clients improve via audits, advice or hands-on design - basically anything that makes them better.
“Nostr Design” is a resource to help designers and developers wrap their head around various nostr concepts and get their minds working around the various challenges of designing for this protocol. It’s going to take time building this out and I’m super excited!"
Getting Excited for Nostrasia
WTH is nostrasia? It’s a 3-day “unconference” - basically a family-friendly casual conference taking place in Tokyo and Hong Kong Nov 1-3. More info here, not that you care.
You guessed it, it’s for nostr, and a bunch of nostr-obsessed nerds will be there (this cat included).
Ok, I’m not really doing anything for it other than checking that my one carry-on fits everything I need it to fit (I pack light, and f*ck check-ins!)
I mostly look forward to meeting some of the people I’ve been interacting with online for quite some time now.
Nostr is moving at insane speeds
I stopped updating Nostrapps.com because the space is moving too fast and there’s not enough time in the day to keep it all up to date and do all the other things I want to do! I may revisit it later, but for now it’s just idling.
Here’s a super rough, and missing 99% of things recap of what’s going on in nostr:
NDK - a development kit for nostr is up and running and people are using it to build apps.
The Thai community is growing a lot on Nostr. It appears Thai people love nostr 🤷♂️
There are now multiple desktop clients including Lume.
Primal raised 1M for development. Seems tiny by most startup standards but hey, it’s better than 0 😂
Snort, the client I designed primarily now has a native Android app. I designed a ton of stuff for it, but has yet to be implemented. It’s just one dude doing a lot of work.
There are new clients for job boards, “data vending machines” (give it a task and set a price and it fulfills it for you), moderated communities (like Reddit).
A ton of new client interoperability (watch streams in Amethyst, see when someone is streaming in Snort, etc…)
You can set account statuses (hello MySpace), see what someone is listening to (Apple Music integration).
A ton of interesting people are joining constantly, many seem to be models (I’m choosing to believe they are real 😂😂😂)
Yeah, it’s still not moving super fast in terms of growth, nowhere near the levels of Blue Sky, and yes there is probably too much bitcoin content for anyone’s liking, but I’m not in a hurry and we’ve got keyword muting rolling out so it’s easy to customize your feed.
Things are still a bit whacky at times
It’s new, and it’s wild, like the early internet. Things break, people laugh and memes are born. It’s fun in all the right ways and doesn’t have any of the bummer feels of X (yeah I snoop once in a while for like a minute and drop off immediately. Sorry!) Not gonna rag on X, Elon is probably doing what he thinks is best, I respect that.
I love nostr because it has a great community and awesome vibes. It’s a breath of fresh air. The fact that I can be in the middle of it day in day out is all I could ask for right now 🙏
What a wall of text! Sorry if you read all the way to the end 😅 I hate this format because I am talking into avoid, imagining your faces, and you can hardly say anything back… like “get out of my inbox!” 😆
Not gonna pitch you, but if you do take the time to explore, let’s connect! I’m under the nym “Karnage” - don’t ask me why… (and don’t tell anyone! hehe)
Have an awesome day! 👋🫡🍕 (mmm, pizza)
Gene