Been dicking around all day arguing when rando Maximalists on Twitter about the inability of NOSTR to scale. They claim my opinion doesn't matter because I don't know enough about the protocol yet. I disagree! In fact when I asked for a good resource to learn more about it they sent me to the only source that I had already read... the one in which I concluded this thing isn't going to work. How serendipitous.
If you tell me you've built a perpetual motion machine that powers itself I'm going to be a bit skeptical. Everyone knows perpetual motion machines are impossible. So far this is precisely how I view NOSTR: a wannabee perpetual motion machine that believes it can scale to infinity... powered by the delusions of maximalists. Is this an apt assessment? Unclear but I get the feeling it will become more and more clear over time.
All this being said I hope that NOSTR acquires mainstream adoption as fast as possible and has screaming success. Everyone tries to frame open source development as a competition. I find it tedious as it gets injected into every single conversation (especially with maximalists).
Try to tell a maximalist that we've been at this 7 years. What is the automatic response? "Oh you must be jealous of how well NOSTR is doing that's why you say it can't scale." And then I have to remind them for a third time that I WANT NOSTR TO SUCCEED. Seriously mindboggling the conversations you can have with these people. Memory of a goldfish and constant unflinching bias.
The honorable doctor @brianoflondon suggested I download a thing called Getalby to get onboarded onto NOSTR. Looked it up on Google which directed me to https://getalby.com/ turns out it's a chrome extension for the lightning network. This is a good start because I'll be god-damned if I'm going to run my own lightning node... lol.
The above list of NOSTR clients was then presented to me.
I've got to be honest... I am incredibly impressed with how much development has been done already. Honestly this is kind of insane and if them maximalists can keep up this pace then maybe decentralized social media will actually be a big theme of the next bull run. Don't forget... there's no way that a development like that wouldn't help Hive as well.
First I tried Hamstr
Looks like this... decent Twitter clone.
Suck on them apples am I right Threads?
So my goal here is to simply follow one person and actually see that person's notes. In this case I'm going with Edward Snowden since I think it's absolutely hilarious that he likes to troll the crypto degens on Twitter.
Snowden's pub key:
npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9
Easy enough... right?
But then I search for his pub key and it's not there and points me to this other similar pub key. Of course I have some rudimentary knowledge of how this works. Every node (relay) can't store every piece of data on NOSTR. So I need to be connected to a relay that is storing Snowden's data. Imagine how frustrating this would be for a noob that wasn't sure what was going on here.
Alright so Snowden signals to us that we need to use snort.social... whatever that is. No problem... right?
But I go into settings and it very much looks like I'm already connected to that node by default... does it not? Again, new user experience in crypto amirite? At this point I'm like hmmm whatever I'll try another frontend, there were so many on that list.
Wouldn't you know it 'Snort' is right there in the list.
Let's try that.
I'm tempted to cheat and just click that "new users page" and add people... but the original goal was to add Snowden so that's what I try to do.
Nice he's on there it... kinda worked.
Looks like I might need to connect to a node called nostr.build?
NM clicking it just loads it... weird.
Alright sweet so all I have to do is click "Follow"
I click "Follow" and oops nothing happens.
Neat.
I tried another frontend after this that was even worse (YoSup).
However trying it again this time actually works.
Why didn't it work before?
I have absolutely no idea.
It wasn't connecting to Alby to sign the transaction.
I just made a few "Tweets" but I can't see them.
snort.social seems really slow.
Having trouble syncing up other frontends to display the same info.
https://twitter.com/Pacemak3r/status/1629291709140967424
- Pacemak3r
Are you ready for it?
I must abide the results of this Twitter poll.
Who's ready for @predicted on NOSTR.
A maximalist shitcoin hater who hates shitcoins!
lol gonna be so stupid and funny.
I hope I don't get bored of catfishing these assholes.
Conclusion
Okay, I did it, and I'm glad I did! I now have access to a Lightning Network account. Now I will have to look into @brianoflondon's bridge to the Lightning Network. Transfer some corns to this NOSTR account and away I go off into the maximalist sunset! So long, suckers!
Seriously though after going through this process I am a thousand percent more convinced that this protocol is a disaster clusterfuck. I mean maybe they can clean it up a bit but it is the slowest clunkiest thing I have ever used in my life. And guess what? I think it's pretty cool. Not joking.
You know what else is cool?
A Giant Newton's Cradle
Zero utility; all novelty.
But you know what's not cool? Someone trying to tell you that the giant Newton's Cradle is a perpetual motion machine. This is what NOSTR is when mixed with delusional maximalism. It has a lot of momentum right now as a novelty product and many will think it's the future. It's not.
Simply from a user experience perspective it's not going to work. It's harder to onboard than even Hive, and people complain about Hive onboarding quite a bit. It's way less secure too and is only enforced by a single Lightning Network private key. What a nightmare.
Still, NOSTR is one of those products that could really take the narrative by storm into the next bull market. It has the full weight of maximalists behind it, and as I've already shown you the development is blazing fast and downright impressive. It's cool the maximalists finally found something different to build on. They seem excited. It's just the foundation they are building on isn't solid... like... at all.
Again, this is good for Hive. Any mainstream narrative in which decentralized social media is the future could never hurt us. There is no competition here, and as already stated: I hope NOSTR has great success... I'm just... not seeing it. Especially in the long term. Altruism is not a scalable business model. Never has been. This is exactly why open source tech has consistently failed to scale over and over and over again until crypto came along. It lacks monetary incentive. Just ask Linux.
Oh yeah I'm going to fit right in on NOSTR I have a good feeling about this.
kek