few words on Nostr

Starting with the premise that I'm only trying Nostr out as an experiment, so what follows are just first impressions...

what I like

The relative conceptual simplicity of the model; compared to the Fediverse it's definitely more resilient and approachable. The account is simply a key pair: a private one that lets you write, and a public one for reading only. As long as someone accepts you on it's relay (in addition to your own personal one, if you have one, which many don't), you're good, the messages will propagate across the network.

what I don't like

The lack of a complete reference structure to try: as of today, a new user is confused. Even if they have the technical skills to understand the conceptual model, finding a relay that supports a reasonable number of NIPs and a client that is convenient enough to play autonomously is not straightforward at all.

It's no better for the individual software projects, which seem to be a set of different projects started with enthusiasm and then just left there, without a substantial underlying design or an overall vision. They are presented in a very “showcase” style that doesn't suit a FLOSS project, and this is a common problem for many: only a few understand that to make a project work in its early stages, you need to attract those in the know, the nerds, the geeks, not the average person who will only ever be a consumer. While useful for building mass, they aren't helpful for the FLOSS development of something that needs to be structured a bit before reaching the end user. To do that, it needs FLOSS development that includes even distant and marginal contributions, meaning techies, nerds, and geeks who aren't part of the project but try to play around with it, leave serious comments, and suggest good ideas.

what I'd like

First of all, a locally-runnable web app in Go, self-contained and go install-able, that acts as both a relay and a client. This way, any techie, nerd, or geek who wants to test the project can dive right in just like any self-respecting techie, nerd or geek would:

The latter should be hassle-free. And no, Docker is a huge hassle, and NixOS modules that aren't very complete or well-documented aren't any better. The techie, nerd or geek who did a quick test with a go install and liked it will put the web app on their home server or VPS and stick NGINX or something else in front of it. Period. Go is built for this, primarily for writing web apps. Rust is objectively hard to stomach; it could work too, but having 12k dependencies with maybe one of them breaking during a cargo build isn't a good start. Having relays without a client (meaning no UI) isn't great either. Adding an administrative UI to the WebApp to manage the relay wouldn't be a bad idea. Adding a blocklist for spammers and bots without relying on poorly maintained third-party scripts (because they aren't part of the project) that assume the server has node, deno etc, is a problem. It wouldn't be bad if this single, complete web app also supported optional binary content storage, perhaps limited to certain keys, to be truly complete.

If it's not Go, then Python is fine too, but it has to be something damn well self-contained and complete enough to test everything on the fly. People can play with Lego-style modularity and third parties projects later once they've decided to invest time in Nostr.

The second important thing is having documentation for the techie, nerd or geek so they don't have to struggle to find basic info to set up their own instance. Everything should be gathered in one place, at least for the most common NIPs, in a format accessible to someone who knows nothing yet and just wants to give it a try.

The third thing is the UI of the complete web app: it should be a website. In other words, rather than just being a pseudo-Twitter/X-like feed, it should act as a blog in the style of WriteFreely but with comments under every note plus a discussions page, plus chats and notifications. Everything is there, just not arranged in a coherent shape.

Yes, the project is young, but not having this is a sign of modern Silicon Valley Mode development. That's a bad mode to start with because that style of development barely works at a corporate level where management keeps things with a certain structure/focus, but it produces terrible results in general and just doesn't work in the FLOSS world. pp completa: che sia un sito web, ovvero che più di far da feed pseudo-Twitter/X-like faccia da miniblog stile WriteFreely ma con commenti sotto ogni nota, pagina delle discussioni, delle chat, delle notifiche.

if you want to follow me on Nostr...

In any of the nth clients, which should all have a search function, just enter my

nprofile1qyfhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytntveuzuenj9uqzpax4huez7aaz59wlcmj62plrke6apzh4zl4yl6ckcxdy9al6g4xwwt02mz

or alternatively my public key

npub17n2m7v30w732zh0uded9ql3mvaws3t6306j0avtvrxjz7lay2n8qa0pnwf

knowing that my personal relay is wss://nostr.kfx.fr