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What Nostr features are essential when deciding which client you want to use?

Seeing things I want fast.

Which client offers the best user experience for you?

Without a doubt Damus. Even though there isn't an algo and I still have to sift through the noisy posters that I follow, at least I don't have to wait for everything to load.

Do you switch between multiple clients or are you loyal to one?

I use damus on mobile, snort on desktop, but then I use iris for notifications because notifications are slow/unreliable on snort for some reason.

Do you use Nostr more or less than other platforms like Stacker News and Twitter?

Less but it's mostly because there's no way to outsource signal discovery on nostr yet.

What is on the top of your Nostr feature wishlist?
  1. Algorithms that work in a decentralized way. The nostr community seems to prefer the idea of algorithm providers but imho that's not much different than the way things work on the web (even if today we're all kumbaya and I can view the algo in whatever client I want) ... I don't want a SPOF, a single point of moderation, a single point of censorship, for the algorithm I like ... imho algorithms done through centralized providers make the protocol way less interesting for social use cases, because it will make desirable social experiences centralized which isn't differentiated from "the way things are currently done."
  2. A coherent strategy for scaling.
  3. Better incentive schemes for running relays. All the attention is on clients and they will capture most of the value unless the protocol enables/encourages sharing that value - and relays pay the biggest real world costs. I think a lot about the internet and how IP has been in stasis for 30 years because ISPs have no financial incentive to "upgrade the internet." In a similar vein there aren't incentives to compete with them ... it is centralizing.
  4. Smarter key management. There's likely a middle ground between a single key pair and DIDs that makes the right tradeoffs.

All of that said, I'm still very excited about nostr and everything that people are building. It's fun! It's also the best thing we've got right now. And everyone willing to speak on the matter seems to think none of these things I've listed are concerns/things nostr needs. So perhaps I'm wrong.

Very useful insights & passages.

It’s easy to be gloomy about China today, given the obvious challenges with economic growth and authoritarian tightening. But I found myself more optimistic about the future while I was in Thailand. Some people are drifting away from China, and many of those who stay are dreaming of better futures. These are creative acts.
A recent Chinese blockbuster made Thailand appear to be a dangerous place to visit, and state media has occasionally amplified that sentiment. To Chinese and other foreigners living in Thailand, it’s absurd to think that crime and danger lurk around every corner because it’s a pretty safe place. They fear that state media is trying to create a pretext to justify a presence for Chinese police in Thailand, rather like how they are sometimes reaching into Mongolia.
Much of China’s present strength rests on manufacturing leadership. If China can’t achieve reasonably high levels of growth, then the manufacturing advantage will dissipate faster, along with many of its other capabilities. And Xi Jinping has formally de-prioritized economic growth as China’s top task.
If we obsessed only over America’s problems, it would be a pretty ugly picture as well.

Essentially it appears to confirm that both great superpowers are turning inwards to shrink the pie rather than looking outwards to grow it.

Definitely a very talented writer, with a knack for compelling stories, hooks & observations. Much more there than the above, but a very worthwhile read. Thanks for sharing!

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LSP > ease of use > non-custodial adoption.

We see that already with Mutiny, Zeus and others implementing LSPs.

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I have become a Go maxi.

After a long time working with Python and NodeJS software and after the initial weirdness (wtf are channels and goroutines and why should I care), it's feels really nice to work in a statically typed language (without generics however ...) again where concurrency support is built-in with goroutines and channels. It feels soooo much better to have a compiler do type checking for you (in a guaranteed way) even if that means you have to define your types first, so you are slower first. But I would trade runtime errors with compile-time errors any time.

Also, the build process spits out a single binary which can be run anywhere where golang is installed (afaik) and the ecosystem is not a complete mess like Python (looking at you, Python package managers) and NodeJS (npm vs. yarn, CJS vs ESM, Javascript vs TypeScript). I also like how imports work in Go. In Python, you run into this circular import issue pretty fast if you don't try to stay ahead of it.

I also tried to learn Rust but the syntax felt rough. When I tried out Golang, I didn't look back.

@theindranetworkprotocol also made me try out Go. If I remember correctly, he also mentioned here and there how awesome Go is.

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