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251 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 10h \ on: What creative ideas have you been rambling on? Design
May not sound design-y but I've been pretty locked in for a few weeks on Lightning.Pub and ShockWallet distribution with regards to on-boarding new node-runners.
Trying to keep my giga-brain focused on one thing for an extended period with so many irons in the fire might be the biggest challenge, particularly where the chasm between being in the weeds on something for years and then putting yourself in the users shoes is so massive.
Last year before Nashville I threw together a bash script for Pub that got people set up in minutes. Response to this was great, I think for a few reasons:
- It's fast, people like to try things but also don't want to sink a lot of time into trying things
- It's easy but feels hackerish and cypherpunk... there's an element of ego to what people are willing try, a non-technical user watching a shell print so smoothly makes them feel elite, but if it looks too technical they'll be afraid to fail. A single line to paste with fun colors in the script seem to have made it approachable.
- It's powerful, "the juice is worth the squeeze". The features of our stack are without rival, so incorporating things like the nprofile directly in the output expand peoples notions of what's possible and make them feel like insiders who are onto what's next.
- It's cheap, Start9's/Umbrels get close on most of the above criteria but still leave a hole in that a casual can't just spin up a $3/month VPS if they fear commitment.
I spent most of last week on v.2 of this script to make it more robust and made it even faster:
#1196169
Can now literally spin up, connect to, and invite friends/family to your own self-hosted Lightning system in under a minute... which also means sharing the overhead (actually earn revenue) unlike other express options that have typically taken the form of mobile nodes.
It's in a pretty good place, got it passing tests on all the major Linuxes and ARM chips over the weekend.
The latter part of the journey, like tweaking node settings and making a social-like node-profile is next up.
There's also the wallet component to this since this is where the management lives and also the ingress for your guest users. The way we've dealt with nostr in the wallet for connection hasn't really leveraged any of nostr's identity components and therefore have made it less intuitive than it should be. This also ties in with our Sanctum service for nostr that bridges the gap for people that are not inclined to deal with key management.
Coming from this as a tech native trying fit in the users shoes makes it feel much more like i'm designing a game or scenes in a movie. Changing any part of the story necessitates all the other plot points fit. This wall of text is just an excerpt, wallet side gets into things like the Lightning Address bridge, actual user-space to take advantage of Nostr offers.. and so much more...