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601 sats \ 9 replies \ @justin_shocknet 2 Sep \ 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...
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Does not need to be visual at all if that's what you mean. Design happen in different way ad provide different outcomes. I feel you are progressing really well, especially now that you are in the phase of receiving real feedback from users. Have you tried recruiting on ~lightning or other node-runners groups online? I know there are many on telegram too.
A single line to paste with fun colors in the script seem to have made it approachable.
That's the way. Are these changes already released?
Start9's/Umbrels get close on most of the above criteria
Do you mean we are going to see it soon dockerized for the respective app stores?
I really look forward to testing out all your products' suite, I'll need to dedicate some time to it. What's the best way to signup for testing?
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I post sporadically when we push something that curious folks already in the trenches might want to play with and get a temperature check. I've never recruited much to be respectful of peoples time and not burn leads since I usually have a good idea what we want to do next. I lean more Cathedral than Bazaar, time will tell if that was right to do or not.
Latest script hasn't been merged yet, hope to get in the flow again today/tomorrow and merge that. Wallet has a big change in the works too, so I'll only put out materials (video and write-up) once everything feels right end-to-end and I won't feel I'm wasting folks time.
There's a unique challenge with this kind of stack in that once somethings out there it's can ossify quickly in some ways, There's a body trail of good projects that have had development grind to a halt being mired in remedial tech support for a modest base at the expense of potential scale.
Start9's/Umbrels
Yes, this has been on the agenda forever but I think churn is finally slowing down enough that we're really pushing to get it out the door. There's ancillary services we need to add in to make it supportable and leave a good impression with newcomers, so we haven't wanted to open the flood gates with these just yet.
Everything is public on Github, but https://t.me/ShockBTC and https://x.com/ShockBTC are the closest things to an official channel. Of course any materials will be posted here on SN as well.
I do need help with comms, someone that can pull what's interesting out of my head on a regular basis and put it out there for consumption... it doesn't come naturally to me without prompting and even that yields these wall of text replies as opposed to more consumable updates.
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Sound's to me you really have a big great plan and I can understand it could be tricky to plan ahead and deliver, considering all the things that need to be orchestrated.
I mentioned nodes OS because simply they offer an app store, that is a good alternative to the big2 currently dominating the market. For example, Shockwallet could be easily listed in @franzap's zap.store, it will probably reach the audience you aim to help.
Comms are really important because it represents what you want others to know about the project(s). It definitely needs to be plan -strategically. Getting some support will free your mind from something that, as you said, is not in your nature.
Are you using any tool to organize all the projects and all the todos each one need? Sometime even a simple agenda or a whiteboard can help.
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Dunno how I missed this notification...
Yea definitely need help prodding the comms, I thought about making an AI bot that prompts ME from time to time... might be easier to slide into a comms cadence when the product can convert at a higher rate.
We use the free tier of Trello for a kanban board, not super dilligent with it but I find it a good place to dump thoughts in an ideation queue sometimes late at night. Helps my team see priorities too and we can take async conversations there specific to tasks.
I've been using LLM's more and more to talk through an idea, then have it dump a mermaid diagram, which I pipe into excalidraw to edit as a whiteboard. (the one on CLINKme.dev actually I did like this)
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AI bot can be useful, but consider the AI taste will be felt in the audience side. It usually cold and tasteless, full of useless emoji that try to compensate. I'll keep it simple for now, even one update a month about the progress will be much more appreciated than a daily automated bot.
Kanban boards are great for note keeping and prioritization in the long term.
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I would love to see more wallets adopt CLINK offers. The self hosted Alby wallet lets me share my node with family in a way that gives them each a unique lightning address that works in almost all lightning apps. The fact that all the addresses are @getalby.com lightning addresses is more centralized than I’d prefer, and it seems CLINK would fix that. However, at this point in the adoption cycle it makes sense to keep using Alby Hub for the more widely accepted lightning address and NWC support. I’ll keep checking in from time to time though and hope for more CLINK adoption. Keep up the awesome work.
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Thanks!
fwiw our Lightning Addresses are still LNURL compatible and should work with anything, there's a fallback via a bridge, you just lose the trustless-ness so it's the same as Alby who provides a bridge.
Might look at a NWC wrapper for CLINK debits to get things rolling there
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I looked into the bridge but didn’t want to deal with configuring a reverse proxy. Would be great for everything to just work over nostr. I guess you’re saying use the bridge you’re already hosting, which as you pointed out isn’t any different than the trusted getalby addresses. The NWC credentials are nice for the family and friends to be able to plug into stacker news and other nostr apps for the funding source. A CLINK wrapper for that would be nice.
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