This is a good question!

Signal is superior because it uses a cryptographic ratchet. Right now if either party had their key hacked the entire conversation history would leak. If someone wants to propose a ratchet-like mechanism for nostr DMs that would be amazing! There's no reason we couldn't build something like signal on top of nostr.

Right now metadata is leaked, you can see who is DMing who and when (just not the content). We have a fairly simple fix for this soon which will prevent people from fetching this information from relays if you're not on of the participants of the conversation. This information is still on the relay though so it's not perfect.

I got into programming for gamedev, so metaverse to me just means an open protocol that you could integrate into game engines or any internet application really.

My proposal (http://git.jb55.com/protoverse) is just an experiment to build a metaverse that is accessible to all, not just people with VR headsets.

You should be able to join the same virtual world with a text, 2d, 3d, or VR client. protoverse was just an initial attempt to see if that's possible.

The metaverse to me is the set of all open protocols and data formats that interoperate with eachother to create a cohesive experience. The metaverse is just the internet really, we just need to make it less reliant on platforms and focus more on writing clients with capabilities for rich virtual spaces so that we can sling sats no matter if its from our social media clients or game engines. it's all the same thing, just different ways to experience it.

People in the early days were techonologists, cryptographers, programmers, curious people. It wasn't political at all, there was no maximalism. I didn't get the sense people were in it for a quick buck. namecoin and litecoin was accepted as a curiousity, there was pretty much no animosity toward new projects. maximalism became more of a thing once these projects started to promise insane things and innocent people started losing lots of money. maximalism is just free market SEC.

I remember mining on my gpu when it was worth $1, I never did it for the money I just wanted more coins to play with and send to friends.

It was a pretty chill and small community back in those days. The politicization came after, and it became necessary, just due to the sheer number of cargo-cult scams that cropped up and continue to crop up around bitcoin.

any new protocol stack will have weaknesses. this applies to both LN and nostr. We need more insight into attacks when they occur. It's currently too hard to tell if a failed payment was due to DoS or liquidity issues. We can't fix the problem if we have no insight into it. I think more measuring and monitoring is important for reliability and scaling. I'm not sure if anyone is working on this.

I think this a bug, you should only see replies to people if you're following them as well. I should probably have a way to turn off replies in the home feed.

I'm working on the web version at the moment and then will work on an android version once the iOS once is somewhat stable.

I'm currently only working on damus on weekends since I still have a $dayjob so this isn't going as fast as I would like. Perhaps I can raise money for this eventually and work on it fulltime.

An uncensorable social network where plebs are in control. Anyone can extend it to include new features, anyone can build new clients to take advantage of these new features.

It puts us back in control of our online social and data without us having to become serfs to big tech.

Not to mention it's insanely easy to get started. Just download the app and it works. No need to run any nodes. It's pretty darn neat.

people seem more interested in damus so I've been focused on that. I use it day-to-day as a CLN web ui... this is the first time someone has asked me for it, so I'll throw it up on a website somewhere soon so people can try it out.

no yacht unfortunately. gave most of it away and lost the rest in a non-yacht-related boating accident.

Favourite programming language (can I have 2?): Haskell + C

Text Editor: neovim with no plugins. Used to be spacemacs until I just reimplemented all spacemacs functionality into terminal scripts with fzf.

Bitcoin Wallet: bitcoin-core qt + hwi + cln

The fact that it can be extended with new functionality, like lightning tipping, badges, realtime ephemeral chat, typing notifications, likes/reactions. retweets, etc. there are all different note types on the network. There is so much yet to explore in terms of what nostr could do for the decentralized web.

who cares about this crap?

The network is pretty healthy at the moment. spam could be a huge problem, but I don't feel like it's unsolvable. There are many proposals by the community. For example, you could have a mode where you can only see posts from people you follow. It could be completely fine if you use it like a signal-like app where only your contacts can send you stuff.

nostr doesn't preclude a particular style of usage. I'm looking forward to many different types of clients that try different spam control techniques.

Bringing precoiners into the space has always been an interest for me. In ~2017 Monstercat I sent a pitch to 600 of our artists to see if they wanted to get paid in bitcoin. At the time it was easier and cheaper to send a single transaction with 600 outputs than to do wire and batch paypal payouts. Almost all of our artists universally said no which was my first realization that education would be the most important thing in the coming years. I started bitcoinwizard.net to try to achieve this without much success.

There are lots of bitcoiners in the nostr/damus world just due to the fact that it's censorship resistant and is an open protocol, so this attracts lots of bitcoiners. Not to mention fiatjaf created nostr and he's a big bitcoiner (he also made lnurl, etc). I hope these apps don't only attract bitcoiners, censorship resistant speech is pretty important and should be interesting even if you're still a precoiner.

I try to focus most of my efforts on bitcoin projects so unfortunately I tend to only reach the bitcoin crowd. I'm hoping damus.io get's out there to the wider internet community so that more people get into bitcoin.

I am considering it yes. I am new to this even though I've worked in startups all my live. I have bought two books recommended to me by friends on raising money:

So I'm going to get through those first so I have a better idea on how it works.

But for now I'm just focused on making the best possible nostr client and to get lightning tipping working as nice as stacker.news !

If there are many relays, clients are going to need to get better at making sure events actually get to the relays of the receiving user. A user could be on another relay you don't know about, and you could try to reply to a user thinking they will receive the message. right now there's no good way to know if a message will get to a user in a scenario where there are many relays, and that's no good.

We need a better solution for those situations. Right now if you're a group of friends you can just make sure to all join the rough set of overlapping relays, but there is no protocol-level mechanism that bridges theses relays, other than relay hints in notes and individuals manually mirroring notes from one to the other.

nostr is not consistent or even eventually consistent, so we need better client mechanisms to make that a better experience.

perhaps it's not an issue if there is a small set of large public hub relays that everyone can broadcast to...