I've been playing with #Nostr. Despite the cryptobro user base the underlying tech is, in fact, not Blockchain based, which is nice. I like the idea of a serverless social network that stays afloat with volunteer-run relays. Very cool model.
Still, the user base is a hard sell. Here's the best description I've heard of Nostr internally, and it's not a motivator...
@Alex
Yeah, I decided to check out what this nostr thing was, interesting tech but the content seems much less to my taste than I find in Mastodon. Maybe partly due to many people not posting over the Xmas holidays. But also, cryptocurrency obsession is a turnoff.
@Alex that's exactly my take. Bitcoin (rah rah!) and conspiracy theorists. The short form content is entirely missable, but there's interesting potential in the tech, if you can deal with the community.
@Alex yes they are very big on sending money to other users. especially the international accounts
@NEW1_ What do you mean by that?
@Alex The clients have a built in Bitcoin Lightning wallet connection making it easy to send Bitcoin from one person to another. It gets used frequently for just about any post a user finds valuable. Even most of the software bounties are paid this way.
Its also very appealing to the people sending money internationally because it alleviates the fees charged by traditionally sending remittances.
The community is very diverse but this is the one thing they share as a group.
@Alex sadly, that's the most accurate description 😬
Bitcoin is baked into the protocol in a really annoying way. It's not mandatory to hold any crypto at all to use the network, so you could theoretically develop a client that cuts out all the crypto features, but it's clearly designed to facilitate lightning network transactions between users.
The decentralized end-to-end encrypted DMs are at least a feature of their own, if you didn't want anything else from a client.