chowcollection on Nostr: “If I were forced to point to one thing [that’s making Nostr take off as a ...

“If I were forced to point to one thing [that’s making Nostr take off as a protocol], it would be the simplicity: it is just such a simple spec, a simple idea, and you pair that with the humility of the approach — Fiatjaf’s original description of, This might have a chance of working, sets the tone for everything. And because of that simplicity, it’s just so easy to start coding for it and start playing with it and actually feel it. In the early days of Twitter, we had this ultra-open API, and that was both a positive and a negative: it was a positive in that anyone — 14-year-old, 13-year-old — could take the API, understand it, keep the majority of it in their head, and start programming. And then they could actually send a message via SMS that would vibrate their phone — so there was this real tangibility of, This thing is alive! And it was a negative because it was way too open — we had no idea what we were doing in terms of APIs — and people went crazy. We didn’t rate limit, we were built on Ruby on Rails — which was the original sin — and we went down all the time. So what’s different about this to me is: you’ve maintained that simplicity, you’ve maintained this desire for developers to contribute and feel something almost instantaneously — especially over this past month — and I’m sure it felt that way earlier as well. But now that you have more people, it just feels deeper and deeper and deeper, and the momentum around development will continue to grow — because the protocol spec is just so simple — and at the same time so open, so anyone can go to GitHub, see the source, see how it works, tinker a little bit, fix this, add this, and see it in front of people, and people give feedback on the protocol itself, which just again creates this incredible momentum that pushes it further and further and further. And the speed at which people are seeing change I think is somewhat addictive. And the knowledge that, if I don’t like this change I can just write my own or fork my own client and do it in the way that I wish is even more compelling.”

- jack (npub1sg6…f63m)