https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=the-gitcitadel-blog-by-stella-v-1
quoting_This entry originally appeared in this blog._
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*A Society of Loners*
I'm becoming more certain that #GitRepublic will be more attractive to development teams currently outside of Nostr, than within it, because Nostr has largely defined itself as a _GitHub-based community of FOSS Lone Wolves_. This is part of its founding mystique and the current "vibe-coding" fad is merely doubling-down on that. Developers are now to stay completely and utterly isolated, and just talk to a machine all day.
We have been sent back to the basement.
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Rather than putting in the effort to form cohesive teams and build truly enterprising solutions, with wide market appeal, we devs are actively encouraged (by the leading devs and financers) to keep everything we build tiny and inconsequental. Their own pet products are large and sprawling, of course, but let's move on. We are to go on the search for The Ultimate MicroApp, with the idea that this is the niche Nostr is meant to fill: _A knock-off WhatsApp, for voyeurs._
*Tired of Marketing to the Wrong Audience*
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There's little will to truly decentralize the repos, themselves, and even the current issues and patches _gitstuff_ capability (which we use) gets little play. It's much more effective to simply @ most developers in a kind 01 note, than to write an issue, because they don't look at their issues and don't use clients that supply issue notifications.
This is partly because they onboarded to Nostr with kind 01 clients, and _kind inertia is real_. But, it's also due to the fact that they usually don't have much professional experience (including, for example, with tech support), and their projects are so small and have so few users, that they aren't used to anyone giving them an issue to solve or suggesting a patch. Why look, if it's usually empty?
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And this all got me thinking about migrations. Migrations typically happen in large waves. We can see that on Nostr, in fact. Individuals occasionally trickle in, but usually it's entire groups shifting in a sudden transplantation. Both on the way in, and on the way out. The same way that humans tend to move from one region to the other, in the physical realm, they move from one platform to the other, in the digital realm.
Here is the thing: _One dev on Nostr isn't a wave, it's a person_.
Furthermore, he's already on Nostr, so the marginal utility of moving to a different kind simply isn't great enough to motivate him to detach himself from his current active sphere of communication and transplant himself to a place with less communication. The communication would have to move with him, but then the move would have to be coordinated, and it's not practical to coordinate that tightly on an open protocol.
A protocol is not a development team. It's a set of rules for development teams. And we don't even know who is following those rules.
*The Odd Project Out*
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#GitCitadel is really the exception to prove the rule, as we've all used different gitservers (and other change management systems, before git was invented and popularized), professionally, and host our own systems. I have GitLab, at home and at work, for instance, and I've used Gitea and Bitbucket, and now OpenDev, and SVN, and etc.
Since most of us, at #GitCitadel, are IT professionals, we aren't emotionally-attached to a specific gitserver or website because we relate more to our project teams, than to the app used to communicate with them. We've found teams are easier to move to a new platform, than individual developers, because they communicate _largely within themselves_. Also, the software that teams produce is large and prominent enough, that they don't depend upon contribution heat maps (those all-important green blocks), to market their skills. They can simply show someone the product or reference the product's web page. They therefore have less need to _work in public_, rather than merely _publishing their code_.
So, long story short:
GitRepublic will need to focus on supplying teams (including the few on Nostr), and _people who use Nostr to build something_ is a demographic, but not a team.