Bitcoin is like the reason why I'm working on Austria in some sense. Bitcoin has really opened me to like this new way of thinking in terms of like free software and freedom software, things that kept that are even possible. If Bitcoin didn't exist, I probably would just be at a fiat job and depressed and, um, and just like slugging away. And I don't know.
It's, so it really gave me a new perspective on, on life and on what I should be spending my time on, uh, cause all of a sudden we have this like very unique opportunity to, um, experience a once in a lifetime opportunity of asymmetric value and just being able to be a part of that. I just, it completely changed my life. In some sense, I always want Bitcoin to be a part of everything I'm working on because it just makes so much sense.
Cause it's the most important technology that humanity has ever created. So it's a big part of everything I still do, but I see it as more like a tool now that let's get this integrated into other things. Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. The Bitcoin time chain is eight seven four one four seven and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Noster talk where I talk with my guest about Noster and whatever else comes up today. That guest is JB 55 aka Will Kasarin aka Wild Bill Kasarin. Will is the developer behind Damos, an iOS client for Noster, which is also the first Noster client I ever used. Today we dig into what's new with Damos and Noster more broadly.
Will's latest project, Note Deck, open source development on Noster and Bitcoin, why content creators and everyone else should try Noster and a whole lot more. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast. Wherever you're watching or listening, but I personally recommend you listen on fountain.fm because not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value, but you can earn Bitcoin just for listening to podcasts.
Check out Bitcoin podcast net for episodes and additional resources. Head to the show notes to grab discount links for my sponsor, Bitbox, or go directly to bitbox.swiss.walker and use the promo code Walker. Send an email to hello at Bitcoin podcast.net. If you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast and if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by giving it a zap on Noster or a boost on fountain. I truly appreciate it.
Without further ado, let's get into this Noster talk with Will Kasserin. Okay, we are live while Bill Kasserin. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who calls you that, but I still like it. My mom calls me that. Does she? I don't know if I believe you. Like, no, she doesn't. Does she really? Well, I mean, that's what my parents called me growing up with Bill. And then I just switched to my birthday, which is William. When I moved to Vancouver.
If I'm not mistaken, you're like developer name on Apple. Is it still Bill? Yeah, it was like it was Billy. Because like that was like what my parents called me Billy, like Billy Kasserin or something. Like, oh boy. It kind of you kind of sound like a gun slinger, you know, like Billy Kasserin out there. Well, my middle name is Robert. So it's like my cousin called me Billy Bob. So I don't know if he called me that. I'll hate you, but.
And what's your mother's maiden name, by the way, in the street you grew up on? Just for my own curiosity. You know, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. All right, we are good to go. So, well, it's been a while. It's been it's been actually over one year since you came on this show. You were one of the first people who I did as like an actual interview, as opposed to me just rattling off new stuff or reading Austrian economics out loud. And you were one of the first.
It was like no end of November, 2023. So yeah, it's been it's been over a year now since you've come on. It feels like it's bad. I don't remember doing that. I mean, so I think it was happening. We were drinking during that episode. Oh, that explains it. That explains it. Yeah, I think you if I remember correctly, clearly I wasn't drinking enough. But I believe you were having whiskey or something a little bit stronger, perhaps old fashioned probably. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, that's I think that may have been the culprit. That's all my best work is on old fashioned. Do you drink old fashions while you code? Oh, yeah. Do you have to like, does the number of old fashions consumed while coding? Like, is there a direct correlation to a amount of review you need to do afterwards? Well, the biggest thing is like it works into a point. And then it's just downhill. It's like this is called the Balmers Peak, which is completely true.
If you Google that, it's completely true. But I always find that I just Balmers Peak. Balmers Peak is it was named after the guy from Microsoft. There's an XPCD of it. So basically the theory is you have like optimal performance until a certain number of drinks and then you just go off a cliff. I mean, that that sounds like me and I'm not even like doing cool cipherpunk coding shit and like my optimal performance, just like having a conversation.
Like, I think I'm getting better at it, you know, and like, especially if I'm like debating something, I'm like, I sound so fucking smart. And then after a little while, it's like, no, no, no, dude, this isn't good. Okay. So here it is. Programming skill, blood alcohol concentration. Okay. There's a there's a small section where it's like you're just like on a roll and then it's just downhill. Yeah. I always like most things in life.
Perhaps I always like to say that like it gets you to do something you would think is like crazy. Maybe that's applies in other situations as well with alcohol. But like, for instance, one example I gave was I was like, I got really drunk one night and I was like, you know what, I'm going to build a WebAssembly interpreter. So WebAssembly is like this programming language that runs on the browser. It's like, it's a virtual machine. It's very complicated.
And it's like, no one in the right mind would build an interpreter. But I got drunk enough. I'm like, let's fucking do it. And then I actually did it. I actually finished it, but I needed that little kick to get it started because otherwise it would be like, who would do that? Right. You needed to like grease the wheels. Exactly. Yeah. Is there an old fashioned in that mug right now? No comment. Okay. It's too early for that walker. I know. I know.
I, yeah, I'm, I was going to try and like take a little sobriety break because I've been, uh, as I mentioned prior to this, I've been in Europe on some fiat mining work for the past few weeks. And a lot of that work involves also drinking like a lot. Yes. Uh, for socialization reasons, um, all business naturally, but yeah, my body is kind of just like hurting right now. And it's like, please stop.
You know, like I, I don't want any more of this poison because like we can all agree like alcohol is, it is in fact poison. Like yes, but what sweet poison it is, you know, whoo. Sweet, delicious poison. After every, like my body screaming at me every time, and like, you got to stop. This is bad for you. I'm like, I know 100% agree. And I'm like off it for a week. And then you know what comes back? I'm probably an alcoholic, whatever. I'll admit it. I heard that definition of alcoholism.
Well, I heard an alternate definition once that was like, you're not an alcoholic unless your life sucks. And so it's like, oh, okay. But I don't know if that's actually a very good definition because it's like, that's a pretty slippery slope, I think. But, uh, yeah. And I agree, uh, OXTR, it is fun poison. But yeah. Moral of the story, I'm not drinking yet either. It's noon where I am.
And so I figured, although it may be five o'clock somewhere in my internal clock says it's like time for a drink right now. Cause I'm on, uh, I'm on socialist European time. It's not quite, I'm not quite there yet. So water for now, but I always say, like, if it's past 12, it's usually fine. I don't know. That's my dad, my dad, my dad would always say jokingly, but also not jokingly. Well, you can't drink all day unless you start in the morning. And I was like, that's, I mean, objectively true.
Yeah. No, that's a, that is a fact. Uh, Derek says they call this being a functional alcoholic. I think that that's, that's probably a fair characterization. I'll go with that. Yeah. Thanks, Derek. We, we needed that. But yeah. So this is first episode back. It's been a little, little TIT coin hiatus for me. And so what better way to get back into Swing of Things than with Wild Bill, Billy Kasserin. It's a, you've been, you've been doing some work lately too.
I mean, maybe, you know, a decent place for us to just kind of start out and, and get things going a little bit. So it's been like a year since we last talked. Uh, since then, I think that, I mean, pace of development in Noster broadly is pretty wild, uh, pace of development for Damos and what you guys have been building out has similarly been, uh, pretty rapid.
I know you're working on a number of things right now that probably are not immediately evident to the normal, uh, Damos iOS user, cause that's kind of stuff in the background, but maybe kind of just to, for people who are maybe newer to Noster or have not, you know, uh, not been really closely paying attention. What's kind of changed for, for you guys at Damos in the past year since we last spoke?
Yeah. The biggest thing for us was like that, you know, the big shock with Apple when they, when they said we can't use apps. Um, that was a huge turning point for Damos because we're like, um, well, we want to do more zap stuff. Like, I feel like we were just starting to, we're just beginning with this idea of being able to zap things. We want to zap razors. We want to do like the Geyser fun style things.
But the minute they, they ban the ability for us to, um, zap a post, it'll be like, we're severely limited with our entire roadmap for the next year. Right. So we kind of went right back to the drawing board and like, what do we do to fix this? And, um, you know, we could just, we could try to fight them and like risk getting deep, like you get banned again, but we decided to just like, well, we need an Android client anyway.
Um, and I wanted to take everything I learned from building Damos iOS and just build a better client. Um, so I decided to build like a multi-platform client and this, it just made a lot of sense from our perspective because, um, you know, I don't have money to, to fund team, like an Android team and an iOS team and a Windows team. Um, so I decided just to build one client that works everywhere and that's like super solid. So I had, I spent a year kind of building up the technology to do that.
So I had to create a new database from scratch and new relay and embedded relay. Um, but once this is all starting to come together now with the, the Note Deck alpha release, which is the first kind of demo of us, uh, making it like a map multi-platform client. I want to, I want to dig into that, uh, a lot because I've actually, I've got that now I just downloaded it today actually and I'm running it here on my, on my Mac.
Uh, maybe before we dive into that, cause I think there's a lot of to get into just around Note Deck and kind of how you see that as the, the next evolution of what you guys are doing. But for those that aren't aware, maybe can you talk about the whole iOS app store debacle and that, because it was like, I remember, I remember this time and it was like, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times, you know, like we were all so stoked on Zaps. Zaps were flying everywhere.
And then Apple was just kind of like, mm, don't know about that. So can you, can you talk through that history a little bit? Cause again, it feels like ages ago, but it's like, it hasn't been very long go at all. Like it's still pretty fresh. No, yeah, it all happened when, uh, it was actually during your Zapp advertising talk. Oh, geez. You were like, oh, let's, let's do Zapp, Zapp advertising is going to be the future of advertising. I'm like, oh, this is cool.
I'm like, I want, let's support this directly. So I added the, the top Zaps feature. And this was way before primal did the top Zaps, right? This was, you know, showing the Zaps in, in, in top of the feed. Um, and then I guess that kind of, I assume that's what got the attention of Apple because I couldn't think of any other thing that would trigger an off review. So this is, this is a very rare thing where they will review your app outside of normal app review.
So someone was tipped off with an Apple and they're like, oh, this, they can't be doing this. Like this is going to cut into a revenue. That's like, I don't know. This is my theory. I have no idea. I never heard the full internal story. Um, so yeah. And they just messaged me like, yeah, you're, you're, we're going to remove your app from the app store in seven days. Um, so I had this huge, so I had, so basically, and at that point, like Jack is like messaging Tim Apple on Twitter.
He's like, what's going on? Like all this media attention, I always say, like, it's probably the best thing that ever happened in Damos because every time I, every time I talk to anyone who's ever even heard of Damos, that's what they'll always reference was that, that one event. There was actually good PR for us. It just kind of sucks that it kind of ruined our business model.
Um, because our, our business model, our plan was, you know, um, you have a feature within Damos where you just kind of, you can tip a proportion of zaps. So let's say 10, 20% of zaps or whatever percent you want is like a voluntary way to donate. So the idea was just, we're just going to grow the ZAP economy and eventually we can kind of just take a cut and like that could like fund all of all the client development. Um, and yeah, so they basically screwed us over with that.
And they said, no, you have to remove from the app. Um, they allowed us to keep it on the profile so you can set profiles, but that's just not as fun. I don't think. Um, so yeah. And then so we removed it and then there's been lots of other clients since then who are allowed to have zaps in their app or not allowed to have zaps for some reason. Um, and, and I've talked to a million. I've talked to, you know, some other people and I'm like, how did you get it? Why did they don't bug you?
They're like, I don't know. They never bugged me about it. So it's like, they're not applying the rules evenly. Um, so kind of we got kind of singled out and, um, and punished just to send a message, I guess, because we were one of the biggest ones at the time. So yeah, it just, it just shows that I don't, and I was like, I don't want to be under that boot of apple my entire life.
Like, let's start building something where I don't have to like sweat bullets, whether I'm going to exist tomorrow or not. Right? No, it's, well, now I feel, uh, I feel a little guilty if it was in fact, the Zapportize and talk to Carl and I, I don't know. I have to thank you though. That was, that was a huge thing once, uh, you know, Apple Bandas. But it is kind of amazing that like that strizand effect that happens.
It's like when, you know, I guess that's not directly a strizand effect, but basically like, Hey, we're going to have some punitive measures that we put out towards this particular application. And then people start to wonder like, well, why like what's like, what are they doing over there? What's maybe something cool is happening that I don't even know about yet.
Did you see, uh, even with them removing Zaps, do you remember, did you see downloads increase after that just because of the kind of the, all the talk or all the chatter around it? Yeah. Like once that happened, like we got a huge boost into downloads. And just from all the media attention. So yeah. And then eventually it kind of died down again, but that was, that was a huge thing.
Was that around, I'm trying to think just time on wise, was that around the same time that China pulled you guys off the Apple App Store in China? Was that just before? If I'm trying to, one was Prague. It was, must have been like a little bit after because I remember. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because it must have been like the next year or maybe that, I don't know. But yeah, it was China was, I was surprised how, I was surprised how fast China banned Dhamma.
So like it was within the first couple of days. Um, so. Yeah. I saw something, it just made me think, I just saw, maybe it was you that posted this just a little while ago, something about like China will now like allow only fans. Yeah. But it's like, so like, so social media, no, but like only fans like, all right, okay, come on in. Yeah. I don't know.
Maybe they, maybe they want to use it as like a blackmailing opportunity if they collect all the data and like they use it to blackmail their enemies, right? Think about it. Yeah. Because I guess that's the thing, uh, your, uh, your client Dhammas and then also basically, I mean, any of the no-ster clients I've downloaded, it's like the best part about it is when you go into the app store and you look at the data collection part, it's like no data collected, like nothing.
And that probably for China, they're like, hmm, you don't like that. That's not useful. No. Uh, so yeah, we're going to, we're going to kick you guys right off. And end encrypted DMs, like they can't look at the messages. So it's literally all the things that they hate, like no data collection and end encryption, like shut it down right now, get it out of here. Yeah. Even if they came to me and it's like, oh, we wanted to see the DMs and people are, I'll be like, well, I don't have them.
They're all on the devices, right? I'd have to like code something special and I'm not going to do that just for China. Like the DMs are literally in the computer in this case. They are in the computer. Matt, I don't know. It's, it's wild. It's again, I know you've been, you've been much deeper in the trenches than I have. I've been in the superficial trenches of meme warfare, but you've been in the trenches of actual writing code warfare.
And I don't know, do you just, do you have this feeling that like, does time move differently? Like you've been in Bitcoin for a while. So you obviously have that, that feeling of the strangeness of time. But in terms of Nostar, is it, is it similar? Do you feel that like your perception of how time is moving is, is even more warped because you're like, you are literally building one of the biggest clients in the space. You're in this, you know, living and breathing it every day.
Yeah, it's like, I call it the Nostar like time dilation field. I mean, maybe when you're in the thick of something and things are happening day to day and you're just trying to put out fires, the one thing that always sticks out to me is when I say I'm going to do something and I look every now and then I'll find that note again for it. It'll say seven months ago that I said, I'm going to do this tomorrow.
I'm like, I'm like, I literally felt like I just said that yesterday, but there's so many things going on. I just haven't got to it yet. I'm like, that is scary when I'm like, when I thought something was just happening and I see a note that says seven months ago, I'm like, holy shit. There's so much going on. Yeah. Well, and speaking of things going on, so one of the things that you've been, you had talked about it, I think it was like seven months ago or so around NoTech.
Like you had kind of floated this up. I think you'd been thinking about it for a while before then, but now there is an alpha that is available for people to download. damas.io slash note deck, right? Yeah. And we're going to release it to the general public soon. It was because we have this Domino. So yeah, so purple members have been, I've been trying it out and testing it, but for everyone else, we're probably going to release it pretty soon for the general public. And it's pretty sweet.
I kind of want to like, I can, we can share screen here and bring it up, but maybe just first, like was, was the issue with Apple and the kind of the reliance on Apple, one of the main drivers behind it, was the Apple. And I think it's a great thing to be able to do that. And I think it's a great thing to be able to do that. Kind of the reliance on Apple, one of the main drivers behind you wanting to push this forward.
Was it something you would have just done anyway, but maybe that gave you a little bit more of like a fire to be like, okay, I need this to be, to be out there. Yeah. Cause I could have completely imagined a scenario where, you know, damas is iOS is growing. A lot of users are happy. I just keep adding more and more features, you know, but at the end of the day, like, so I could have completely done that. And I was on that path.
But when Apple said like the minute they, I have a real big problem with authority. And when someone tells me like, I can't do something, I'm like, well, fuck you. I'm going to watch me, motherfuckers. I'm going to go do whatever the hell I want. So it was definitely probably that was the moment where I, it's such, it's such a, it's so ingrained in me, this not like being under the control or of someone, especially when it's completely ridiculous.
And it's like something foundational to what I believe in that like to have free and open money that you can send freely. Like that's why I started working on Lightning. Cause I want people to be able to transact freely without some person in the middle saying you can or can't do it. So the minute Apple is like, you can't do this. I'm like, well, I instantly lost interest in developing on your platform.
You know, it's, it's kind of nuts too, because I know obviously Apple's been now challenged in various lawsuits and whatnot, just about kind of their like monopoly, basically power over this. But it's kind of insane that if you look just between Google and between Apple, like, yeah, okay, you can do progressive web apps and things like that. But they basically, they have the complete monopoly on your pipeline to users.
And you are again, like for anyone that hasn't ever been through that app review process. And again, yours being outside of that process, which is like insane, but the normal app review process itself is such a nightmare. Both for Google and for Apple. Cause first of all, you never get a human, right? If you have a problem and it's rejected, there's never a human being you can actually talk to. Maybe you have, you've had more luck finding a human than, than I have with past experiences.
But never a human, you may just get caught by a bot that flags something, you know, some code change that says, oh, nope, that's actually not allowed based on our latest updated rules. It's totally opaque. You don't really have any sort of recourse and you're completely at their mercy. Like they literally just have you bent over a barrel and there's nothing you can do about it. And their guidelines is not like a contract. It's, you know, it's a guideline.
So if they, if, you know, the one line in the guideline that says that, you know, you can't, the basically the whole guideline that they're ruling off of is this idea that, oh, you can't, you know, sell digital content. So my argument was like, well, zapping someone is not buying something. It's like they provided something and now you're zapping it. It's not, you're not buying it. You're not getting something. It's just a tip, right?
So even, even like they're not even really matching their guidelines. It doesn't even really make sense, but it doesn't matter because again, it's a guideline. They can do what the hell they want. They can just make something up. So it's kind of, it's just a complete gong show over there. And that's why some apps get through some, some apps don't. That's why some reviewers like allow it. Some reviewers don't.
And a lot of the time, if you just keep resubmitting it, you just go through and get through eventually. It's kind of ridiculous actually. If you're getting a lot of zaps on Noster for your insightful comments, your memes, or your feed picks, you should get the majority of those sats into self-custody by going to bitbox.swiss.walker and using the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
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And again, I think that's the key is like because it's a guideline, it's inherently arbitrary. Like it is open to whoever's, well, not whoever, it's open to their interpretation. It's the same thing with any sort of like in a non-code perspective, but like YouTube's community guidelines. Like you may not have broken any specific rule, but you kind of got close to one of them a little bit and so they said, you know, they flagged it and you're guilty until proven innocent.
And what are you going to do? What is little old you going to do? You little loser, like we've got you. Well, my whole argument was like, look, like we're planning on releasing the ZapRacer feature, which was going to allow, let's say you're like building a well in Africa. I know it's kind of like a, it's kind of like one of those examples, but it's true. Like there could be people building wells in Africa and like, and this could help them.
And so you have this trillion dollar company who just is afraid that this might slightly indent their, you know, massive trillion dollar corporation. It's like, so you're just punishing people who just want to, I don't know, it just seems so ridiculous to me. It's insane. And like, again, they take what, what do they take 30% usually any transaction, which is like an insane amount.
And with people like increasingly transacting online, this idea that they expect to take 30% tax on every single transaction in on the planet is absolutely insane to me. Yeah. No, it's like, you thought credit cards were bad. Like, Apple is, I mean, that's basically, you know, every company they get big enough, they eventually just become a bank, right?
And they just want to take their, their little piece of the pie that they didn't really earn and they claim that they facilitated, but they only were able to facilitate because they are the only place where you can have your app. Like it's, it's absurd. But okay, fuck Apple. Just wanted to throw that out there. Also, fuck Google. We are equal opportunity haters
here. But let's, let's talk about note deck a little bit. You want me to, I'm going to share, share my screen or you want to share yours just because I think I, before we, for folks, for sure. Before we go to that, I just want to mention that like, we're not giving up Damos iOS development. It's just that we're kind of making it more
like simpler. And like the biggest thing we're focusing on right now is onboarding because, you know, if people join and they just are confused and they leave, it's not really useful. We still want to use the Damos iOS as a way to like have a really nice onboarding experience. It may be not necessarily like that focus. That, so that's kind of our goal with Damos. But again, I still want to do the cooler things. And that's what note deck is for.
Well, and maybe that's, that's worth just digging into a little bit deeper because we're, well, we're going to go on a bunch of tangents here. I already know it once you and I get, get going here. So let's, we'll keep the tangents rolling. But, you know, that onboarding user flow, like that was one of the things that we, I say we as a no-ster collective of people who were kind of on early and really saw the potential in this. And some of us who can't code did our best to just
promote it. And those of us who could code like you, I went out and actually build the stuff. But the thing that I heard so many times was, especially in those earlier days, oh, yeah, I tried out seems like a nice idea. But like, I was just confusing to get started. And of course, back in those days, two people were like, oh, it's kind of the UI is a little clunky.
I think that excuses out the window now, like the UI across so many different no-ster clients is so clean and professional and exactly what you have come to expect from a social media app. But I think the onboarding is still one area we're talking to, you know, talking to Vitor or talking to Miliyan, everybody's kind of focusing in a different way on, okay, how do we improve that experience? How do we make it so that those first interactions they have are smooth and are
stickier that we actually keep them around? Can you talk a little bit about how you kind of view that? Like, what's your perspective on that initial user flow from Damos? How do you guys try to make that experience as smooth as possible and make sure that people, once they've actually taken the jump to create an end pub, want to actually stay with it and keep using it?
Yeah, so this is, you know, I've been having tons of meetings about this recently because I went to Mexico about a month ago and we just randomly met this couple and we're trying to onboard them and it was like really, really brutal. Like, we're trying to get the QR codes to work and the QR code scanning wasn't working and like all these things that they're there, but we just never put a lot of focus on them because we're too busy trying to get the app working and the basics
working. But now I realize like these are actually the most important flow. I know that people have been saying that in the early days and I feel like I'm probably at fault for kind of dismissing them or like, okay, whatever, because I was already so into it and I was just trying to make it work. But now I realize like people are joining and they just feel so clunky compared to, even now it's still pretty clunky in a lot of the time, especially with Damos. So yeah,
the main thing I want to do is I want to make sure they have a pleasant experience. I want to, when they join, they can actually see my content and that's always been a big struggle is that, you know, how do you, what algorithm do you show? So I think we're going to start seeing more, more algorithms, at least when you first joined some onboarding algorithms. Like right now, we have a fixed list of users, which is like getting stale and they're probably not even
relevant anymore. So we just need, we need better ways to discover content. We need better ways to also pre-populate profile, like some things like pre-populating profiles, because right when you first joined, your client doesn't know anyone. So like it doesn't even have like profiles to search for. You can't search for people, especially if you're building a pure client. Like Primal is another example of a client where they're taking a different approach where they maintain a central
relay and, you know, they provide all that for free. But like, you know, Dom is trying to stay pure to the protocols. We want to, you know, not rely on a central server. So, you know, how do you do this in a decentralized way and still load profiles? So there's like simple things like that. It's not even that complicated. Just recommend useful things, preload profiles, get QR codes, scanners that actually work. Because if you, because I go on to like threads or blue sky,
it's like they have pretty good experiences. Like, you know, obviously they have teams of like 10s, 20, 30 people. So that's what we're competing with. But I think we can get there. I don't know if that'll like fix the issue. Another thing was retention. Like we noticed the retention numbers were very, very low. People are joining and leaving right away. And this is the whole, again, maybe we theorize it, onboarding is a big aspect of this. So one thing we added recently was push
notifications. I think we're one of the, I think us and Amethyst are one of the few clients that have push notifications. A lot of people say that, well, they're like a dark pattern or they're not. But some people actually really, really like push notifications. If you don't get a lot of interactions on Nostra, and then you forget about the app. And then if someone randomly tags you one day and it brings you back into the app, that's actually pretty good. Like most apps
do that. We're not as aggressive as threads where they like put up like random stuff in your notifications all the time, but it's still better than nothing. So all these things are helping, I think, I hope. Yeah, it's interesting with blue sky because they've obviously, it's a different, I mean, it's at first fall, it's a different protocol, right? And they've obviously taken a different path on that in terms of how they view. I mean, I think one of the most
stark differences is moderation. Like it becomes very clear very quickly. If you say the wrong thing on there that has the right trigger words in it, you will get moderated out of existence. And that's not really the case on Nostra at all. Yeah, you can get muted by people and you won't get interacted with, but you can keep, you know, you can keep shouting into that, you know, what
becomes a void for as long as you'd like and saying whatever you'd like. And yeah, there's a, recently after like over a year, just checked back in on blue sky just to kind of see what was happening over there. And it was, it was about the same in terms of the discourse that was over there. The user experience was improved. They finally got hashtags to work that took them quite a while. Apparently that was, that was difficult on, on that protocol. I don't know.
But yeah, it's, they have had, like, and I find it interesting too, they had obviously a massive surge amongst people who were like really, really anti Elon anti Trump. We're like, we want to get away from X because it's a, you know, a horrible right wing cesspool. And they all seem to have flooded to blue sky. Now, you know, for better or worse, I'm sure a lot of them also ended up trickling over to Noster, but probably a minuscule percentage compared to the ones that went over to blue sky.
And I'm, you know, it's kind of interesting to think about too, like where these, we see kind of these waves of adoption on Noster, like we saw them, like Jack and Snowden kind of each had their like own wave of people that they brought over. You've seen a lot when there's sensorial regimes
in various countries, you know, you see that, that pick up a little bit. But I'm kind of curious what you see as the, the next drivers of big user flows into Noster or do we have any more, you know, maybe, maybe it's not big flows, maybe it's little trickles, but it just keeps picking up pace and picking up pace. Yeah, I think my favorite thing with the blue sky was when people were posting their only two genders and everyone was getting banned for saying that.
Basically just sums up the entire platform. But I, I, no, I mean, I think we'll always exist and Noster kind of represents this space that once everyone's fed up with everything else not working. It's one of those things where it's like, it's obvious to people who are here because, and I went through this recently where it's like, I already went through this. I went and did the technical evaluation on all these things. So to me, I'm like, why, why isn't this obvious? Why
isn't everyone see this? But I realized it's because no one's gone through the work to, to figure out, because it's hard work. It's like to evaluate different protocols to understand like, how is it censorship resistant for the other versus other things? A lot of the time people join these networks just because like some influencer, some celebrity said to come follow me. And that's what we saw with blue sky. A lot of people, there's a lot of like famous people
started going over to it and then, you know, people are drawn in by them. So the sad, the sad stories is like, people won't get into it for the tech, I guess is a similar story with the coin. So you need, you need, you just need to use the tactics that they're using. So one obvious thing is just make the creator tools really, really good. Like if we make the creator tools better than other platforms, like just make it so easy to start earning stats and get easy to like view
your analytics or make it really easy to upload video and long form content. Because there's a lot of people I've talked to who want to join in and they want to write long form content and produce it. But like a lot of the time, even in the Nostra clients today, that's like, you have to go download some other client or so anyway, so I think creator tools will be a big thing and making
video work a bit better. I've been really adamant about let's like, let's make video really good because the media content is, is like all over about is all that's what social media is about these days is just sharing media content. So maybe if we start doing, if we just be big, be better, be a better solution for those types of things. And then all of a sudden they're like, whoa, we have all these awesome tools, but also we get to own our own our account and own our data.
That's going to be like the aha moment maybe. But I don't know, these are all kind of theories. It's, it's kind of sad. I'm just like, I was hoping maybe it just, it'll be just be obvious to people and those adopt it because it's so obvious, but it's obviously going to be an uphill battle and of education. I think it's interesting because like for people who, as you said, are already kind of deep into this deep down the Nostra rabbit hole, it's like the idea is like,
well, you know, if you build it, they will come like, come on, this is just better. Like, why aren't people seeing this? But you're right, the reality is that people don't come for the tech. They come for you. I mean, some people do a lot of people that are here already do and are coming because they see the potential of this as a tool for censorship resistant publishing owning your
own content and honestly, already see the better user experience that this can provide. But most people are going to come because some influencer, they like some media personality is says, hey, I'm, you know, going to be publishing this specific type of content only on Nostra, or I'm just going to start publishing it generally on Nostra, whatever. And then once they get here, they'll realize, oh, wow, this is actually a much more flexible user friendly experience
than anything else I'm used to. Like that's the thing once, once even like from the, from my perspective as a, you know, a podcast creator, it's so nice for me to be able to upload something. So I mean, granted, there's a couple of jumps that I make,
but I, for the long form videos, I upload them to satellite dot earth. And then I paste that into highlighter, I throw in the caption and everything else, I publish it to highlighter, and then anywhere that long form video content is displayed, for example, flare dot pub, it's instantly available there. I don't have to publish on flare dot pub as well. It's just there. And that's like, that is already so much better than me publishing on YouTube and on rumble and
on X and like, and Spotify does video now. So like, do I need to publish that on Spotify as well? Spotify is just a whole nother just garbage can silo too, because I only recently found out because I was listening to Odell on a show. And he was like, yeah, any podcast metrics you see from your RSS feed don't actually include Spotify metrics, because they keep all of that within Spotify.
So they just pull it once from the RSS feed, and then give you your own internal metrics. And it turns out like, Oh, wow, I've got like, thousands and thousands more listeners than I thought that are just on Spotify, which is strange. But again, that's how they decide to do it. So whatever. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I think there's this idea of people running away from something
or running towards something and running towards something is always more powerful. Because at the end of the day, even if people are running away from censorship, deep platforming, whatever it might be, it's always going to be more powerful if they're running toward a better user experience, a place where there's better content, a place where there's just better conversation. That's always going to be stickier than running away from something else, because you could always
be running away from something else. But if you're running towards something, you actually have a destination, you're not just going off in whatever direction you think is going to satisfy, you know, getting out of your current state of pain. But yeah. So do you want to dig into note tech a little bit? Because I think this is pretty, it's pretty sweet. Do you want to share? Do you want me to? Because I've got it up here. I can share. Yeah, you can share it. Whether you want to.
You want to share yours? Because you, you've obviously, you'll be much better at playing around with it. I don't know if that'll still work though. We'll see. I'm on Linux. If not, I can, yeah, you should have, yeah. All right, it's working. There we go. Yep. I got you. I can blind people if they want, or I cannot not blind people. Go dark mode for sure. So this is note tech. And you might, you might notice that it's very similar
to something like tweet tech. And that's kind of what it was inspired by. And the biggest thing is that I've kind of built this for performance. So you'll notice that like you can kind of scroll. And it's getting like full frames. And there's no, you can scroll basically back to the start of your entire database. So it's really, it's really optimized for perform. I'm going to stop making people hurl and stuff. Another thing is, yeah, another thing it's offline first. So let me
just close it real quick and open it. So it starts really quickly. So that was me closing and opening it. So like it works offline. So if you're on an airplane or something, you can still use stuff. You can reply to people. And you can add columns. And we're going to add more column features. But yeah, this is the long term plan of this is I want to kind of become a Nostra browser, kind of like Google Chrome. And anyway, I don't know, it's still very early,
but it's kind of like our kind of our tech platform that is demoing this stuff. No, I mean, I think it's sweet because like I personally really enjoyed TweetDeck. That gets a, it's a nice way to experience like, especially, you know, okay, I do a lot of stuff on my phone. But if I am on, if I am on a, you know, my laptop or whatever, I like to have that experience of, okay, I can like
check out multiple things at once. There's, I have the ability to really kind of customize and tailor my experience way more so than I can on just that single, you know, smaller screen on the phone. I'm curious, so you mentioned it's offline. So if you're, if you're applying to stuff when you're offline, is it just storing the events? And then when you get back online, it broadcasts them?
Or how does that work? I mean, it will work that way. I mean, this is still an alpha, but okay, that's the plan is that it'll kind of put it into like an outbox or something kind of like your mail client. That's, I mean, honestly, super slick. And yeah, again, I just started playing
around with it today. I'm curious. So do you see like adding the ability to like, okay, will you be able to create a feed that's like, I just want to filter by, you know, by video posts, or I just want to filter by image, image tags on here, kind of, will you be able to have those kind of multiple experiences built in there? Or do you want to keep it more to the, you know, just generalized micro blogging, filtering or long form filtering?
Yeah, so this is the goal for note deck is it's going to be really the power tool. It's for the power users. Very similar like Twitter or X pro, they call it the new tweet deck name. Yeah, it's for power users. It's really meant for power users. I actually want to share one app. So this note, so yeah, to answer your question, yes, we're going to have different columns, there's going to be long form posts, you can have like, you can actually have notification feeds and contact
feeds from other people. So you can have multiple accounts. That's how I currently use it. I have the Dommas notification feed, my personal notification feed, even Vanessa's notification feed to see if people are messaging her. And then so it's really for power users. But additionally, what I want to do is start building other apps within it, again, along the same idea as this browser idea. And I'm going to share kind of like one thing I'm working on real quick.
So I don't know if you can see this, but this is a visualization of every user that's in the local database on my local machine. So what I want to do with this is imagine if people are chatting on the network and you kind of see like, like the profile picture shimmer or there's like a circle around it. And let's say Vita right here, he's talking to this person, or yeah, one of these people. So you maybe see a line between this, if they start talking, so this kind of becomes this
interactive virtual map of like all the activity going on in NOSR. And because I think I really believe a big part of discoverability is just like visualizing the network, it's like a visualization problem. So just being able to see what's going on at a higher level is kind of like one additional power tool I want to build. Anyway, so I just want to demo that.
That's super sweet. Because I think again, that's one of the other things that came up and continues to come up again and again is in terms of user retention on NOSR, generally is discoverability. Like, okay, let's say you nailed the onboarding flow. And of course, part of that onboarding flow is discoverability in a sense. But there's also the discoverability that happens when you are already onboarded, you are a user of whatever client you're using.
How do I find more content that is going to resonate with me and that is going to help me engage with the network more. And I think that's something that it seems that a lot of clients are focusing on a lot right now. Like how do we make this better? One aspect of it is like algorithmic discovery, right? Like, okay, let's build these various feeds. And that's something
I want to kind of talk to you about a little bit as well. But then this, I really like this kind of visual map idea to kind of be able to see, okay, like what is actually the conversation flow look like? Where are the strongest connections? I don't know if that's something that can be built into, who's communicating the most? Like what does it look like over the past, not just live, but like the past week as well? How have people been interacting? Who's interacting with who?
What do those clusters look like? That's kind of fascinating. And this was actually, this is actually Jimmy Song's idea, surprisingly. I was talking to him in Nashville. Really? I think it was in Nashville. And I was on a boat and he was just like, he was like, hey, here, let me tell you, this is what I want in Domest. And he like sketched it out. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I could totally do this. So yeah, if you see this feature in
Domest eventually, it's because of Jimmy Song. But it's awesome. But there's like, what's cool about this visualization is that there's different ways you can visualize, right? So one of the examples, one of the common feedback we get is that when people join, it's like, oh, it's just everyone talking about Bitcoin. I'm going to talk about Nostra. But people who talk about those things are naturally follow each other. So imagine all the people who follow each other, they kind of
cluster into a into a section of that virtual 2D map. So you can instantly see everyone who are Bitcoiners like, oh, that's that group. And so imagine if you can circle that group and create a list. And that's your initial contact list. It's just your Bitcoiner list. But then again, there's other people who might be more interested in gardening or permaculture. And those people will naturally clump together because those people are talking to each other all the time.
And that will naturally form a cluster. Like, oh, and then maybe even eventually, like, you can just apply machine learning. And then they'll say, like, oh, these people are talking about permaculture, this group, you circle to instantly create lists automatically from those from those clusters. And then what this creates is like this 2D map. It's almost called like the Nostra Village,
which is funny because this is what the Japanese users called Nostra. Like, right when I started interacting with Japanese users, they're like, oh, welcome to the village. This is the village because that's what it really is. It feels like a kind of a small village with different groups of people within the village. So I think if we just visualize that and map it out, I think that could actually solve a lot of these issues.
I love that idea of kind of being able to create like these ad hoc, if you will, lists and groupings based on based on interest. Because again, yeah, you can also, you can follow certain hashtags and do things like that right now. But sometimes you end up getting maybe more spam in there than you would want because people are obviously using those
hashtags when they're not actually talking about whatever that thing might be. But this gives you a way to kind of filter that to a certain extent, like, okay, these people are consistently talking about whatever X topic that it is. I know that this is going to be a high signal list of people who are going to continue talking about this, not just they're trying to
use it to somehow get thrown into other people's, you know, other people's feeds. Exactly. And so yeah, I mean, that's, I realize this, you know, a lot of the apps that we currently use already kind of do this, like a lot of the machine learning algorithms that they're using do this for you. But the cool thing about this, I mean, you make it visual is that it's no longer opaque, like a big thing that people worry about is this idea of like, what is the algorithm doing? It's influencing me
and trying to convince me to do or to vote a certain way. But this is like, it's open. It's an open way of like, this is exactly what the algorithm is doing, because you just circle this group of people and now the algorithm is just what you just physically did on the screen. And I love this idea of an open an openness to that to algorithms where you actually can see what the algorithm is instead of just like, some programs telling you that is like,
trust me, I'm doing the right thing. I was listening to you gave a presentation, I think it was like Nostradam, I believe it was. This was like a couple of weeks ago. And it was super interesting because you were talking about just a lot of the things that you've been working on that are not directly visible. You know, it's not just the iOS app, like it was, you know, note push this, this relay for push notifications, the Nostra DB,
Nostra script, note guard, note crumbs. And I'm just kind of, if there's any of those, maybe that you want to get into a little bit, because I think sometimes these things are, they're easy to miss for folks, because again, they're, if they're just using Nostra casually, and maybe they don't need to know about all these things. But I think some of them are really interesting. And one of the things maybe that would be a place to start with that was you were
talking about Nostra script versus a DVM. Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe, maybe back up for a second, just explain what DVM is, and then just kind of Nostra script alongside that? Yeah, so I mean, I'm not a DVM expert from what I might understand is that you're kind of outsourcing a lot of the algorithm work to some other entity on the network. Let's say you're, you don't, your client or you might not know how to show the best, like the top,
top Zapp posts or the top like posts. So you're outsourcing that, that request, that algorithm to a third party. So there's some third party, they generate a list of notes for you, and then you consume that list on your client. So that is very much like a different approach from Nostra script. So Nostra script is kind of like the inverse of that. So Nostra script is, you know, instead of that other entity generating that list for you, that algorithm for you, you just have
the algorithm yourself. It's actually a short computer program that's a portable binary program. And then you put that into your client. And then that, and that, and your client will generate that list for you dynamically on on demand without having to spam the network with like all these
lists all the time. The reason I like that approach is it works offline. So if you're like, you know, you, your algo feed it, and it's also private, like you can have your own algorithms, you don't have to let, you don't have to tell the world that what algorithms you're interested in, you can, they're just programs that are running, think of like a small JavaScript program that's running within your browser that's doing something useful. So they're, they're related, but they're
just, they just do it in a different way. So Nostra scripts integrate are being integrated into the Nostra DB, which is another technology I was working on, which is a new type of database, which is built into note deck. So everything you saw in note deck is all powered by Nostra DB. And, and the way to think about Nostra DB is that it's just, it's like a relay that's in,
in the node, like the relay is in the computer. Like a lot of the clients I built before, like on Dommas, Dommas iOS, it's like, there's no relay in Dommas OS, you just have to talk to remote relays. The downside of this is when you're not online, or when you have poor connectivity, things won't load. So no text a different approach where it's like, things will always load. And it's not, and the results of what you see are not dependent on what the relays are sending you.
So a relay could be like injecting ads into your fee. Like, let's say you, let's say you request someone's profile, and instead of them giving you the profile, they just give you a bunch of ads and interspersed between the nodes, like they could totally do that. So clients have to be very careful to like make sure that the, the resulting query is matching the filter that they sent. But with, with NostraDB, you don't have to think about that at all, because you're only ever looking
at, you're only ever querying the local relay that's inside your client. And then you're just dumping data in from other relays around the web. And then everything just kind of works. And it works
offline. So anyway, so it's a different approach. I call it the local relay model. So my, my, my vision for the future of this Nostra client is, you know, you have your local relay, you're only ever talking to local relay, you have these nostra scripts that are running that only interact on the local relay, like all these visualization tools, it's only the, and that makes it really fast too. Because when you're loading data off, you don't have to wait for data to load off the
network because it's always there. It's always available. You can always query it in the same way you would query any data on Nostra. Anyway, so I hope it leads to like a much, a much better user experience with, and a much more powerful in terms of things you can, it's like a, it's a technology where you can build more powerful things on top of. It's like a, that's why I was thinking of it as like a browser, a Nostra browser in that sense.
Now, I love that. And the other thing you mentioned, which I wanted to follow up on was note crumbs. Can you talk about what that is? So note crumbs is what powers, I mean, I worked on note crumbs for like a weekend last year in December. And it like bear, it kind of works. So whenever you share a Damos.io link,
it's, it's, it's called something, it's called an open graph server. So whenever you share that link on Twitter, or you share an iMessage, or you share it in a mail, open graph is this open protocol where like the operating operating system itself can pull in a preview of that, of that post. So what you'll notice whenever you share a Damos.io link, you'll actually see an image preview in like your messenger app or whatever. So that's what, that's what note
crumbs is. I'm expanding note crumbs to become kind of like our version of primal.net, primal.net web. So a lot of, one of the biggest things is being able to share your profile to like other people. And this is why people love the primal links because they, you get your username, you can share your, and share it. And then you have like a nice preview of your profile and all
your, and all your recent posts. So I'm, this month I'm working on expanding note crumbs into like our full own, our own version of the primal.net web links that are like fully blown profiles. But the only, the only adjustment I'm doing is that I'm not making it a full blown web client, because I don't think web is secure to build NOSHA clients. It's going to be something, it's just mainly for previewing notes and, and just to make sure that's really high
performance and it loads quickly. That's just kind of the main goal with that. Nice. Okay. Well, I'm, I'm curious to just kind of, okay, there's a, there's a lot of development happening on NOSTA, both within Damos and everything you're building within primal, within amethyst, within Snort, here on the zap.stream on iris. I, there's,
I can't even name all of the different clients that are out there now. So I'm, I'm not trying to purposely exclude any of these are just the ones that popped into my head first, because they're the ones that I use the most. But I'm curious, you know, do you see, are you looking at the development that's out there for other stuff? Like, like Pablo, for instance, building out this, this O-Las, I believe that's how you're supposed to pronounce it. But are you looking at some of this
and, you know, do you draw some inspiration from what you see in other clients? And does that make development sometimes a little bit less daunting? Because a lot of this is open source. I mean, most of it, that's fair to say, like most of the client development that's out there is, is open source, maybe not all, but the vast majority. Yeah. Yeah, most of it's open source. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of web clients,
and I don't use any web clients. So maybe I'm just a, I'm weird in that sense. But one thing I'm really excited about is Kiran's working on a native version of zapstream built on the same technology as note deck. He's actually using NOSTA to be as well. So I'm like, I'm super hyped for that. Cause I hopefully I can integrate that as app stream into note deck in the future. That would be super, super slick. And I'm, I'm, I'm the same way. So you're, you're not, you're,
you're not a freak. You're not alone. I, I honestly like prefer, I do most stuff on mobile, just because that's what I like to do. I also, I like to walk a lot. And so that, that's more conducive to it, although I do have my indoor walking treadmill and my standing desk. So I can still walk and use my laptop. But you know, I have noticed that there is a lot of focus on web clients generally. You mentioned that that's sometimes not as secure. Is that worth getting
into it all? Or does that get too technical for some people? I'm just kind of curious, like, is that something that you view as an actual vulnerability in terms of like, are we talking about like, okay, you're exposing private keys. If you're not using something like an extension or maybe like at a high level, where do you see that vulnerability from a Noster client perspective? Well, that's, that's the main issue is that if you want security,
you have to really compromise UX. So if you go to any Noster client on the web, these days, it's like, you have to use a plugin or you have to use NsecBunker. So NsecBunker is like this remote signing idea. So if you're new to Noster and you like, you're presented with those two options, you're like, what the hell is this? And you just leave. So you're like, it's like, you're like, you're kind of screwed if you're building a web app. That's why it's so much nicer
on native because it's like, it's more relatively more secure. And you can just generate a key and you don't have to worry about cross site scripting attacks that are just gonna, which actually happens multiple times. It happened with a core code, it happened with enigma, where people, well, in core code wasn't a cross site scripting, but you know, there's like these analytics scripts that can like send your key off. So a lot of the web apps are just removing Nsec. For good reason,
they're removing the Nsec input, but now you're just like your UX is screwed. And like, if we want this to succeed, you really almost need like an OAuth or password login for web apps. And I don't know how to make that work really, that makes sense. Unless you're like encrypting the key on a web somewhere, but still, you have to do post somehow. So you got to give your key to some server that's going to sign for you. It's just, I don't know, I don't know how to solve that.
Well, I noticed like, you know, a lot. And I think you guys do this, like when I was downloading, when I was downloading note deck, it had me, you know, put in my end pub and then you sent Damos sent a DM to me with a one time code, which I then used to authenticate and download. So I never had to put my Nsec anywhere. I didn't have to use, you know, any sort of sign or anything like that. It was just that one time code. But again, that's predicated on the fact that I have
the mobile app and I'm using that and have access to it. So again, for a newer user, it's like, well, okay, well, where do I go check that? You know, so it's a, I suppose chicken and egg kind of thing. Yeah, we're probably not going to expose that to like regular people. Eventually, you probably just want it so you can sign up with like a credit card if you don't know anything about Bitcoin or, but like that it was really no text kind of mainly for people who already have a purple
subscription right now. But eventually it's just, you won't need to log in that way. So, I mean, I know you mentioned earlier, just having a focus, let's say less on zaps. But at the same time, I know you are like a, you know, an only zaps kind of maximalist. Do you, when you say less of a focus on zaps, do you mean kind of for the, for the general user? Like, do you think that that's, maybe we've leaned too hard in the direction of focusing on the fact that look, you can, you know,
because it is pretty fricking incredible. Like, look, you can send and receive Bitcoin, you have basically Venmo like capability built into every Noester client, you can do this seamlessly, you know, near free payments that travel instantly around the world to anyone's end pub that you want and are sent to their wallet. Do you think that that's, you know, again, it comes to like, we think that's really cool. But the majority of people just don't really give a shit. Is that kind
of where your head's at? Well, there's two things on this point, which is one, it's more specifically for the iOS side, we're probably going to focus less on it just because we can't do as much. Like, we want to do a lot of cool things. But if you can't zap a note, if you can't do any note related zaps, it's like, well, it just practically for us, it doesn't really make sense to focus on that.
Again, maybe we could have some weird setup where we, you know, like, like Primal does where you have to have to pay and have like a KYC wallet, but that just going so far away from our core of pillars or core of philosophy is that I don't, we don't really want to do that. So, and again, the second point, which is exactly what you're saying, a lot of users just don't care. They want to experience Bitcoin, but they don't need to hear it like shove down their throat. A lot of time,
that just scares people away. I always want people just to experience it and not think about what it is. And then they can learn about it later if they want to dig into it. But like, I don't think like marking it as like a Bitcoin wallet is going to be helpful for us. But and then the third thing is, you know, on the on the note deck and Android side, we're going to go heavy into it because we're not restricted there. Right. So we actually have a, there's a local, it's probably like the last,
one of the last working NWC wallets. So it's a company here. I know the guy, Adam Soltees, he runs it. He's in Vancouver, North Van, right, skip right across the street. So we're going to probably partner with him and just make that the default Domus wallet and just have an, and have it automatically set up an account. So very soon we're going to have it like a built-in wall in a Domus. It's powered by CoinOS. That's kind of like the next step. So on the,
on the, maybe we'll have the NIOs as well. It's just harder because I'm sure we'll get more scrutiny, but I think we'll try pushing again and see what happens. Yeah. I'm curious because somebody asked about this in the Zap.stream chat as well, just eCash generally and a lot of the stuff that Kali has been doing and a lot of the other devs building around it. Do you, are you guys looking at that at all? Do you think that that, you know, there's, there's a lot of flexibility there,
obviously. Yes, of course, for anybody listening there, you know, as Kali himself would tell you, there is increased rug risk. Don't keep everything on a mint. You know, pull it out periodically, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. But that being said, are you looking at eCash at all? Are you viewing this as something that's going to be, you know, integrated more, let's say natively into more clients? I think though, though, my perspective is that NWC is the interface. I don't care how you
set up your mint. Like if, as long as it's lightning and it's compatible with lightning, then that's fine. I'm not going to have like custom integration for Kashu, just because I think the complexity or the eCash, because I think the complexity gets really high. Because the minute you have like eight, eight different like, uh, cash you nuts from like different, from different mints and now like mints are going off like up and down all the time and it just gets
really complex. Um, I don't know how to solve that. It's like a UX issue, right? It's like, how do you wrangle with that complexity of having all these different tokens from different mints? Um, and it's like, they're all just like paper, Bitcoin, you have to go back to redeem for like actual on chain lightning. Um, I just think it adds a lot of complexity. So if I say, we're like, we're just kind of focusing on the NWC interface that is compatible with a lot of these mints
anyway. So that's kind of what we're doing. Now, I think that's, that's fair. And you know, that's the beauty of, of people building, uh, in and around Bitcoin, Nostra, eCash, it's like, there's somebody focusing on everything or, you know, I should, I should say, out of everything, somebody's focusing on each little part and usually multiple people. And that's kind of like a beautiful thing because interoperability and sleeker solutions may be
built out by somebody who you had no idea was even building this or focusing on it. And then all of a sudden one day it's just, they shipped the code and it's there for people to use. Like I, I think that's, that's like kind of the incredible thing, especially if you're following a lot of Nostra devs or lightning devs, eCash devs, whatever, all of a sudden stuff just pops up and you're like, oh, wow, that's, that's really cool. I had no idea they were even working on that. And now they've
just shipped it. Like it's a, it's incredible. But to clarify, Zap devs, because they are actually doing a shitload of work behind the scenes. Um, you know, another thing I heard you mention in that Nostra Dem Talk was this idea of your focus with, with Domus and also Note Deck and these other products that you're building out of being kind of like a social work play dynamic. Can you talk about that a little bit? How that, like how that shapes your methodology as you're building stuff?
Yeah, so, um, I think the gaming space is like super untapped. Um, because I'm a gamer. Um, I used to build video games. I have a game engine I built in C from scratch that I still had occasionally. Um, and I've always wanted to like, what would Nostra integration with the game look like? And so like this whole, you know, this whole 2D landscape, like visualization is really just building like this virtual shared space where imagine if you're, if you're, you go to someone's
profile and then they have like this virtual room. Um, and maybe there's a, there's a, what do you call it? Uh, one of those talk clients, it's associated with the room. So you can jump in and hang out with people within the room, kind of like Habbo hotel style. I don't know what I don't know what the latest ones are these days. Um, but I always liked that idea of like building these
virtual shared spaces. Cause I grew up, I used to play like World of Warcraft a lot and that was literally my community where I was like, I would hop into the game and be present with people and like chat with them and like we would fight dragons together. And it was like the such as cool, like virtual experience. And like, I wanted to bring an aspect of that into Nostra somehow. So this, this visualization is like step one. I eventually want to have like places you can
actually go and be within the Nostraverse. That's, I don't know, I just think that's kind of cool. Um, I forget what, but that was a long train of thought, but I forgot the question was. No, no, that actually, I mean, that kind of gets in, I had people as well asking about gaming in the, in the Zap.stream chat. And I mean, I think that's kind of interesting. Somebody was asking about Nostra Gamer ID profiles, tech space, Nostra games, BBS, door games. I don't know what
that means actually, excuse me if that makes me a total noob. But I, I mean, I think that the gaming space, I would agree it is like incredibly kind of untapped. And I think there's multiple layers to that, right? There's the actual in game experience layer, but then there's also like the, uh, like let's say Twitch, you know, that I've never used it personally, but I know that like an insane amount of people do like it is wildly, wildly popular. So much that they have massive
conferences specifically just about Twitch streamers. Like, yeah, you have Zap.stream now. Um, you've got, uh, actually when I hopped on the, the HiveTalk that you guys had, uh, what last night or the night before, that was the first time I'd used HiveTalk. I was actually super impressed. Really good. Like who, who built that by the way? BitKeret. She's, I was, I was very impressed. I didn't know she was building this, but it's amazing. So good, good job. It's,
it's very impressive. I was like kind of blown away when I, I thought it was just going to be an audio only, because I hadn't looked into it at all. I thought it was going to be an audio only kind of space, uh, similar to Nostra Nest or something, but it was like, you had a lot of concurrent video running from everyone and the performance seemed to be still like top. She says I can go up to 100 people. So I was like, well, that's pretty good.
All streaming video at the same time. I, I assume so. That would be pretty crazy, but I mean, that's, that is pretty wild. But like, so I'm curious, you know, where there's a huge number of gamers worldwide. Uh, I myself am a gamer. Carl is a gamer. You are a gamer. I know probably a lot of people listening to this are also gamers. Uh, but, you know, again, we're still here a minority on Nostra in terms of like the Nostra
versus still fairly small. I mean, do you think that that's kind of a, another potential inflow of new users that we might see as people starting to build tools around, maybe it's around, you know, gaming itself, but also around the gaming experience, the Twitch like experience, providing those kind of tools. Like that's a huge, huge market of people. Um, and also there also, there tends to be when it comes to these streaming tools like Twitch,
there tends to be a value component to it, right? You tend to be able to tip people, things like that. Obviously using Bitcoin over lightning is a much more seamless way to do that. It seems like kind of a natural marriage there. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the time these platforms, like you have to be very careful what you say. They're like highly moderated. Um, so if you say the wrong thing politically, like boom,
your entire business is gone. And a lot of these streamers make tons of money, like, like they're actually still like, they're kind of bigger than some celebrities. Like some of these people like XQC and, um, Asmongole, there's like all of these like really big streamers, they make like tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, um, just from people like in some sense zapping them, but they're using the platform zap and then they, and the platform takes a huge
cut. Um, so there's a huge opportunity here of like, not even just the zaptream aspect, but one example I always think about is I have my, my runescape character that I've been basically building since 2007. Like I, I, I'm very passionate about this cause I'm like, I'm going to get to 99 mining eventually. I'm at 95 mining. So anyone knows about runescape. It's like, I finally got I used to play runescape quite, quite a lot. So yeah. So I still have it, but I'm like, I'm like,
I don't actually own this character. Like if, if the admin of that server doesn't like me, they can ban it. And like, I literally would lose 10 years of work. Um, this has actually happened to a lot of people who are, who are like playing games. And like, um, so I always like this idea of like, how do we apply that idea of like owning your character in cyberspace, owning your like
avatar and owning it's owning the items within your avatar. Like we're not a blockchain. So we're not like transferring items or anything like that, but there's still some interesting aspects. Like maybe, maybe the game I'm, I'm playing, they offer me, they can sell me stuff and for not your notes. And if you think about the bad spec is they're really just like an item that's like a, that they, someone can send you and it's like a virtual item you can display on your profile.
So maybe there's an aspect of that where you can get items from the game you're playing through Nostar. So there's that aspect, which is huge. Like, I don't know, that's completely unexplored. So yeah. Oh, no, and I think like, you know, it's so funny, the whole idea of like, you know, oh, we'll just use the blockchain for everything, right? You know, like this, this, the basically every, every shit coins, you know, pitch deck is like, well, we're going to put
whatever this is on the blockchain and that's going to make it better, right? Okay, VCs, give us your money, let us pump this pre-sale token to you. And then let's, let's dump it on retail and we all come out rich and nothing was ever really solved. But at the end of the day, you don't need a blockchain for like, like, I think basically the only real use case for
blockchain that we have so far is money. And that's Bitcoin. Like, we're good with that. And yes, you can theorize about, you know, tokenizing securities and all these other things on the blockchain, but like really still Bitcoin is the only valid use case that I think we have seen for blockchain to date, and a very, very good one. But for a lot of things like, you know, you know, various ass in game assets and things like that, like, that's all that really requires
is like public private key cryptography, right? Being able to sign that, okay, this asset was transferred from, you know, X user to Y user. And now this user's private key is the only one that can sign that and transfer it elsewhere. Like that's really kind of all you need. I mean, maybe you can make the argument that you need, you know, you'd need specialized relays, like you'd want a centralized relay running some of this. I don't know, just because like,
you would want to have that quote, global state. But I think it's really interesting. And I'd be very curious to see, I mean, do you know, is anybody working on something like this? I mean, probably somebody in the larger Nostra community is hacking on this right now, right? I mean, we talked about like me and semi-sol talked about like a transferable badge protocol, which it gets kind of complicated. But, you know, if you're transferring things, maybe cashew is be
perfect for that, right? Because you have this bear token that you can transfer, you saw that centralized mint. But a lot of the time, you know, that mint is like managing like the game assets, or it is the game company. And but once they transfer to you, you can at least have like a bear proof that like, Hey, this is mine. So but even if it's a simpler case, we're non transferable assets, which is fine, which is like a lot of that that actually works for a lot of different
things. Nostra works great for that. So yeah, I don't think you necessarily, yeah, you definitely don't need a blockchain or ledger for for every and also doesn't really make sense to have like a completely like transparent ledger for like every game item history. Sometimes you want to recover recover items and delete items, like you want to build you some moderation. I don't know, it really depends on the use case. But yeah, I don't know. I think a blockchain is kind of
overkill for for a lot of these things. So I mean, maybe just like switching gears slightly, because it is speaking of blockchains that are not overkill for something and speaking of Bitcoin. And I was I was asleep because I was in European time zone. I was asleep when Bitcoin hit 100K and I woke up to like texts and voicemails from Carl and I was like, God damn it. Like I missed it. You know, I shucks, I missed it. But it's kind of a it's kind of a wild time right now. And I
know you've been you've been in Bitcoin much longer than I have. You've also been developing in and around Bitcoin, well, much longer than I was even aware that Bitcoin existed. You know, so I'm kind of curious just what are you? Are you at all like still kind of paying attention to Bitcoin more broadly? Or is your focus just kind of deep in Noster right now? Like where are you at? Or are you just kind of at the point where it's like, yeah, okay, Bitcoin's doing what
Bitcoin's doing. But I'm, you know, I'm hacking on other things now. Yeah, I mean, I've always been, you know, in some sense, Bitcoin is like the reason why I'm working on Noster in some sense. Like Bitcoin has really opened me to like this new way of thinking in terms of like free software and freedom software, things that could that are even possible. Like if Bitcoin didn't exist, I probably would just be at a fiat job and depressed and and just like slugging away. And I don't know.
It's so it really gave me a new perspective on on life and on what I should be spending my time on. Because all of a sudden we have this like very unique opportunity to experience a once in a lifetime opportunity of like asymmetric value and just being able to be a part of that. So I'm like, I don't know, I just it completely changed my life. And so it's, I wouldn't say like I'm, in some sense, I always want Bitcoin to be a part of everything I'm working on, because it just
makes so much sense because it's the most important technology that humanity has ever created. So, I don't know, so it's a big part of everything I still do it. But I see it as more like a tool now that let's get this integrated into other things. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's, it is such an obvious integration. Like the fact that, you know, it should be self-evident,
like the fact that Nostra has this Bitcoin lightning integration. And no one else really does, whether it's, you know, Blue Sky or, well, I mean, okay, X, technically, they've had a strike integration for a while, like you can, you know, you can kind of zap somebody via their profile. I don't think any, probably the usership of that is so insanely small. I don't think I've ever used it. Yeah, like most people don't even know that it still exists. Like it's still, it's still on
there. I'm surprised Elon hasn't pulled it off yet at this point, although he does seem to be talking about Bitcoin a little bit more again, just with like one word responses to people, people's posts about Bitcoin saying stuff like wild and yeah, and wow. But so I don't know that that's always been an interesting, so I am still on X. I know guys. Yes, what a centralized platform cuckold I am. But I find it interesting with Elon because clearly, like we know that he has a large bag of
Bitcoin. We know that Tesla and SpaceX have Bitcoin in the balance sheet. He, I think, had a dream come true that he, that they've just now the Department of Government Efficiency, which is doge, which is just another way to pump doge bags. I mean, it's a pretty hilarious troll, honestly. But like, I don't know, I'm curious. It's always been strange to me that he doesn't talk more about it or isn't more vocal about it because he's obviously a forward thinking guy.
And it's like, if you're talking about like, okay, you're trying to take humanity interplanetary, like, well, what's the natural, what's the natural currency? What's the natural money of a spacefaring species? Like, it's kind of obviously Bitcoin. And I think you can deal with the, let's say, the delays between planets pretty easily in terms of relaying that data. But I don't know, I didn't even have a question there. It's just more like, it's always surprising
to me that he doesn't talk about it more. So my theory is that everything that he, and this is just a purely observational thing, everything that he puts his time and energy into is things that he can have direct control over. So like the doge thing is just, he was able to talk to the devs and have a meeting with the devs and he was going to like plan the future. And like, or even the doge council, it's like, oh, he gets to be involved with like managing
the resources of the country. And like, he wants to have control. Whereas Bitcoin, like, he can't have control over Bitcoin. He can't come to the devs and tell them to change this or do this or make this optimization. So maybe he just, my theory is that he just doesn't really care about things. He can't directly control. Maybe that's true, but it's not. But I think it's a fairly fair hypothesis. He does seem to like being in control. And I mean, I guess you can't blame him.
Clearly his control has worked out very well in the companies that he has worked on. It's pretty interesting to see this, the Saga with open AI to kind of playing out in front of us, where he is clearly not so happy with Sam Alton and deciding to, okay, we're going to take this nonprofit, basically, you know, well, we have privatized parts of this nonprofit, which are definitely for profit. And we're raising a shitload of money. And by the way, it's like closed source.
I don't know. Wait, by the way, speaking of AI, is your is your bot, was it Dave? Was it Dave? It was Dave, right? Dave, Dave, who wrote the, who wrote the nostritch joke originally, is he still active? He's not running right now. I could, I could turn him on, but he cost me, he cost me money. So I don't like, like, are you, are you using, I assume open AI as API? Yeah. Yeah.
That gets really expensive very quickly. But I realized that a lot of the open source, kind of tooling, they all, they have, they all have compatible open AI APIs. So you can, I'm running an AI model locally. So I could probably switch Dave over to that. It just might make my computer hot the whole day, but it's my option. Might make it explode, start on fire. But yeah, depends if Dave starts like going out in his
own and deciding to answer like absolutely everyone. Exactly. I just need a, I just need a throttle on it. Like if you need to zap him to talk to him or something. I mean, honestly, that's a pretty sweet idea. I'm just going to, I'm going to go ahead and say that people would like that quite a bit. Plus it's like, okay, it just like speaking of AI compute, like it makes so much sense to use Bitcoin as a currency for that. Like, I know, have you, have you played around with Unleash.chat that,
that NVK built out? No, not yet. No. It's pretty nice because you can, first of all, you just pay in Bitcoin. There's like no, you don't have to, no personal information to sign up. They don't store any of your data. And then you just, you top it up with some Bitcoin, you know, put some sats in there and you can run any number of models. So like that's, I think that's like, that's pretty
sweet. And it also just makes a lot more sense when you think about like, okay, if you're paying for AI compute with a credit card that can be, you know, that money is not actually paid to you yet, that can be clawed back, you know, whatever 30, 60 days down the line, like that really doesn't make a lot of sense when you're talking about actual real world compute. Like that's a pretty dumb way to do things. Like you want final settlement so that you know, you actually have the money
paid to you that you're using to fund your compute. It's kind of shocking to me that more folks haven't done that yet. But then again, it's like still like what, like 1% of the world even owns Bitcoin at all. So like we're still early. Oh yeah. And I want to go back briefly to the, you know, we went on a tangent, but this whole like work, play and social. Yeah, thank you for bringing this back. Again, safe space for tangents, but I appreciate you bringing
it back. Because I did want to, there was one more aspect of that. So we talked about, so obviously Domus, you know, we're focused on micro blogging because that was the obvious use case of Nostar. A lot of people associate Nostar with micro blogging, but it's just like, that's just such a tiny aspect of it. You know, there's long form, there's, you know, there's like clothes, like group chat, and there's like all these other things. So, you know, one aspect is again,
we talked about which is gaming. So maybe we start to integrate more things into your profile. Maybe you can actually, you know, have gaming related things to touch your profile. And then after that, it's like, what is, what is the product? How does Nostar help productivity? How does Nostar help me in my business? So I'm, we're calling this like Domus work, like what are the Domus work suite of tools? So a few things I'm working on right now is something called the
notebook. I'm terrible at naming. It's just no, no prefix with everything. But my deal with notebook is going to be our male client. So the idea is that if you take, because one way I use no, no deck is, you know, of all these like support tickets coming in, people like, Hey, this is broken. So what I would like to do is I would like to bookmark one of those things and it gets added to my notebook. And what's cool about notebook is kind of like just basically an email inbox.
So anytime people post a new thing to the thread, it gets updated and there's like state, there's like red and unread states and like being able to archive a thread when it's done. So it's like a very simple idea, but this could at least help. You can imagine one situation where if you on your website, you have like a little chat box and people are trying to get help on your website, that those nodes are getting sent to your relay. And then you have some way to like manage those
within within your notebook and see and respond to people and give them help. So like that's just one example of like a tool that people can use. And then obviously the next one would be something like Slack and having like a private relay for your company where you can all communicate. And the coolest coolest thing about this is eventually once we have enough these tools, then it's going to be such an obvious thing for a company like, Oh, wait, I can run all this on
premises. And I have my own Twitter for my company, I have my own mail client that works really well and it's all integrated and it's all integrated with calendar stuff. I don't know. So it's like this huge untapped aspect of maybe this could be like how Domus makes money in the future is maybe selling these tools to businesses. Who knows, but those are the kind of the main three things we're looking
at is the play, work and social. And I think that's a cool approach because again, there are so many things like the focus has been on microblogging, right? How do we build the Twitter like experience basically for people because that's okay, let's be honest, like that's what's going to attract people into the network to start with. Like they want to, they want to socialize, they want to play, they want to, you know, they want to have fun. They want to be where their friends are, they want
to have a make new friends, have conversations. But this is ultimately just a, it's just an open protocol for communication, right? Like that's at its core, it's a really simple way to do that. Exactly. And we don't have a shit coin. So how do you attract people? It's like freedom and me freedom and memes, I guess it's kind of so you need some way to spread the message and a social network is a easy way to do that. You would think freedom and memes would be enough
for people. That's enough for me, but I guess it is not enough for most people. They, yeah, but I'm also very, I'm very glad that there isn't a shit coin. Could you imagine like things could have, I mean, thank God that this was like mostly Bitcoin developers building this stuff out, because otherwise you know somebody else coming in here, some VC is like, you know, you know, make this a lot better if there was a shit coin that we could pump and, and, and, you
know, and get our own tags nice and inflated. That's how far, that's how far, far caster was made. Basically, that's the, that's the story of how far caster is built. Have you used it at all? No, I haven't, I haven't used it just because I just, I just feel like I wouldn't, maybe this is what other people feel about, but Nostra when they look in from the outside, but I just don't know if I would culturally fit in with a bunch of Ethereum people. That's a different vibe for sure.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of curious as well. Like, okay, so you mentioned just looking outside of the, the micro blogging, kind of some of the things you guys are thinking of. Are there other aspects of the Nostra protocol that you think are kind of untapped right now in terms of the, the potential? Like you mentioned a little bit long form as well. Long form right now, as you correctly put it out, it's like you're a little bit limited. Like you need to go to a
client that supports you being able to write in long form. Are there, this is the first question that I've got kind of a follow up, but are there any mobile clients where you can publish long form events right now or only read? So there's one called Yaki Hone, which is really good. Yeah. So I recommend that if you want to try it. There's a hub, Habla News, I used to use that.
Yep. I think those are, I think those are web clients. I don't, but there has, I don't think there's like a dedicated like native writer client and a lot of these, a lot of these long form clients, they're trying to mix in like social media and stuff. And like that's the last thing I want if I'm writing something I just want. I almost want like this like blank white room with no
distractions. It's just really nice slick way to just compose notes and markdown. So that's something that maybe that we can look into the future for adding as, as another note tech app is like a really just focused writer app for long form and like a reader app for long form, a dedicated reader app would be pretty cool too. I didn't, I want to say that Pablo was building out a dedicated like right only long form, basically workspace. I could be wrong on this because he's building
out so many different things at once at any given time. I need, I got a double check, but I, I swear I remember him mentioning like, oh yeah, I'm building something out that's exactly what you said, like just right only, like there's no other distractions. This is just a place where you go to write. Because I think that is something that like people want, like you don't want to have all of the extra distractions if you're just trying to get out and write and publish.
Yeah, exactly. So I want to give one, actually want to demo something. And this is like one of my other favorite protocols that I used to use. And this is maybe like for anyone who's listening, like who, who, who any developer who's out there, they want to like try to build this vision. I would love someone to build this. So this is called Gemini. I don't know if you ever heard of Gemini. Gemini? I do not think so. So Gemini is this is basically like a, it's a web, it's a new type
of web, but it's specifically with linked markdown documents. So anytime you click any one of these things, it's kind of like a web browser, but you can, any page you jump to just shows you another markdown. So it's like, it's like a long form web browser. Think of like a web browser that you can only read markdown documents and they're all hyperlinked together. Like we could totally build this on, on Nostar. Anyway, so I thought I wanted to throw that out there because like this is one
example of where it's like it's really hyper focused for one specifically use case. And yeah, I don't see why we can build this on Nostar. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that. Is this a, did you say that was it's, it's own protocol or? Yeah, it's its own protocol. So it's like it uses its own web servers, its own protocol, its own ports, its own data format. And it's really slick. And I just like, I always wanted that on Nostar. And like that's another
example of like, we could be building these things that are like more focused. You don't need to put in micro blogging and everything just because there's a lot of micro blogging content. Like we can have other types of clients, other types of experiences that are just like more standalone. Yeah, well, that's, that's another question I wanted to ask you too is in terms of this, like, the super app versus micro app debate, where do you fall on that?
Yeah, so, and this is again, another motivation why I'm, I'm taking this, this browser approach with Notec, which is I want all of these apps to exist in like their own tab, right? I want to be able to, so one actually really cool feature of a Nostar browser, and that's something I'm building into, into Notec, which is since you have that local relay embedded within the clients, anytime you open up a new app, let's say the notebook app or the visualization app or the, or like this app
we were just talking about, like the Gemini app, they all can talk to the local relay. So this is already kind of like diverging from the web, the web, it's like you type, go in your browser, you type in a website, it loads it from some remote server. But this browser, since it has a local relay, all these different apps can all communicate with each other. So if I go into my columns app and I click bookmark, then I can hop over to my notebook app and I see that bookmark in my notebook.
And then I hop over to like my visualization app, I can see all the stuff that's happening, source from the columns, because it's all talking to that local relay. So it's like a new vision for like, it's kind of a super app, but it's also like just a shelf or a Chrome for all these other micro apps that can all talk to each other. And it'll work offline too, which is another really
cool feature. So this is the vision I'm seeing. And eventually what we're going to do is with those nostrils scripts, we can actually just say you type in www.bitcoin.com or whatever, and then it loads the nostrils script for that. And maybe it'll load you, it'll load a nostril app, that's like a native nostril app. It's like not a web app, it's not a browser app, but it's like a native nostril app that has access to a local database that can do queries locally, has a
completely different scripting language. So this is my vision of building like this. It's almost like an operating system for all these nostril apps that can communicate with each other. And maybe we'll provide a nice really simple scripting language like JavaScript, something similar to JavaScript, where you can write these apps and you don't have to do all the complicated, you don't have to know about connecting to multiple relays, you don't have to know about upbox model or relay
pools, because it's really complicated to build a nostril app these days. But imagine if you could just write one in like five lines of code. So that's the long-term goal. What you're saying is even I could maybe write a nostril app. That's the plan. Like there maybe there'll be no code solutions where it's just like drag and drop stuff and connect them together and then you have an app. I mean that's pretty slick. I would like to be able to do that very much. I'm curious too, just
you mentioned earlier better tools for creators. Is that something that you guys are thinking about in Damos or are you speaking kind of more broadly about the Nostril ecosystem in general? Probably both. We want to get to that. We're obviously very limited. I'm building a browser in like an iOS app and a relay. It's on the list. It's just and I think it's pretty important for
large-scale adoption and we're going to get there. But maybe it's one of those things where it's like if I just build this browser and someone else just makes that creator app and I don't have to do it, that would be ideal. Well, and again, that's the beauty of I assume that this what you're building now is also open source. All open source, GPL. I think that's pretty incredible. And I think that it's something that for folks from the outside looking in, it may seem kind of weird.
Like what do you mean you're building this stuff and then you're just putting it out there for people? I don't mean for this to sound like a cheesy question, but what does open source mean to you? Why is that so important? What are people missing about that when they see like, what do you mean you're just giving this away? How do you view this?
Yeah, imagine if someone just gave you a pill and it's like, I'm not going to tell you what's in the pill, but you should ingest it and it's going to make you like faster and make you feel better. And it's like, I'm like, I'm not going to put that into my body. And I see programs as the same way if they give you a giant binary, it's like, Oh, trust me, this is definitely not going
to steal your private key or steal your Bitcoin. But I think open source is pretty important, even just from that basic aspect of trust and openness is that, you know, running a program on your computer, you need to kind of trust the person if they're writing it, especially for native apps and I'm building native apps. So that's step one. Another thing is just sourcing help from around the world. A lot of times an open source, someone has a specific niche,
itch they need to scratch for their particular use case. And it doesn't make sense for me to work on it, but they can take my code, fork it and improve it. And then they can contribute back code. So actually get kind of free labor from the market. It's not always the best quality,
like doesn't it? But sometimes it is really good quality. And then the third thing, which is you can kind of be a little bit more innovative because one issue, even like we're talking about open AI is like, you're starting to see their kindness faltering a bit compared to the latest open source models, because you get all this like knowledge from like, you know, a lot of us actually surprisingly coming from China, because they don't have any, they don't have like IP
restrictions. So they can literally just take all the data and they're not going to get sued and they train on the data. And, you know, a lot of the time you can't do that in North America because of IP law and things like that copyright law. So you're starting to see like these open source teams who are like contributing these models and they're like starting to beat like these like closed source commercial models. So there's like, there's all these aspects where just openness
actually provides a lot more benefits. And then, and the perceived negatives of it are actually not a big deal. If someone able to fork like with GPL, if someone forks it, they can't close source it for their commercial application. The way that GPL works is that they have to open source their code. And this actually happened, I think even with Primal because Primal was, I had, they use some of our GPL code in D and they had it open source and like, there you go. Open source is working.
I mean, it's kind of beautiful because again, it's the, that, you know, the old saying like arising tide lifts all boats, right? Like you're opening these things up so that anybody around the world can hack on this, not just whoever's in your localized or, you know, closed team.
And how can that not like it's a free market approach, basically. It's saying like, look, if you can, if you can do something better on here, please go ahead and do it and we'll, you know, we'll incorporate that into ours or you build out your own, like whatever, build the best thing that you can and, you know, whoever builds the best thing is going to win, but we're not going to close off your ability to build just because we're trying to like keep this so close
to the chest and keep anyone's eyes from seeing under the hood. Like it's kind of a beautiful thing. And like the perfect example of this is Linux is like Linux is in every single computing device, like on the planet in your iPhone, for the most part, it's a little variation of it on Android phones, like your Mac OS. It kind of like can infect when things are more open, things kind of spread and it's easier to hack on them. And like, I didn't ask for permission to build zaps.
I didn't ask for permission from someone to hack on Bitcoin. I just did it and like, and there's something really profound about that. Like with all these other closed systems and all these other platforms, you have to ask them, you have some time to pay up like $200,000 a month like on
Twitter just to get API access. And it's like, you know, this free and openness is like allows this hackers and creative people just to contribute and to this amazing, beautiful thing that's kind of in some sense, it's like blooming, it's blossoming into this, this thing, this organic thing that's growing and it's beautiful. And I don't know, it's you just can't do that with closed system. You just kind of like, you have to call up the CEO like, Hey, can I have access to
your like, no, it's like, okay, it's was off and busy. I'm like, okay, whatever. So that's why I love Bitcoin and Nostra because it's like, you don't have to ask permission. You just start building. Yeah. And apologize because my dog decided to bark at the, at the moment you were speaking. So he's clearly feeling. He's hyped. He's hyped. He's he's he loves open source freedom tech.
You know, what can I say? He's like, yeah, give me some of that. I'm curious, with where we're at right now with Nostra adoption, what do you think like for non-technical people who are loving Nostra? They're loving what, what developers are building. They're using different clients, they're experimenting, they're trying their best to, you know, let's say, kind of functionally hack on them to, you know, whether they're, you know, throwing out bug reports, hopefully they're
doing that in a productive way and not just like, Hey, Will, this is broken. But like, what's the best way for non-technical folks to help grow Nostra slash Nostra? However, you would like to pronounce it. I think the biggest thing is just, you know, producing content is important. Like onboarding your friends and like trying to explain like what, like why it's important, like what,
you know, what do you gain from it? Like what, like why are people doing it? That's the biggest thing right now is that, you know, the retention is so low and maybe even just giving feedback and like, you know, asking the devs like what, for your particular use case, what, what can you, what do you need for us to make this thing more successful? Like we have some basic ideas, but you know, there's a lot of, a lot of people, a lot of people needing different things and a lot of
people want to build like communities on Nostra and people are doing that, which is cool. But yeah, just like, you just got to keep spreading the word because I feel like we're definitely losing that battle, if you was like, to like, I call it surf them where, you know, blue sky. Like we have this amazing free software and we're losing to these like, to these horrible solutions that's like locking people in even further and it's just sad to see. So I don't know if it's like an education
issue. It's like, maybe it's us need to improve onboarding, but we definitely need to step up and start making a bigger effort and reaching out to different communities that might not be just the Bitcoin community people, maybe gamers, maybe, you know, gardening or, you know, just start to branch out a bit, I think would be really helpful. We need more Nostra podcasts is what I'm hearing. True. Yes. That would be great.
Well, luckily, TIT coin is both a Bitcoin and Nostra podcast. So, you know, I'm doing my part, as the meme would say. I want to be conscious of your time, Will, but one other thing I wanted to just ask, because you've now been traveling a lot for for Domus and, you know, spreading the good word about Nostra and doing purple pilling in person. You know, you mentioned this experience, which was slightly hampered by QR code issues the other night. But I'm curious, like for the,
I think the pitch is different depending on who you're talking to granted. Like if you're talking to a creator versus like a, I don't want to say a consumer because that sounds so legacy, but just a normal, a normal user. What's, first, I guess, what's your pitch to just the, the normal social media user on why they should check out Nostra? And then do you have a different pitch that you kind of throw out towards people that are more content creators?
Yeah. I mean, the one thing I've been trying to lean on more recently is like, you know, especially when I've been, what I've been saying, like, oh, it's decentralized. I like, no one seems to give a shit about decentralized. So I was trying to think of, I was trying to approach a
different angle and I did a post this morning, even on the Dom's account on Twitter. I'm like, maybe this idea of like, people like to own things, people like to collect things, people like to, you know, so maybe this idea of like owning a place in cyberspace, like some of you have control over. I mean, this has always been our slogan with Domus, which is the social network you control.
But maybe just like really leaning into that and showing how that's, how that's possible and explaining why that's possible without even talking about cryptography, without talking about, because I usually, before I would always go on about, oh, you have your private key and you can sign things and it's super decentralized. And people are just like, what the hell are you talking about? So I've been trying a little bit more subtle approach and say like, some of you control,
because if people ask like, what do you mean by control? It's like, then you can go down that road if you want to. But I think we need like simpler and clear messaging. And I don't know, I'm still working on that as a nerd. It's hard for me to do that. But I think that's been kind of my focus
lately is just how to make the message simpler and more clear. I mean, it is difficult because again, I think for folks who are on Nostra right now, a lot of us were attracted because this was decentralized censorship resistant protocol for open communication that relies on public private key cryptography and also incorporates Bitcoin. Like, but boy, that pitch is not winning. It's rough. Like, yeah, that's, that's going to get, you know, the 0.001% of people and granted,
like those people are really going to vibe with that message. But for most people, that's just, that's just not going to work. And so I think figuring out ways to, to, again, I don't want to say spin, but it is a spin. It's figuring out how does this appeal to the, the normie, you know, the person who's just like, and what do they want? They want a better experience, right? They want, they want more, they want more flexibility, but they don't want too many choices. They want,
you know, like too many choices freak people out. But like, you want something that just is going to work. And I think that's, you know, go ahead. Yeah. And I think that people are increasingly, I don't know if this is true, maybe it's just me, but they're increasingly skeptical of kind of like authority and, you know, what do they call institutions, you know, we see that. I feel
like almost like this election was an example of that. It's like, and maybe this caution, this caution is about like having the institutions having too much control over what's getting put into our feeds. Maybe people, maybe don't, people don't care about that. Maybe, but that's one aspect of it. So like, we can at least sell it like, Hey, it's like, you know, you have control over your feeds. But I think it's becoming increasingly harder for us, especially in the world where,
you know, you know, Elon's message is like, look, we have free speech on Twitter. So, you know, there's no problem here. And a lot of people are just like the value proposition is like, well, I already have free speech here. So like, what is like, you know, a theoretical free speech increase is going to matter that in any practical way. And that's kind of the battle we have to face now with masters like, okay, what's our message? Because that was our message. Like,
we have free speech. So we need to show value outside of that and show, so maybe this whole interconnecting this idea, like the, you know, the, it's like the social apps protocol that are all interoperable, like we need to, we need to start building those apps and show how they work together and maybe that, and especially under one brand, like that's what I've been trying to do with Domus is like, it's hard for me to say, go try this one, go try this one, I don't know if
it's going to nuke their contact list or like go try primal, you know, like a different like algo feed experience. I'm like, I'm just trying to build the suite of tools that like, if you're familiar with the Domus brand, you can actually just use our really reliable suite of tools that all work together. So that's kind of our approach. But who knows, like this is still like, we need to figure out, I think it's been a struggle when you really need to figure out whether our message
is that we want to send out there. We need to, we need to work and of course, workshop it in the public square, which is, which is Noster. And I think that I would agree with you on the interoperability piece, because I think that's huge, even the experience of like the fact that you can now, like you can highlight something and publish that highlight on Domus like really easily. And if
folks haven't tried that, like it's super cool. Like that's really like that. It's those, I think that Noster enables certain experiences that feel like magic, because they aren't available anywhere else. Like they truly feel like, like, holy shit, this is like, this is incredible. Or when I, you know, I publish something, a video on highlighter, and it's available on Flare and wherever else services video content that feels like magic. And so I think that that, that magic is part of that
value prop of like, look, it's just a better user experience. And it's going to keep getting better. That's the other thing that like I've tried to emphasize to people is like, especially if they got a bad taste in their mouth, because they used it a year ago, however, however long ago, and they're like, Oh, it felt clunky. It's like that user experience from the UX, they're just the UI smoothness keeps improving rapidly. And that interoperability layer of things just working
together seemingly by magic is getting better and better as well at this insanely rapid pace. And I think that's what gives me a lot of hope for the future of this network is that like, the more apps that are built, the more people that are hacking on the Noster protocol, the better the experience gets for not just people using their client, but for literally everyone, because it all works together. And like, so to me, it's like, it's that like Noster has a special magic. And like that magic is
that everything works together. There is no YouTube publishing to YouTube and viewing on YouTube, or publishing on Spotify and viewing on Spotify. All of that, all of that is, you know, it's everything everywhere, all at once, right? Maybe that's the I think that's probably, probably copyrighted because of the movie. But you know, something similar to that is kind of the vibe
that I'm going with right now. Yeah. And that's, and as we really just got to get them past that, that friction at the start, which is, you know, oh, I need to put in a, you know, my private key, or I need to create, install an extension, or like, just get them through the door. Let's, let's figure that out. Let's, let's, let's remove all those obstacles, get them into the door, and then just get them to experience this thing as quickly as possible. And maybe just, you know, it'll take
off from there. But that's kind of been the struggle. And this is why the focus on onboarding is so important, at least at Dom's HQ is just getting them in the door, getting them to stay for more than a second is, is, is just the, is the majority of the battle really. Yeah. No, amen. Well, I want to, we'll, we'll start to, to wrap up here a little bit, but anywhere you want to, I mean, people should go to, you can go to domus.io, you can search domus on the app store.
If you're not signed up for Domus Purple, you can do that and you can get early access to note deck, which is pretty sweet. And I'm looking forward to playing around with that more, already enjoying it and how people have got a little bit of a taste of it. Anywhere else you want to, you want to send people or anything you want to leave folks with before we close out.
Yeah, I mean, so if you, if you've listened to this and you agree with any of our, our vision and you want to make it a reality, obviously, Domus Purple is, it's kind of like the only thing that's kind of keeping us afloat. We have one part-time employee named Daniel, and it kind of covers his wage almost. But if you want to see this keep growing and you want to see us build more cool stuff, yeah, definitely get a Domus Purple subscription. I know it's not a lot right
now, but we're going to add more features like the Domus.io links like Primal Has. And so yeah, if you want to support us, definitely Domus Purple is the way to go. And then yeah, that's just a thank you for supporting everyone who's been supporting us so far at this point. So,
thanks. Oh, yeah. Thank you for building open source freedom tech. And I'm going to do my small parts of, for anyone who has zapped this stream, I'm going to go ahead and zap these two Domus, because again, you guys are not, for anyone that's listening, you guys are not VC funded in any way. You are not no outside investment whatsoever. Like you are, you're just building open source freedom tech and trying to figure out ways to monetize it, which I think is, is awesome. But
also I imagine incredibly stressful and very difficult. Yeah. And all the zaps go directly to my node, my node right here, my good old trusty node. So there's no middleman directly to, and this is what it should be. This is the vision we're trying to build. It's like support the creators you want to support those and go directly into their value for value. So that's what we want to see more of this. And we're just trying to represent that as much as possible. I think that's,
that's beautiful. And again, this like, this value for value ecosystem is something that is still really new to people. And seems really weird and seems like, well, okay, that's a nice cute idea. But is that ever going to actually be, you know, like, is that going to be meaningful? Is that going to replace, you know, if you're a creator like my YouTube, you know, revenue, I mean, not for me personally, because I don't make like zero on YouTube. So like, don't give a
fuck. But I think that it's important that people actually try to embrace this ethos. And like, I think what fountain is doing is really great and has been really great. And they are now a no-ster client as well. Like that's incredible. Like that was, I think one of the, I was really glad to see that happen. Because that's like, that's what this is all about, right? Being able to turn basically any closed system, which is what they had before,
into an open, become a part of an open network. That is incredible. And, you know, anyone can do this too. Like you can, you can make whatever your closed system is. You know, you have some sort of closed social graph. Why not open that up to the entire world? And that's, you can basically only do that with no-ster. Like that's, again, that's kind of magic. Yeah. The future is open networks. We have open payment networks. We have open communication
networks. I think people not building on those are just going to eventually, you know, just go away. So open is the future. That's a, that's a perfect note to end on. Well, JB55, Wild Bill, Catherine, thank you for your time. You're thanks to everybody who joined in the live stream too. Again, this show will only be live streamed on no-ster. So if you want to watch it live, as folks have done here, you have to do that on no-ster. So, and shout out to
Kieran for building Zap.stream and making this possible. And Kieran, if you're listening to this, please respond to my email and come on the show soon. So we can talk about Zap.stream on Zap.stream. It will be super meta, but well, thanks for your time, man. I'm going to kill this stream now. Thank you. And thanks to everyone for listening. Podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.