chowcollection on Nostr: “In retrospect: when we were just an API and we were a fun little project inside of ...
“In retrospect: when we were just an API and we were a fun little project inside of another company — those were the glory days. That’s when anything went and we didn’t have any external pressures to grow or to monetize — we were just having fun. And [the Twitter API] just reminded me of the only way this can truly be done in a way that serves all the people without all of the surface area that centralization provides 1) for advertisers telling you what they want and what they want you to do, and 2) for governments telling you what they want and what they want you to do, or what data they want for particular users that they don’t like or want more information around — Turkey was a great example the government that always wanted information about particular journalists that were critiquing them. There’s hundreds of other examples of that. But when Bitcoin came along, it looked — from the white paper — that at least some of the discovery issues that we were trying to solve for in a centralized way could be rethought, and it could be done in a way that was actually open, that was actually accessible. Obviously there’s much more accessibility we need to build on top of Bitcoin and through Bitcoin, but at least it showed a different path. And in 2009, when I was starting Square — and Bitcoin was coming out — it just really changed the way I thought about everything: it reminded me of the earlier Internet, it reminded me of why I was here and what I loved, and then it was just a matter of going against this incredible momentum that a public company incentive provides. So I think all the lessons that we learned as a company, we now have — not the technology, but — the understanding as to how to do it a little bit more correct and a little bit more right. And I see it in this [Nostr] protocol. But I also think it’s beneficial to try different things: the Web5 work, the DIDs — they’re solving identity problems. I think there’s some really good solutions that I’m excited about. I don’t expect it to be usable for everything. Bluesky is focused entirely on the social network use case, and they’re doing a different approach than what we experience here, which is: put a spec for a protocol out — it’s not necessarily as simple, but there’s a lot of thought that went into it — and building a client in a less public way, using that as a reference, and then hoping that inspires more developer activity. So I think these A/B tests for development models are generally good, and over time I don’t think they’re necessarily competitive. The reason we started Bluesky Twitter is: ultimately, we’re only as good as the content we have access to. And if we help create a protocol that people actually want to use and put stuff on — and we can get access to that content — we get better, we get stronger because of it. So I don’t see Nostr as competitive to Twitter — it would be my hope that [Twitter] becomes a client. And it would be a great thing strategically, because they have access to more content — if they continue with an ad-based model, that’s critical. But even if they explore other models such as commerce, such as subscription, it’s also meaningful that you just have a bigger network. And it’s really the presentation layer that Twitter should sit at — it should not own all three of those things: the hosting and also the protocol layer. So [Nostr] solves for all of those things in such an elegant way. And to me, my heart is more with this approach: super-dead simple, make it public right away — I love love love that Fiatjaf made it public domain. And just: what’s the velocity that a developer has from going from reading that document, being able to keep it in their head enough that they can replicate what William did, and then in an afternoon actually feel something for themselves to a point where they want to share with someone else so that they can feel the same thing — that to me is the magic path, but I think it’s important that we have different models as well.”
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jack (npub1sg6…f63m)Published at
2023-01-11 18:40:04Event JSON
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