Dawn on Nostr: Portable identities that you have complete responsibility for securing, clicked right ...

Portable identities that you have complete responsibility for securing, clicked right away. No one likes the current systems they're stuck using. There was enough correlation between existing companion products & password managers to different nostr clients & signers that I didn't have to make the cold comparisons, they did. All I had to explain was that you can't plead for help if you screw up. I had an in on this part, since that's where the conversation started.

There was disconnect about how notes are stored and spread. I think they were initially equating to either one-place-total-data-control or everything-everywhere, with no evolving middle ground. I didn't realize that until I started comparing feeds from my relay set to other people's. Questions came when they noticed duplicated content, which led to more questions about why the feeds were also different. Once we got outbox and "natural" distribution patterns down, all the intentional distribution methods I had shown suddenly seemed worth attention. We went back through a couple clients and relays and did some feed comparison & republishing. Then things really started to make sense.

Curation that didn't require being in a club to participate in the discussion got more attention than I thought it would.

The pyramid main feed was another that surprised me. I have 8 or 10 people outboxing there, so I wasn't expecting that to make much impression, but I got "So this one is similar to what early Facebook was about?" I was like, " Umm... Kinda!"

Trending type things had mixed interest, the smaller scale of that was said to feel more personalized but we don't have a big T trending, we only have bitcoin and ai stuff so... who knows.

The WoT filtered discovery streams were immediately said to feel similar to scrolling current social media platforms. That made it easy to compare social graph dictated content to algorithms.

We compared my home feed to scoped relay feeds, then compared those to filtered discovery feeds, and ended on the Damus relay and Amethyst global. The idea of scaling how far in or out you want to venture made sense that way. I think I got lucky because everything worked and the "global" feeds did not disappoint in getting my point across. I got a lot of questions about how to find interesting relays outside of my predetermined "nOasis" and how to get started someplace similar without a "me". They gave ideas around that, like relays having something akin to meta tags & instead of choosing from a list of topics or people at onboarding, having a 'type & search for interests' that seeks out that information from known relays. I don't know if that would work but you probably do. 😅

I'm kinda surprised I didn't get questions about finding specific people. Maybe I didn't highlight that aspect enough. Or maybe they didn't care. The latter is entirely possible. None of us are very pop culture oriented.

I didn't get much into specialized relays or the other stuff. I demonstrated Alexandria. Their publication visualizer impressed right away. ZapCooking's cook books were a hit, too. I mentioned chat groups, video conferencing, and forms. That brought up questions about separating work/personal. Lists seemed like an obvious solution (aside from separate keypairs) but I couldn't think of any other stuff that is leveraging other other stuff, so we wrapped up there with my 'that's where things are at right now' closure.

I don't know if you wanted a full essay about it, but there ya go. Honestly, we jumped around between 5 or 6 different clients and probably a individual dozen relay amd everything worked. That alone feel like a huge win for everyone involved in creating this stuff.