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@ Jacob Goff
2025-03-21 19:47:15Decentralization is a beautiful return volley to the censorship regimes that have ruled American social media, but the decentralization piece isn't the biggest impact Nostr is having on me. The empowerment and encouragement to start building are what overwhelms. Since I began sending zaps just a few weeks ago, every idea I have had for an app over the last decade is organically re-emerging as executable Nostr apps.
The rise of AI alongside Nostr's invention/discovery is serendipitous for someone who doesn't have the coding experience to develop an app from scratch like myself. It is also a great moment for apps that had a social feature -- which was essentially every app. "Connect it using Facebook" was such a non-starter for me. I live in a small town where Facebook is a gossip cesspool. There are intriguing communities there, sure, but the overwhelming dread that overcomes me when I open that app doesn't justify digging for the socially-delightful gems. Further, any app that integrates with facebook is or becomes a variation on an already existing feature that META has engineered into their platform -- they want, they need your eyeballs. On their site.
Nostr makes no such demands. It doesn't care which site is being used to access the protocol, and what features exist on that site. It is available to help, secure a user's identity, and doesn't make many demands in return.
My friend and local farmer Ryan and I have discussed an app for years, built it and rebuilt it using different tools, but we ultimately got distracted by more pressing and less complicated projects. I think a huge barrier to execute it was the sense that it would be impossible to achieve any network effects, plus the thought of managing the social side was overwhelming. It required us to need really powerful tools, and to maintain a lot of data that we didn't really want to hold onto. It was essentially an app for local food producers and consumers. With Nostr at play, we could build something like this and simultaneously onboard our local community to the Nostr protocol while also providing a lightweight solution to managing the complicated part of an online marketplace. The lightning payments come as an added bonus.
We are tracking the use of another app which is sweeping through local food producers, which is only in its beta phase, and restarting our build of a marketplace that is worth building and encourages a sustainable local food supply, this time with a protocol that reduces 90 percent of the annoying part of that build, and doesn't require anyone spend time on Zuckerberg's playground.