A bold pitch for Nosta

(Psst... you can watch the video pitch here)

A seemingly unstoppable epidemic is ravaging our lands. We have to defeat it, or else... everywhere you look, you see people anxious and demoralized. You may have noticed it already amongst friends and family, maybe you feel it too, but the problem is one of global scale. All you wanted to do is to set up a Nostr profile. But you had no idea what you got yourself into. It all started so innocently. "Join this new and amazing social network", they said. "No on will be able to censor you", they said. But no one mentioned NIP-05 or LUD-16. Not a single word about npubs and zaps. What does it mean? Does anyone actually know? Is this Psyops? The sense of disorientation that flows through your mind when you hear the terms has now become familiar. Will there ever be an end to this? Or will life forever be filled with incomprehensible tech jargon?

Fear not, Nosta is here to save the day. No need to learn anything about anything. Just click a few buttons, tap on some keys to make those input fields happy, and you'll have a beautiful Nostr profile that your grandkids will still fondly tell stories about.

And not only that, Nosta is also your entry point into the Nostr ecosystem. Take the leap and have fun with Twitter clones, Telegram clones, Github clones, Medium clones, Pastebin clones, and so much more. And if you still really want to get into this NIP-05 stuff... you can do that, too, with Nosta. It's the one-stop shop for profile creation and management with a satisfying layer of polish to lull you into subservience.

Are you convinced now? No? Maybe one more picture about some other stuff?

Aaaaanyhow, let's talk about this hackathon. I started this project when designing a community commenting feature for the Wallet Scrutiny website late 2022. I had to get familiar with Nostr and realized that nicely setup profiles really contribute a lot to the commenting experience, but it's a bit too much to ask that every Nostr client builds their won full-fledged onboarding flow. And I wondered what a good experience for this would look like? Maybe it could be a micro-app? So I started tinkering with designs.

I stumbled across this problem again when setting up the Nostr account for the Bitcoin Design Community. It took a ton of technical research and tinkering with various clients to get it set up properly. Then people had problems discovering it in their clients and I realized that I could not tell whether it was set up correctly at all. If I can't, working closely with this stuff, will others? Life is just so hard sometimes. I tinkered a bit more over Christmas, also with code, but then stopped as a million other projects had higher priority.

Around comes this lovely hackathon (thanks Bolt Fun crew). My goal has been to use this opportunity to get a basic V1 of the site running where people can create and view profiles. I made some really good progress. The 10-step profile creation is working, and I also managed to squeeze profile updates in (zaps, badges, reports...). Plenty of stuff to do, but I think it's in good enough shape that anyone can see what this is meant to be, and we can chat about whether it's worthwhile or not. Maybe we want the global population to live with Nostr-lingo induced panic attacks for all eternity? There could be benefits, I suppose.

Let's get more practical and look at a list of the current features:

• 10-step profile creation flow for complete newcomers that explain the core aspects of Nostr and guide users towards a rock-solid setup

• Promotion of other applications in the ecosystem to encourage newcomers to get active

• Profile data inspection & download

• Highly visual profiles with various themes

What's in progress:

• Profile editing

• Log in with browser extensions & encouragement of good security practices

• Adding external signer setup into profile creation

• Add lists and external identities, maybe pinned notes

• Activity check-list

• Direct zapping

• More stable and efficient relay management

• Help section with explainers

• Profile healer (identify and fix problems)

Potential business models would keep the core service free and could charge for additional services:

• Pro accounts (subscription)

  • Handles

  • Image upload

  • Backup

• Cosmetics (one-off purchases)

  • Themes

  • Customization

  • Supporter badges

But first, let's discuss whether this effort is worthwhile in the first place. I certainly enjoy building it and find it useful. Do you?

Check it -> Nosta

Also, here's a work-in-progress video from a month ago.

Peace ✌️