My own solution to growing nostr was to build divine.video which has generated a lot of excitement by people who want to use it and don’t even know to care that it’s nostr. Do something you can’t do in other social media ecosystems. Divine works because we have nostr libraries and blossom and relays and a ton of other things. It was much easier to build on Nostr than building the entire protocol from scratch. But it would have been easier to build centralized than on Nostr, if we didn’t care about freedom and a permissionless future.

We are running a version of keycast at login.divine.video. I don’t think custodial keys are something most nostr users would like to use. And I think it’s vital that any nostr app works with non-custodial keys. The goal is to make it easier to onboard users. Think of it as the bitcoin exchange that bridges to tradfi. We generate a bunker url so you should be able to use the custodial key to access most nostr apps. And you can take your key and ask the service to delete it. Yeah you’d need to trust the keycast server operator to actually delete it and not use it. But this is the same thing users face in any service that uses traditional non-key based accounts.

Do you contribute to building Nostr? We’re trying to make Nostr better for everybody, and one step towards doing that is a survey, listening to developers and contributors. Please fill it out, and share it on!

Yep, I worked on Yahoo Pipes as the project I did right after leaving Odeo(ne twitter)... Mostly my work was on unit and integration tests in prep for launch as I joined it late. It was cool, yahoo killed it... we could totally bring it back and make something amazing that was pipes meets nostr.

I use tons of social apps and in particular recently the video apps because I need to understand how they work for divine.video. Can’t make a good Nostr video app without understanding what works for people on other apps.

Instagram reels has decided instead of showing me reels in languages I understand they’re going very poorly AI dub everything in to English. It’s so painful that it gets me to stop my endless scrolling.

Divine.video uses nostr. That’s more important than always talking about it on my podcast. Some guests don’t know enough about nostr to have an interesting conversation.

The divine web app connects to relays beyond relay.divine.video mostly to get users kind 0 and kind 3 events, and lets you choose other relays if you want to look for short form videos beyond our relay. We aren't pulling in content from other relays and we're not encouraging our users to publish to other relays. If you're seeing reports from divine users on your content, then you or somebody else is republishing your events to our relay. I believe you can use the h tag to limit what relays will host your content if you don't want that to happen. A cool idea would be a way for you to publish, using your keys, a list of relays you don't want to host your content, kind of like the opposite of the h tag, that way you'd have more agency over where your posts went. At the moment, you're welcome to send us something and we can manually block your npub from our relays if you don't want your events to be visible to divine users on the divine relays.

We're tweaking the moderation and content warning system, right now it's flagging a bunch of things as adult content which are clearly not adult content. Divine is using the extension to nip-71 that Vitor and I came up with in terms of just a replaceable event type so you can edit the metadata about the content. You can use it for any content you want, including AI generated content. We are using the client tag, you can filter out divine content from your client or your relay if you want. We're not pushing the divine events out form relay.divine.video but i think there are folks running scripts that share them beyond our relay. The filters for the divine app is we check and label any content uploaded to our blossom server or from events on our relay. We do let you add your own blossom server and change the relays, but we'll indicate that you're outside of the divine experience and in the broader open nostr ecosystem. In the divine app, we're going to have it use labelers we provide, but with settings to choose others. I honestly don't expect these choices to be very appealing to existing Nostr users and would encourage folks to consume the content with other clients. We are curating what goes in our relay and our media severs. If you're not keen on how we do it, use other clients or use the open source divine app and make a version with different choices. I'm not planning on changing the nip-56 tag to other, i think 'ai-generated' is a useful tag of content and if a second app supports it i'll submit a PR to update the spec. Innovation in nostr is not based on strict support of the spec, each app supports it as they choose, with a few core elements. If we don't extend it, try new things, add extensions, then Nostr won't evolve. In ATprotocol they've got strict schema validators and their relays and appviews will not accept signed events that don't fit pre-approved schemas. That's not really the Nostr way. There is no central nostr standards authority to complain to, it is a permissionless network. We will see a lot more folks get upset like you are at seeing content reports until changes Amethyst to show content reports as a content report label. Right now it shows up as if it was a comment. If you don't want to see them, stop using the divine relay, use a client that doesn't display labels that way, or contribute to amethyst to change it's behavior. I don't really love that decision decision, but I do support each nostr app developer making their own choices about how to interact with the network.

So New Zealand got it's first Ikea today. It's national news.... last year we got a Costco which caused mobs of people and was national news for over a week. I know it's silly and consumerist of me, but it sure does make life easier. https://news.google.com/search?q=ikea%20nz&hl=en-NZ&gl=NZ&ceid=NZ%3Aen

New version of the diVine released to TestFlight. This one focused on lists. I think we should do more with lists in Nostr.

Anthropic released a new model, Opus 4.5 and i'm playing with it. I had it generate some docs for a server i'm working on setting up, and it created a docx file which was nicely formatted instead of a markdown file.

Nostr’s core are the developers who build all the apps and servers and other tech we need to make it work. Eventually I hope the tech eventually fades in to the background as users come for the community they can find. We can do better as a developer community. One of the projects I’m working on through And Other Stuff is making Nostr a better place for developers. The first step is to listen and learn, to do that we’re working with the open source support group superbloom. Please fill this out if you’re helping build nostr and share. https://survey.superbloom.design/878514 If someone speaks fluent Japanese, Chinese, and Thai we would love to translate this in to those languages in order to reach more devs.

No I think we need help on the blossom side too

We need beta testers and QA, for the website, for posting videos, for all the features of the apps, mac, ios, android, and web.... Please don't pitch bitcoin at folks, we're going to add a cashu wallet and zaps eventually, but we don't want to scare them away... ;-D

Hey Nostr, I need your help. Divine.video as you might have seen is a new video nostr app that i've been working on for the last 3 months. It got MUCH more attention than I was expecting. Hundreds of millions of people viewed, liked, or shared videos about it. I've got some of the biggest original Viners in my DM's begging to get back on it. The TestFlight hit it's 10k limit in a few hours. I'm excited but also really stessed out. We've had lots of bugs and Apple and google have been their usual black boxes when it comes to app review. A bunch of folks have stepped up to help, got the android build working for example. Lots of things have broken, nobody really knows how survive a flash flood. I'm sharing this because I need help. We've got a chance to really grow nostr, the idea of a video app that's not got AI slop and does focus on something more human is resonating. People hate what's happening to tiktok, instagram, and youtube shorts where algorithms and the platforms love of AI generated content going viral is taking over. Instead of fighting back we see AI only platforms like MetaAI and Sora. This is an assault on the very idea that people are central to social media. I think big companies see the shine of AI generated content and dream of a world without all these pesky rabble making demands of platforms. If only they could replace the creators with bots. This call to action felt right to me, but holy shit I had no idea it'd go so viral. The app has lots of bugs, and we need appstore approval, but at the moment the biggest problem I have is relays. I need you, the nostr community's help. I started out with strfry which we know scales but lacks search. So i started using nosflare, https://github.com/Spl0itable/nosflare , by which worked pretty good when we had dozens of users but has had scaling issues and has been hard to debug. But Nosflare is cool. I was able to easily add nip-50 search support, and because it runs on cloudlfare i hoped would scale horizontally. When I told I was using nosflare, he said i should have told him... but again I didn't think this would escalate so quickly. So then we tried using the ditto relay https://github.com/andotherstuff/otherstuff-relay by and put a bunch of really beefy servers behind it. Even then it's struggling to keep up. The thing is, we're pre-launch, we have 10k users in testflight and a mostly read only site at divine.video which is a react app. I'm a really terrible sysadmin. Yes I've helped run my own mail server since the 90's but I hate it and i'm not good at it. I know my way around my command line, I've compiled my own kernel from source, but fuck i hate it. And now i've got to setup and scale servers to realize the dream of something i've worked on for the last 8 years. I need your help, but maybe i'll digress... In 2017 I decided to learn crypto, i joined a startup, quantstamp, and built their testnet, a SAT solver to verify smart contracts. I quit because I came to see how scamy the world of ICO's and tokens were. I'm not the only Nostr dev to have explored the 'darkside'. I started my company to build decentralized social, initially trying to take secure scuttlebutt to the mainstream. I built planetary.social, and worked with amazing dev's like and others we saw Nostr arrive and we pivoted! We built Nos.social, which i'm really proud of but it never took off. A few months ago I was in talks to help start andotherstuff, but i was also very frustrated with running a company, I wanted to build stuff myself. So I stopped managing people, started a podcast, and really dove in to building with agentic programming. I built a bunch of things I threw away. A lot of bad experiments. In the course of the revolution.social podcast i kept hearing about Vine. I listed to the "Vine 6 seconds that changed the world" podcast: https://vine-six-seconds-that.captivate.fm/ and I talked to people about this social media platform that was shutdown when was trying to save Twitter when he returned as CEO. I thought, well Vine is cool, I know folks like and others have build nostr video apps, how hard could it be to make a nostrvine app. I started coding, that's why the repo is still called nostrvine: https://github.com/rabble/nostrvine Turns out that it wasn't that had to make something that sort of worked. Then I thought, it'd be cool to dig up some old vines. I searched the internet, found some on youtube, some on the way back machine, and I thought oh cool, i found a couple hundred popular old vines. Then I hit the motherlode, a community internet preservation project called archiveteam had run crawlers to archive the site: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Vine they had about 2.7 TB of vine data, but in these very hard to work with WARC files that are 40GB each! I spent a month or more learning to parse and extract the files. I realized i had the meta data for most vine users, millions of comments, and hundreds of thousands of actual vine videos! It was a nightmare to parse because of the size of the files, the messiness of the data, and the like. But it was a consuming fun project, a puzzle. At the same time, I was learning about flutter, I've had to rewrite the nostrvine codebase many times as i learned about riverpod, figured out how to get the UI to update smoothly while interacting with nostr. Getting the app to run fast and smooth was really hard. I also had to figure out how to host the damned videos in a way that works. I tried google cloud, cloudflare, and bunny. I made TONS of workers to run all of these services to make the system working. I also was seeing how much people, myself included are frustrated by AI slop, taking over social media. I have an old friend who runs a non-profit tech org, The Guardian Project, they'd make a tool for verifying videos are real for documenting human rights abuses. I thought, hell i could use this proofmode thing they've got to verify that videos are real. People like realness. Over the last few weeks the pieces came together, I was scheduled to speak at WebSummit with and also to interview on the main stage talking about enshittification of the internet, and how we can resist it, by building things like Divine. I talked to a reporter from Tech Crunch who'd written a positive article about AndOtherStuff, and she was excited to write an in-depth piece about my vine clone. Once the date was set, I had no choice to go forward. Was the app ready, NO NOT AT ALL. I was literally coding up releases on the plane while flying to Web Summit in Lisbon. I started submitting the app, and getting rejected. It got much better really fast, and basically works. On the stage at WebSummit when I introduced diVine, the audience clapped politely. I showed the app to people and they sometimes said "oh this will be big" and wanted to play with it. But if you've ever made software, and you show it to people, everybody always finds something nice to say about it. I had so little faith in diVine taking off that I was planning on taking a few days off to explore Morocco before heading to a non-profit software dev meetup in SF. It was only the last minute that I decided I might need be near a computer and internet connection post launch to see how things are going. Until diVine launched I thought the highlight of my trip and WebSummit would be that a podcast network wanted to pick up revolution.social and help me build an audience around the podcast. I have never seen anything like this excitement. Just look at tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=divine there is a wave of people excited about it. There's a wave of news about it: https://news.google.com/search?q=divine%20vine&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen Folks are saying that I'm taking on TikTok, and it's been on the evening TV news all over the place. This is a dream. More excitement than I ever could have dreamed of. Creating a social media app that reflects all the values I laid out in rights.social . Building something people love and are excited about. When the app's been up, the new videos are amazing, so funny, so creative. When Jack launched Twttr, we didn't get this reaction. It took a lot of time for twitter to emerge as a star. The scaling issues didn't even show up until a year after twitter launched. When Kevin launched Instagram it got 150K signups in the first few days, and I was blown away at how fast it was growing. If it hadn't been for my messing up getting in to the appStore, and having my relays collapse under the traffic, diVine would have grown much faster. Somehow it hits a nerve. This is where I need your help, the Nostr community. I've already got help from a ton of folks like the folks from and and others i'm forgetting right now... But we need more help. Let's do this as a community. We're building a permissionless, open future that can't be shutdown by corporate owners. But we only get there if the tech works. We don't get to integrate cashu and show users how there's another business model for social media if we don't make an experience that people enjoy using. Here's where we are. We've got the new nip for replaceable video events, which is supported by divine and amethyst... https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2072/files we've got the proofmode verification spec i proposed: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2109 and my weird fork of nosflare which adds the ability to do filter requests that sort on things other than timestamp, it lets us find the most popular old vines: https://github.com/rabble/nosflare The blossom server for media running on cloudflare mostly works, bunny is mostly working to scale serving the content. But fuck our relays are having trouble. Partially it's because divine doesn't optimize how many relay connections it does, so help with that would be appreciated.. but mostly it's we need to scale the relays, we need to work fast, and reliably. I'm trying to not talk much about Nostr and not make users understand anything about how nostr or keys or relays work. We need a network of relays, we can dedicate for this, scale horizontally, which respond quickly, and support search. We could have search relays + normal content ones, but doing that requires updates to the released app, which is hard to do because we've got a delay of a day or more per release. So it's best if we can put this all behind relay.divine.video. In terms of content moderation, my tactic is to provide a pretty heavily moderated experience on the primary relay and media server. But users own their keys, and the app lets users change or add relays and switch media servers. That way we can provide both freedom and the curated experience of users we're enticing away from centralized corporate social. And all of this is open source. So help! I need nostr sysadmins and scaling folks. Please help. We don't have much time to catch this wave, and I'm in over my head. If you can help, reach out, [email protected] or send me a DM, i'll add you to a slack room, and we'll figure it out. Join me and we'll make a social media revolution to make revolution possible.

I spent the last week asking nostr users to help me test it. ;-D

yeah i'm totally floored by how widely this is being picked up.