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THE Bitcoin Podcast
NOSTR: Building Better Social Media -- jb55 AKA Will Casarin (THE Bitcoin Podcast)
01:46:43
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- [00:00]
Will Kassarin
Bitcoin is like the reason why I'm working on Ostra in some sense, Bitcoin. It really opened me to like this new way of thinking in terms of like free Software and freedom software, things that are even possible. If Bitcoin didn't exist, I probably would just be at a fiat job and depressed and just like slugging away and I don't know. So it really gave me a new perspective on life and on what I should be spending my time on. Because all of a sudden we have this very unique opportunity to experience a once in a lifetime opportunity of asymmetric value and, and just being able to be a part of that. I just, it completely changed my life in some sense. I always want Bitcoin to be a part of everything I'm working on because it just makes so much sense because it's the most important technology that humanity has ever created. So it's a big part of everything. I still do, but I see it as more like a tool now that let's get this integrated into other things.
- [00:51]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast. The Bitcoin time chain is 874147 and the value of one bit Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Nostr Talk, where I talk with my guest about Nostr and whatever else comes up today. That guest is JB55, aka Will Kassarin, aka Wild Bill Kassarin. Will is the developer Behind Domus, an iOS client for Nostr, which is also the first Nostr client I ever used. Today we dig into what's new with Domus and Nostr more broadly, Will's latest project, Note Deck Open source development on Nostr and Bitcoin why content creators and everyone else should try Noster and a whole lot more before we dive in. Do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're watching or listening. But I personally recommend you listen on Fountain fm because not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value, but you can earn Bitcoin just for listening to podcasts. Check out bitcoin podcast.net for episodes and additional resources. Head to the Show Notes to grab discount links for my sponsor Bitbox, or go directly to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker. Send an email to helloitcoinpodcast.net if you had feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast. And if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by giving it a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain. I truly appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this Noster talk with Will Kassarin. Okay. We are live Wild Bill Kassarin. I pretty sure I'm the only one who calls you that, but I still. I still.
- [02:45]
Will Kassarin
My mom calls me that.
- [02:47]
Walker
Does she? I don't know if I believe you.
- [02:49]
Will Kassarin
No, she does.
- [02:50]
Walker
She does that. Does she really?
- [02:51]
Will Kassarin
Well, I mean, that's what my parents called me growing up was Bill. And then I just switched to my. My birthday, which is William when I moved to Vancouver.
- [02:59]
Walker
If. If I'm not mistaken, you're like developer name on Apple. Is it still Bill?
- [03:04]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, it was like. It was Billy. Because, like, that was like, what my parents called me. Billy. Like Billy Kazar or something? Like, oh, boy.
- [03:11]
Walker
It kind of. You kind of sound like a gunslinger, you know, like, Billy. Billy Casserole out there.
- [03:16]
Will Kassarin
Well, my middle name's Robert, so it's like my cousin called me Billy Bob, so I don't know. So if you call me that, I'll hate you, but.
- [03:21]
Walker
And what's your mother's maiden name, by the way, in the street you grew up on? Just for my own curiosity, you know. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. All right, we are good to go. Will, it's been a while.
- [03:35]
Will Kassarin
It has.
- [03:36]
Walker
It's been actually over one year since you came on this show. You were one of the first people who I did as, like, an actual interview, as opposed to me just rattling off new stuff or reading Austrian economics out loud. And you were one of the first. It was like, no end of November 2023. So. Yeah, it's been. It's been over a year now since you've come on. It feels like it's bad.
- [03:59]
Will Kassarin
I don't remember doing that.
- [04:01]
Walker
I mean, so many things has happened. We were drinking during that episode.
- [04:06]
Will Kassarin
Oh, that explains it. That explains it.
- [04:07]
Walker
Yeah. I think you. If I remember correctly, clearly, I wasn't drinking enough, but I believe you were having whiskey or something a little bit stronger, perhaps.
- [04:16]
Will Kassarin
Old fashioned, probably. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [04:18]
Walker
Yeah. Yeah, that's. I think that may have been the culprit.
- [04:20]
Will Kassarin
That's what all my best work is on, Old fashioned.
- [04:23]
Walker
Do you drink Old fashions while you code?
- [04:26]
Will Kassarin
Oh, yeah.
- [04:27]
Walker
Do you have to? Like, does the number of old fashions consumed while coding? Like, is there a direct correlation to amount of review you need to do afterwards?
- [04:36]
Will Kassarin
Well, the biggest thing is, like, it works into a point and then it's just downhill. It's like, this is called the Balmers peak, which is completely true. If you Google that, it's completely true. But I always find Balmer's Peak. Ballmers Peak. It was named after the guy from Microsoft. There's an XCD on it. So basically the theory is you have like optimal performance until a certain number of drinks and then you just go off a cliff.
- [04:59]
Walker
I mean, that, that sounds like me. And I'm not even like doing cool cipher punk coding shit. And like my optimal performance just like having a conversation. Like, I think I'm getting better at it, you know? And like, especially if I'm like debating something, I'm like, I sound so fucking smart. And then after a little while it's like, no, no, no, dude, this isn't good. Okay, so here it is. Yeah, Programming skill, blood alcohol concentration. Okay, there's a.
- [05:25]
Will Kassarin
There's a small section where it's like, you're just like on a roll. And then it's just downhill.
- [05:30]
Walker
Yeah, I was like, most things in.
- [05:32]
Will Kassarin
Life, perhaps, I always like to say that, like, it gets you to do something you would think is like, crazy. Maybe that applies in other situations as well with alcohol. But like, for instance, one example I gave was I was like, I got really drunk one night and I was like, you know what? I'm going to build a webassembly interpreter. So web assembly is like this programming language that runs on the browser. It's a virtual machine. It's very complicated. And it's like no one in their right mind would build an interpreter. But I got drunk enough, I'm like, let's fucking do it. And then I actually did it. I actually finished it. But I needed that little kick to get it started because otherwise it would be like, who would do that? Right?
- [06:04]
Walker
You needed to grease the wheels a little bit.
- [06:06]
Will Kassarin
Exactly. Yeah.
- [06:07]
Walker
Is there an old Fashioned in that mug right now?
- [06:10]
Will Kassarin
No comment.
- [06:11]
Walker
Okay.
- [06:12]
Will Kassarin
It's too early for that, Walker.
- [06:13]
Walker
I know, I know. Yeah, I was going to try and take a little sobriety break because I've been, as I mentioned prior to this, I've been in Europe on some fiat mining work for the past few weeks. And a lot of that work involves also drinking a lot for socialization reasons. All business naturally. But yeah, my body is kind of just like hurting right now and it's like, please stop. You know, like, I don't want any more of this poison. Because, like, we can all agree, like alcohol, it is in fact poison. Like. Yes, but what sweet poison it is. You know, sweet, delicious poison after every.
- [06:55]
Will Kassarin
Like, my body is screaming at me every time like, you got to stop. This is bad for you. I'm like, I know. 100% agree. And I'm like, off it for a week. And then, you know what comes back? I'm probably an alcoholic. Whatever. I'll admit it. I heard that's the definition of alcoholism.
- [07:07]
Walker
Well, I heard an alternate definition once that was like, you're not an alcoholic unless your life sucks. And so it's like, oh, okay. But I don't know if that's actually a very good definition because it's like, that's a pretty slippery slope, I think. But yeah, and I agree. Oxtr. It is fun poison. But yeah, moral of the story, I'm not drinking yet either. It's noon where I am, and so I figured, although it may be 5 o'clock somewhere, and my internal clock says it's like, time for a drink right now, because I'm on. I'm on socialist European time. It's not quite. I'm not quite there yet. So water for now, but I would.
- [07:47]
Will Kassarin
Say, like, if it's. If it's past 12, it's usually fine.
- [07:50]
Walker
I don't know if that's my. My. My dad. My dad would always say jokingly, but also not jokingly, well, you can't drink all day unless you start in the morning. And I like, oh, that's. I mean, that's Object.
- [08:01]
Will Kassarin
Argue with that objectively. True.
- [08:02]
Walker
Yeah. No, that's a. That is a fact. Derek says they call this being a functional alcoholic. I think that that's. That's probably a fair characterization.
- [08:12]
Will Kassarin
I'll go with that then.
- [08:14]
Walker
Yeah, thank. Thanks, Derek. We. We needed that. But yeah, so this is first episode back. It's been a little. Little titcoin hiatus for me. And so what better way to get back in the swing of things than with Wild Bill? Billy Kasserin, you've been doing some work lately too. Maybe a decent place for us to just kind of start out and get things going a little bit. So it's been like a year since we last talked since then. I think the. I mean, pace of development in Noster broadly is pretty wild. Pace of development for Damis. And what you guys have been building out has similarly been pretty rapid. I know you're working on a number of things right now that probably are not immediately evident to the normal dumbas iOS user because it's kind of stuff in the background, but maybe kind of just to. For people who are maybe newer to Noster or have not, you know, not been really closely paying attention. What's kind of changed for you guys at Damis in the past year since we last spoke?
- [09:21]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, the biggest thing for us was like that, you know the big shock with Apple when they, when they said we can't use Zaps, that was a huge turning point for Thomas because we're like, well, we want to do more Zap stuff. Like I feel like we were just starting to, we're just beginning with this idea of being able to zap things. We wanted zap raisers, we want to do like Geyser fund style things. But the minute they, they ban the ability for us to zap a post. So we like, we're severely limited with our entire roadmap for the next year. Right. So we kind of went right back to the drawing board, like what do we do to fix this? And you know, we could just, we could try to fight them and like risk getting deep, like get banned again. But we decided to just like, well, we need an Android client anyway. And I wanted to take everything I learned from building domiciles and just build a better client. So I decided to build like a multi platform client. And this, it just made a lot of sense from our perspective because you know, I don't have money to, to fund team like an Android team and an iOS team and a Windows team. So I decided just to build one client that works everywhere and that's like super solid. So I spent a year kind of building up the technology to do that. So I had to create a new database from scratch, a new relay, an embedded relay. But once this is all starting to come together now with the Note Deck Alpha release, which is the first kind of demo of us making it like a map multiplatform client, I want to.
- [10:38]
Walker
Dig into that a lot because I've actually, I've got that now. I just downloaded it today actually and I'm running it here on my Mac. Maybe before we dive into that, because I think there's a lot to get into just around Note Deck and kind of how you see that as the next evolution of what you guys are doing. But for those that aren't aware, maybe can you talk about the whole iOS app store debacle and that? Because it was like, I remember this time and it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We were all so stoked on Zaps, Zaps were flying everywhere. And then Apple was just kind of like, don't know about that. So can you. Could you talk through that history a little bit? Because again, it feels like ages ago, but it's like it hasn't been very long ago at all. Like, it's still pretty fresh. No.
- [11:30]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, it all happened when it was actually during your zappertizing talk.
- [11:34]
Walker
Oh, geez.
- [11:36]
Will Kassarin
You were like, oh, let's, let's do zap. Zapperizing is going to be the future of advertising. I'm like, oh, this is cool. I'm like, let's support this directly. So I added the top zap feature and this is way before Primal did the top zaps, right? This was, you know, showing the zaps in top of the feed. And then I guess that kind of. I assume that's what got the attention of Apple because I couldn't think of any other thing that would trigger an offer view. So this is, this is a very rare thing where they will review your app outside of normal app review. So someone was tipped off with an Apple and they're like, oh, this, they can't be doing this. Like, this is going to cut into a revenue that's like, I know this is my theory. I have no idea. I never heard the full internal story. So, yeah, and they just messaged me like, yeah, we're going to remove your app from the App Store in seven days. So I had this huge. So basically, and at that point Jack is like messaging Tim Apple on Twitter. He's like, what's going on? All this media attention. I always say it's probably the best thing that ever happened to Domus, because every time I talk to anyone who's ever even heard of Domus, that's what they'll always reference was that one event there was actually good PR for us. It just kind of sucks that it kind of ruined our business model. Because our business model, our plan was, you know, you have a feature within Domestic where you just, you can tip a proportion of zaps. So let's say 10, 20% of zaps or whatever percent you want is like a volunteer way to donate. So the idea was just, we're just going to grow the zap economy and eventually we can kind of just take a cut and like that could like fund all of, all the client development. And. Yeah, so they basically screwed us over with that and they said, no, you have to remove from the app. They allowed us to keep it on the profile so you can set profiles, but that's just not as fun. I don't think so. Yeah. And then, so we removed it and then there's been lots of other clients since then who are allowed to have zaps in their app, but we're not allowed to have zaps for some reason. And I've talked to Milian, I've talked to some other people and I'm like, how did you get it? Why did they don't bugging you? They're like, I don't know. They never bugged me about it. So it's like they're not applying the rules evenly. So kind of we got kind of singled out and punished just to send a message, I guess, because we were one of the biggest ones at the time. So, yeah, it just shows that I don't. And I was like, I don't want to be under that boot of Apple my entire life. Let's start building something. Or I don't have to like sweat bullets whether I'm going to exist tomorrow or not.
- [13:37]
Walker
Now it's. Well, now I feel. I feel a little guilty if it was in fact the zap for. I don't know for sure, Carl, and I don't know.
- [13:46]
Will Kassarin
I have to thank you though. That was, that, that was a huge thing once, you know, Apple banned us.
- [13:50]
Walker
But it is kind of amazing that like that Streisand effect that happens. It's like when, you know, I guess that's not directly a Streisand effect, but basically like, hey, we're going to have some punitive measures that we put out towards this particular application. And then people start to wonder like, well, why, like, what's. Like, what are they doing over there? What's. Maybe something cool is happening that I don't even know about yet? Did you see even with them removing zaps, do you remember, did you see downloads increase after that just because of the kind of the. All the talk or all the chatter around it?
- [14:22]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, like once that happened, like we got a huge boost and did downloads and just from all the media attention. So. Yeah. And then eventually it kind of died down again. But that was, that was a huge thing.
- [14:32]
Walker
Was that around. I'm trying to think just timeline wise, was that around the same time that China pulled you guys off the Apple app store in China?
- [14:41]
Will Kassarin
Was that just before, if I'm trying one was Prague. It was. Must have been like a little bit after because I remember.
- [14:47]
Walker
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
- [14:49]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. Because it must have been like the next year or maybe. I don't know. But yeah, China was. I was surprised how. I was surprised how fast China banned Domus. Like it was with it within the first couple of days.
- [14:58]
Walker
So, yeah, I saw somebody. This just made me think. I just saw maybe it was you that posted this just a little while ago. Something about, like, China will now, like, allow only fans.
- [15:07]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, but.
- [15:08]
Walker
But it's like, so, like, so social media. No, but, like, only fans, like. All right, okay. Come on in. Maybe they.
- [15:15]
Will Kassarin
Maybe they want to use it as, like, a blackmailing opportunity if they collect all the data and, like, they use it upon their enemies. Right. Think about it.
- [15:23]
Walker
Yeah, because I guess that's the thing. Your client Domus, and then also basically, I mean, any of the Noster clients I've downloaded. It's like, the best part about it is when you go into the App store and you look at the data collection part and it's like, no data collected, like, nothing. And that probably, for China, they're like, you don't like that?
- [15:43]
Will Kassarin
That's not useful.
- [15:45]
Walker
No. So, yeah, we're going to. We're going to kick you guys right off.
- [15:48]
Will Kassarin
And encrypted dms, like, they can't look at the messages.
- [15:50]
Walker
So it's literally all the things that they hate. Like, no data collection. End. End encryption. Like, shut it down right now. Get it out of here.
- [15:59]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. Even if they came to me and said, oh, we wanted to see the dms, that people, I'd be like, well, I don't have them. They're all on the devices. Right. I'd have to code something special. And I'm not going to do that just for China.
- [16:09]
Walker
The DMs are literally in the computer. In this case, they are in the computer. I don't know. It's wild. Again, I know you've been. You've been much deeper in the trenches than I have. I've been in the superficial trenches of meme warfare, but you've been in the trenches of actual writing code warfare. And I don't know, do you just. Do you have this feeling that. Does time move differently? You've been in Bitcoin for a while, so you obviously have that feeling of the strangeness of time. But in terms of Noster, is it similar? Do you feel that your perception of how time is moving is. Is even more warped because you're like, you are literally building one of the biggest clients in the space. You're in this, you know, living and breathing it every day.
- [16:53]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, it's like. I call it the Noster, like, time dilation field. I mean, maybe when you're in the thick of something and things are happening day to day and you're just trying to put out fires the one thing that always sticks out to me is when I say I'm going to do something and then I. And I look every now and then I'll find that note again for. It'll say seven months ago that I said I'm going to do this tomorrow. I'm like, I'm like. I literally felt like I just said that yesterday, but there's so many things going on, I just haven't got to it yet. I'm like, that is scary. When I'm like. When I thought something was just happening and I see a note that says seven months ago, I'm like, holy shit. There's so much going on.
- [17:25]
Walker
Yeah, well. And speaking of things going on, so one of the things that you've been. You had talked about it, I think it was like seven months ago or so around noteq like you had kind of floated this up. I think you'd been thinking about it for a while before then. But now there is an alpha that is available for people to download Domus IO notedeck. Right?
- [17:46]
Will Kassarin
Yep. Yep. And we're going to release it to the general public soon because we have this Damas Purple membership and the whole point of it is like you get access is up early. So. Yeah. So Purple members have been trying it out and testing it, but for everyone else we're probably going to release it.
- [17:59]
Walker
Pretty soon for the general public and it's pretty sweet. I kind of want to like we can share screen here and bring it up but maybe just first like was. Was the issue with Apple and the kind of. The reliance on Apple, one of the main drivers behind you wanting to push this forward? Was it something you would have just done anyway? But maybe that gave you a little bit more of like a fire to be like, okay, I need this to be. To be out there.
- [18:27]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. Because I could have completely imagined a scenario where, you know, Thomas iOS is growing. A lot of users are happy. I just keep adding more and more features, you know. But at the end of the day, like so I could have completely done that and I was on that path. But when Apple said like the minute they see I have a real big problem with authority and when someone tells me like I can't do something, I'm like, well, fuck you. I'm going to watch me, motherfuckers. I'm going to go do whatever the hell I want. So it was definitely, probably that was the moment where I such. It's such a. It's so ingrained in me. This not like being under the control or or of someone, especially when it's completely ridiculous and it's like something foundational to what I believe in, that, like to have free and open money that you can send freely. Like, that's why I started working on lightning, because I want people to be able to transact freely without some person in the middle saying, you can or can't do it. So the minute Apple is like, you can't do this, I'm like, well, I instantly lost interest in developing on your platform.
- [19:21]
Walker
You know, it's kind of nuts too, because I know obviously Apple's been now challenged in various lawsuits and whatnot, just about kind of their, like, monopoly basically power over this. But it's kind of insane that if you look just between Google and between Apple, like, yeah, okay, you can do progressive web apps and things like that, but they basically, they have the complete monopoly on your pipeline to users. And you are again, like, for anyone that hasn't ever been through that app review process, and again, yours being outside of that process, which is like, insane. But the normal app review process itself is such a nightmare, both for Google and for Apple, because first of all, you never get a human, right? If you have a problem and it's rejected, there's never a human being you can actually talk to. Now maybe you have, you've had more luck finding a human than I have with past experiences, but never a human. You may just get caught by a bot that flags something, you know, some code change that says, oh, nope, that's actually not allowed. Based on our latest updated rules. It's totally opaque. You don't really have any sort of recourse and you're completely at their mercy. Like, they literally just have you bent over a barrel and there's nothing you can do about it.
- [20:38]
Will Kassarin
And their, and their guidelines is not like a contract. It's, you know, it's a guideline. So if they, if you know, the one line in the guideline that says that, you know, you can't. Basically the whole guideline that they're ruling off of is this idea that, oh, you can't, you know, sell digital content. So my argument was like, well, zapping someone is not buying something. It's like they provided something and now you're zapping it. You're not buying it, you're not getting something. It's just a tip, right? So even, like, they're not even really matching their guidelines. It doesn't even really make sense. But it doesn't matter because again, it's a guideline. They can do what the hell they want, they can just make something up. So it's kind of, it's just a complete gong show over there. And that's why some apps get through. Some, some apps don't. That's why some reviewers like allow it, some reviewers don't. And a lot of the time if you just keep resubmitting it, you just go through, get through eventually. It's kind of ridiculous actually.
- [21:30]
Walker
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- [23:23]
Will Kassarin
Well my whole argument was like look like we're planning on releasing the Zaprazr feature, which was going to allow, let's say you're like building a well in Africa. I know it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a. One of those examples, but it's true. Like there, there could be people building wells in Africa and like, and this could help them. And so you see, you have this trillion dollar company who just is afraid that this might slightly indent their, you know, massive trillion dollar corporation. It's like, so you're just punishing people who just want to. I don't know, it just, it just seems so ridiculous to me.
- [23:51]
Walker
It's. It's insane. And like, again, they take. What, what do they take? 30, 30% usually of any transaction, which is like an insane amount, first of all.
- [24:02]
Will Kassarin
And with people increasingly transacting online this idea that they expect to take 30% tax on every single transaction on the planet is absolutely insane to me.
- [24:12]
Walker
Yeah, no, it's like you thought credit cards were bad. Apple is. I mean that's basically every company. They get big enough, they eventually just become a bank, right? And they just want to take their, their little piece of the pie that they didn't really earn. And they claim that they facilitated, but they only were able to facilitate because they are the only place where you can have your app. Like, it's, it's absurd. But okay, fuck Apple. Just wanted to throw that out there. Also fuck Google. We are equal opportunity haters here. But let's, let's talk about note deck a little bit. You want me to, want me to share. Share my screen or you want to share yours? Just because I think I. Visually for folks, for sure.
- [24:54]
Will Kassarin
Before we go to that, I just want to mention that like, we're not giving up Dom development. It's just that we're kind of making it more like, simpler. And like the biggest thing we're focused on right now is onboarding because, you know, if people join and they just are confused and they leave, it's not really useful. We still want to use domest iOS as a way to like have a really nice onboarding experience and maybe not necessarily like, zap focus. So that's kind of our goal with Dumbest. But again, I still want to do the cooler things and that's what no deck is for.
- [25:21]
Walker
Well, and maybe that's worth just digging into a little bit deeper because we're. Well, we're going to go on a bunch of tangents here. I already know it. Once you and I Get. Get going here. So let's. We'll keep the tangents rolling. But, you know, that onboarding user flow, like that was one of the things that we. I say we, as a noster collective of people who were kind of on early and really saw the potential in this, and some of us who can't code did our best to just promote it. And those of us who could code, like you, I went out and actually build the stuff. But the thing that I heard so many times was, especially in those earlier days, oh, yeah, I tried out. Seems like a nice idea. But, like, it was just confusing to get started. And of course, back in those days, two people were like, oh, it's kind of. The UI is a little clunky. I think that excuse is out the window now. Like, the UI across so many different noster clients is so clean and professional and exactly what you have come to expect from a social media app. But I think the onboarding is still one area we're talking to, you know, talking to Vitor or talking to Milian. Everybody's kind of focusing in a different way on, okay, how do we improve that experience? How do we make it so that those first interactions they have are smooth and are stickier that we actually keep them around. Can you talk a little bit about how you kind of view that? Like, what's your perspective on that initial user flow from Damis? How do you guys try to make that experience as smooth as possible and make sure that people, once they've actually taken the jump to create an end pub, want to actually stay with it and keep using it?
- [27:03]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, so this is. You know, I've been having tons of meetings about this recently because I went to Mexico about a month ago and we just randomly met this couple and we were trying to onboard them and it was like, really, really brutal. Like, we're trying to get the QR codes to work and the QR code scanning wasn't working. And like, all these things that they're there, but we just never put a lot of focus on them because we're just busy trying to get the app working and the basics working. But now I realize, like, these are actually the most important flow. I know people have been saying that in the early days, and I feel like I'm probably at fault for kind of dismissing them or like, okay, whatever, because I was already so into it and I was just trying to make it work. But now I realize, like, people are joining and they just feel so clunky compared to. Even now, it's still Pretty clunky a lot of the time, especially with DOM as. So yeah, the main thing I want to do is I want to make sure they have a pleasant experience. I want to, when they join they can actually see like content. And that's always been a big struggle is that, you know, how do you, what algorithm do you show? So I think we're going to start seeing more algorithms at least when you first join. Some onboarding algorithms like I don't like right now we have a fixed list of users which is like getting stale and they're probably not even relevant anymore. So we just need, we need better ways to discover content. We need better ways to also pre populate profiles. Like simple things like pre populating profiles. Because right when you first join your client doesn't know anyone. So like it doesn't even have like profiles to search for. You can't search for people, especially if you're building a pure client. Like Primal is another example of a client where they're taking a different approach where they may maintain a central relay and you know, they provide all that for free. But like, you know, DOM is trying to stay pure to the protocols. We want to not rely on a central server. So how do you do this in a decentralized way and still load profiles? So there's simple things like that. It's not even that complicated. Just recommend useful things. Preload profiles, get QR codes, scanners that actually work. Because I go into threads or Blue sky, it's like they have pretty good experiences. Obviously they have teams of tens, 20, 30 people. So that's what we're competing with. But I think we can get there. I don't know if that'll fix the issue. Another thing was retention. Like we noticed the retention numbers were very, very low. People are joining and leaving right away. And this is the whole again, maybe this. We theorize onboarding is a big aspect of this. So one thing we added recently was push notifications. I think we're one of the mean, I think us and Amethyst are one of the few clients that have push notifications. A lot of people say that, well they're, they're like a dark pattern or they're, they're not. But some people actually really, really like push notifications. If you don't get a lot of interactions on Nostr and then you forget about the app and then if someone randomly tags you one day and it brings you back into the app, that's actually pretty good. Like most apps do that we're not as aggressive as threads where they like put up like random stuff in your notifications all the time, but it's still better than nothing. So all these things are helping, I think, I hope.
- [29:38]
Walker
Yeah, it's interesting with bluesky because they've obviously, it's a different, I mean, first of all, it's a different protocol. Right. And they've obviously taken a different path on that in terms of how they view. I mean, I think one of the most stark differences is moderation. Like it becomes very clear very quickly if you say the wrong thing on there that has the right trigger words in it, you will get moderated out of existence. And that's not really the case on Noster at all. Yeah, you can get muted by people and you won't get interacted with, but you can keep, you know, you can keep shouting into that, you know, what becomes a void for as long as you'd like and saying whatever you'd like. And yeah, there's a. I recently, after like over a year, just checked back in on bluesky just to kind of see what was happening over there. And it was, it was about the same in terms of the discourse that was over there. The user experience was improved. They finally got hashtags to work. That took them quite a while apparently that was, that was difficult on, on that protocol. I don't know. But yeah, they have had, and I find it interesting too, they had obviously a massive surge amongst people who were really, really anti Elon, anti Trump, were like, we want to get away from X because it's a horrible right wing cesspool and they all seem to have flooded to Blue sky now, you know, for better or worse. I'm sure a lot of them also ended up trickling over to Noster, but probably a minuscule percentage compared to the ones that went over to Blue Sky. And I'm, you know, it's kind of interesting to think about too, like where these, we see kind of, these waves of adoption on Noster. Like we saw them like Jack and Snowden kind of each had their like own wave of people that they brought over. You've seen a lot when there's sensorial regimes in various countries. You know, you see that, that pick up a little bit. But I'm kind of curious what you see as the, the next drivers of big user flows into Noster or do we have any more, you know, maybe, maybe it's not big flows, maybe it's little trickles, but it just keeps picking up pace and picking up pace.
- [31:59]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, I think my favorite thing with The Blue sky was when people were posting their only two genders and everyone was getting banned for saying that. Basically just sums up the entire platform. Yeah, but I. No, I mean I think we'll always exist. And Nostra kind of represents this space that once everyone's fed up with everything else not working, it's one of those things where it's like it's obvious to people who are here because. And I went through this recently where it's like I already went through this. I went and did the technical evaluation on all these things. So to me I'm like, why isn't this obvious? Why doesn't everyone see this? But I realized it's because no one's gone through the work to figure out because it's hard work. It's like to evaluate different protocols to understand like how is it censorship resistant for the other versus other things. A lot of the time people join these networks just because like some influencer or some celebrity said to come follow me. And that's what we saw at Blue sky is a lot of people, there's a lot of like famous people started going over to it and then you know, people are drawn in by them. So the sad, the sad story is like people won't get into it for the tech. I guess it's a similar story with Bitcoin. So you need, you need, you, you just need to use the tactics that they're using. So one obvious thing is just make the creator tools really, really good. Like if we make the creator tools better than other platforms, like just make it so easy to start earning SATs and get easy to like view your analytics or make it really easy to upload video and long form content. Because there's a lot of people I've talked to who want to join and they want to write long form content and produce it. But like a lot of the time, even in the Nostra clients today that's like you have to go download some other client or so anyway. So I think creator tools will be a big thing and making video work a bit better. I've been really Adam in like, let's make video really good. Because media content is like all over about. That's what social media is about these days is sharing media content. So maybe if we start doing, if we just be a better solution for those types of things and then all of a sudden they're like, whoa, we have all these awesome tools, but also we get to own our account and own our data. That's going to be like the aha. Moment maybe, but I don't know. These are all kind of theories. It's kind of sad. I'm just like, I was hoping maybe it'll just be obvious to people and I'll just adopt it because it's so obvious. But it's obviously going to be an uphill battle of education.
- [34:07]
Walker
I think it's interesting because for people who, as you said, are already deep into this, deep down the Noster rabbit hole, the idea is if you build it, they will come on. This is just better. Why aren't people seeing this? But you're right, the reality is that people don't come for the tech, they come for. I mean, some people do. A lot of the people that are here already do and are coming because they see the potential of this as a tool for censorship resistant publishing, owning your own content, and honestly already see the better user experience that this can provide. But most people are going to come because some influencer they like, some media personality is says, hey, I'm going to be publishing this specific type of content only on Noster, or I'm just going to start publishing it generally on Noster, whatever. And then once they get here they'll realize, oh wow, this is actually a much more flexible, user friendly experience than anything else I'm used to. Like that's the thing, once even like from the, from my perspective as a, you know, a podcast creator, it's so nice for me to be able to upload something. So I mean, granted there's a couple of jumps that I make, but I, for the long form videos, I upload them to Satellite Earth and then I paste that into highlighter, I throw in the caption and everything else, I publish it to highlighter. And then anywhere that long form video content is displayed, for example Flare Pub, it's instantly available there. I don't have to publish on Flare Pub as well, it's just there and that's like, that is already so much better than me Publishing on YouTube and on Rumble and on X and like. And Spotify does video now. So like, do I need to publish that on Spotify as well? Spotify is just a whole nother just garbage can silo too. Because I only recently found out because I was listening to Odell on a show and he was like, yeah, any podcast metrics you see from your RSS feed don't actually include Spotify metrics because they keep all of that within Spotify. So they just pull it once from the RSS feed and then give you your own internal metrics and it turns out, like, oh, wow, I've got like thousands and thousands more listeners than I thought that are just on Spotify, which is strange. But again, that's how they decide to do it. So whatever. But, yeah, we'll see, we'll see. I think there's this idea of people running away from something or running towards something. And running towards something is always more powerful because at the end of the day, even if people are running away from censorship, de platforming, whatever it might be, it's always going to be more powerful if they're running toward a better user experience. A place where there's better content, a place where there's just better conversation. That's always going to be stickier than running away from something else, because you could always be running away from something else. But if you're running towards something, you actually have a destination. You're not just going off in whatever direction you think is going to satisfy, you know, getting out of your current state of pain. But yeah. So do you want to dig into notec a little bit? Because I think this is pretty. It's pretty sweet. Do you want to share or do you want me to. Because I've got it up here.
- [37:14]
Will Kassarin
I can share. Yeah, or you can share too, whether.
- [37:17]
Walker
You want to know. You want to share yours because you've. Obviously you'll be much better at playing around with it.
- [37:23]
Will Kassarin
I don't even know if it's a work, though. We'll see. I'm on Linux.
- [37:28]
Walker
If not, I can. Yeah, you should have yet.
- [37:31]
Will Kassarin
All right, there we go.
- [37:32]
Walker
Yep, I got you.
- [37:35]
Will Kassarin
I can blind people if they want, or I can not blind people.
- [37:38]
Walker
Yeah, go dark mode for sure.
- [37:42]
Will Kassarin
So this is Notec, and you might notice that it's very similar to something like tweetdeck. And that's kind of what it was inspired by. And the biggest thing is that I've kind of built this for performance. So you'll notice that you can kind of scroll and it's getting like full frames and there's no. You can scroll basically back to the start of your entire database. So it's really optimized for performance. I'm going to stop making people hurl in a second. Another thing is. Yeah, another thing that's offline first. So let me just close it real quick and open it so it starts really quickly. So that was me closing and opening it. So, like it works offline. So if you're on an airplane or something, you can still use stuff. You can reply to people and you can add columns and we're going to add more column features. But yeah, this is the long term plan of this is I want to kind of become a nostr browser, kind of like Google Chrome. And anyway, I don't know, it's still very early, but it's kind of like our, kind of our tech platform that is demoing this stuff.
- [38:49]
Walker
No, I mean, I think it's sweet because I personally really enjoyed Tweet Deck. It's a nice way to experience especially. Okay, I do a lot of stuff on my phone, but if I am on my laptop or whatever, I like to have that experience of okay, I can like check out multiple things at once. There's. I have the ability to really kind of customize and tailor my experience way more so than I can on just that single, you know, smaller screen on the phone. I'm curious, so you mentioned it's offline. So if you're, if you're replying to stuff when you're offline, is it just storing the events and then when you get back online it broadcasts them or how does that work?
- [39:30]
Will Kassarin
I mean it will work that way. This is still an alpha, but that's the plan is that it'll kind of put it into like an outbox or something kind of like your mail client.
- [39:39]
Walker
That's, I mean, honestly, super slick. And yeah, again, I just started playing around with it today. I'm curious. So do you see like adding the ability to like. Okay, will you be able to create a feed that's like I just want to filter by, you know, by video posts or I just want to filter by image image tags on here kind of. Will you be able to have those kind of multiple experiences built in there or do you want to keep it more to the, you know, just generalized micro blogging filtering or long form filtering?
- [40:09]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. So this is the goal for Note Deck is it's going to be really the power tool. Like it's for the power users. It's very similar. Like Twitter or X Pro they call it is the new Tweet Deck name. Yeah, it's for power users. It's really meant for power users. I actually want to share 1, 1, 1 app. So this, this note. So yeah, what to answer your question, yes, we're going to have different columns. There's going to be long form posts. You can have like, you can actually have notification feeds and contact feeds from other people. So you can have multiple accounts. That's how I currently use it. I have the Domest notification feed, my personal notification feed, even Vanessa's notification feed to see if people are messaging her. And then, so it's really for power users. But additionally, what I want to do is start building other apps within it again along the same idea as this browser idea. And I'm going to share kind of like one thing I'm working on real quick. So I don't know if you can see this, but this is a visualization of every user that's in the local database on my local machine. So what I want to do with this is imagine if people are chatting on the network and you kind of see the profile picture shimmer, or there's a circle around it. And let's say Vitor right here, he's talking to this person or one of these people. So maybe you'll see a line between this if they start talking. So this becomes this interactive virtual map of all the activity going on in Nostr. And because I think I really believe a big part of discoverability is just like visualizing the network. It's like a visualization problem. So just being able to see what's going on at a higher level is kind of like one additional power tool I want to build anyway, so I just wanted to demo that real quick.
- [41:45]
Walker
No, that's super sweet because I think, again, that's one of the other things that came up and continues to come up again and again is in terms of user retention on Noster, generally is discoverability. Like, okay, let's say you, you nailed it. You nailed the onboarding flow. And of course, part of that onboarding flow is discoverability in a sense. But there's also the discoverability that happens when you are already onboarded, you are a user of whatever client you're using. How do, how do I find more content? That is going to resonate with me and that is going to, you know, help me engage with the network more. And I think that's something that it seems that a lot of clients are focusing on a lot right now. Like, how do we make this better? One aspect of it is like algorithmic discovery, right? Like, okay, let's build these various feeds. And that's something I want to kind of talk with you about a little bit as well. But then this, I really like this kind of visual map idea to kind of be able to see, okay, like, what is actually the conversation flow look like, you know, where are the strongest connections. I don't know if that's something that can be built into, you know, who's communicating the most. Like, what does it look like over the past, you Know, you know, not just live, but like the past week as well. How have people been interacting? Who's interacting with who? What do those clusters look like? Like, that's. That's kind of fascinating.
- [43:06]
Will Kassarin
And this was actually. I was actually. This is actually Jimmy Song's idea, surprisingly. I was talking to him in Nashville.
- [43:10]
Walker
Really?
- [43:11]
Will Kassarin
I think it was in Nashville. And I was like, on a boat. And he's just like. He's like, hey, here, let me tell you, like, this is what I want in dumbness. And he, like, sketched it out. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I could totally do this. So, yeah, if you see this feature in Dumbass, eventually it's because of Jimmy's song.
- [43:22]
Walker
That's awesome.
- [43:23]
Will Kassarin
But there's like, what's cool about this visualization is that there's different ways you can visualize, right? So one of the examples, one of the common feedback we, is that when people join, it's like, oh, it's just everyone talking about bitcoin, everyone talking about nostr. But people who talk about those things are naturally follow each other. So imagine all the people who follow each other, they kind of cluster into a section of that virtual 2D map so you can instantly see everyone who are bitcoiners. You're like, oh, that's that group. And so imagine if you can circle that group and create a list. And that's your initial contact list. It's just your bitcoiner list. But then again, there's other people who might be more interested in gardening or permaculture. And those people naturally clump together because those people are talking to each other all the time. And that will naturally form a cluster, like, oh. And then maybe even eventually, like, you can just apply machine learning and it'll say, like, oh, these people are talking about permaculture. This group you circle. So you instantly create lists automatically from those. From those clusters. And then what this creates is like this 2D map. I almost call it, like, the Noster village, which is funny because this is what the Japanese users called Noster. Like, right when. Right when I start interacting with Japanese users, they're like, oh, welcome to the village. This is the village. Because that's what it really is. It feels like a kind of a small village with different groups of people within the village. So I think if we just visualize that and map it out, I think that could actually solve a lot of these issues.
- [44:35]
Walker
I love that idea of kind of being able to create, like, these ad hoc, if you will, lists and groupings based on interest. Because again, yeah, you can also, you can follow certain hashtags and do things like that right now. But sometimes you end up getting maybe more spam in there than you would want because people are obviously using those hashtags when they're not actually talking about whatever that thing might be. But this gives you a way to kind of filter that to a certain extent. Like, okay, these people are consistently talking about whatever X topic that it is. I know that this is going to be a high signal list of people who are going to continue talking about this. Not just they're trying to use it to somehow get thrown into other people's, you know, other people's feeds.
- [45:20]
Will Kassarin
Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, that's. I realize this, you know, a lot of the apps that we currently use already kind of do this. Like a lot of the machine learning algorithms that they're using do this for you. But the cool thing about this when you make it visual is that it's no longer opaque. Like a big thing that people worry about is this idea of like, what is the algorithm doing? It's influencing me and trying to convince me to do or to vote a certain way. But this is like it's open. It's an open way of like this is exactly what the algorithm is doing because you just circled this group of people and now the algorithm is just what you just physically did on the screen. And I love this idea of an open, an openness to that, to algorithms where you actually can see what the algorithm is instead of just like some program telling you that is like, trust me, I'm doing the right thing.
- [46:01]
Walker
I was listening to you gave a presentation. I think it was like nosterdam, I believe it was. This was like a couple of weeks ago and it was, it was super interesting because you were talking about just a lot of the things that you've been working on that are not directly visible. You know, it's not just the iOS app. Like it was, you know, NotePush, this relay for push notifications, the Nostr DB Noster script, note guard, note crumbs. And I'm just kind of, if there's any of those maybe that you want to get into a little bit. Because I think sometimes these things are, they're easy to miss for folks because again, they're. If they're just using Nostr casually and maybe they don't need to know about all of these things, but I think some of them are really interesting. One of the things maybe that would be a place to Start with that was you were talking about Noster Script versus dvm. Can you. Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe, maybe back up for a second? Just explain what DVM is and then just kind of Noster script alongside that?
- [47:02]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not a. I'm not a DVM expert, from what I understand is that you're kind of outsourcing a lot of the algorithm work to some other entity on the network, let's say your client, or you might not know how to show the best, the top zap post or the top, like, post. So you're outsourcing that request, that algorithm to a third party. So there's some third party. They generate a list of notes for you and then you consume that list on your client. So that is very much like a different approach from Nostra Script. So Nostra Script is kind of like the inverse of that. So Nostra Script is, you know, instead of that other entity generating that list for you, that algorithm for you, you just have the algorithm yourself. It's actually a short computer program, that's a portable binary program, and then you put that into your client and then that and that. And your client will generate that list for you dynamically and on demand without having to spam the network with like all these lists all the time. The reason I like that approach is it works offline. So if you're like your algo feed and it's also private, you can have your own algorithms. You don't have to tell the world what algorithms you're interested in. They're just programs that are running. Think of a small JavaScript program that's running within your browser that's doing something useful. So they're related, but they just do it in a different way. So Nostra scripts are being integrated into the NostraDB, which is another technology I was working on, which is a new type of database which is built into notetq. So everything you saw in notetq is all powered by nostradb. And the way to think about nostradb is that it's just. It's like a relay that's in the node. Like the relay is in the computer. Like a lot of the clients I built before, like on domiciles, it's like there's no relay in DOMOS os, you just have to talk to remote relays. The downside of this is when you're not online or when you have poor connectivity, things won't load. So Node Tech's a different approach. Where it's like things will always load and the results of what you see are not dependent on what the relays are sending you. So a relay could be like injecting ads into your feed. Let's say you request someone's profile and instead of them giving you the profile, they just give you a bunch of ads and intersperse between the notes. They could totally do that. So clients have to be very careful to make sure that the resulting query is matching the filter that they sent. But with Nostradb, you don't have to think about that at all because you're only ever looking at. You're only ever querying the local relay that's inside your client. And then you're just dumping data in from other relays around the web. And then everything just kind of works and it works offline. So anyway, so it's a different approach. I call it the local relay model. So my vision for the future of this Nostra client is you have your local relay, you're only ever talking to the local relay. You have these Nostra scripts that are running that only interact on the local relay, like all these visualization tools. It's only. And that makes it really fast too, because when you're loading data off, you don't have to wait for data to load off the network because it's always there, it's always available. You can always query it in the same way you would query any data on Nostr anyway. So I hope at least a much better user experience and a much more powerful. In terms of things you can. It's a technology where you can build more powerful things. On top of. That's why I was thinking of it as a browser, a Nostr browser in that sense.
- [50:10]
Walker
I love that. The other thing you mentioned, which I wanted to follow up on, was note crumbs. Can you talk about what that is?
- [50:20]
Will Kassarin
So no Crumbs is what powers. I mean, I worked on no Crumbs for like a weekend last year in December, and it like barely. It kind of works. So whenever you share a DOMUS IO link, it's, it's. It's called something. It's called an open Graph server. So whenever you share that link on Twitter, or you share in an imessage, or you share it in a mail, Open Graph is this open protocol where like the operating operating system itself can pull in a preview of that, of that post. So you'll notice whenever you share a domicile link, you'll actually see an image preview in your messenger app or whatever. So that's what notecrums is. I'm expanding Note Crumbs to become kind of like our version of primal.net web. So a lot of. One of the biggest things is being able to share your profile to other people. And this is why people love the Primal links, because you get your username and you can share and share it and then you have a nice preview of your profile and all your recent posts. So this month I'm working on expanding Note Crumbs into our own version of the Primal Net web links that are fully blown profiles. But the only adjustment I'm doing is that I'm not making it a full blown web client because I don't think web is secure to build Nosh clients. It's going to be something. It's just mainly for previewing notes and just to make sure that's really high performance and it loads quickly. That's just the main goal with that.
- [51:37]
Walker
Nice. Okay, well, I'm curious too. Just kind of. Okay. There's a lot of development happening on Nostr, both within Domus and everything you're building within Primal, within Amethyst, within Snort, here on Zap Stream, on Iris. I can't even name all of the different clients that are out there now, so I'm not trying to purposely exclude any. These are just the ones that popped into my head first because they're the ones that I use the most. But I'm curious, do you see? Are you looking at the development that's out there for other stuff, like Pablo, for instance, building out this Olas. I believe that's how you're supposed to pronounce it. But are you looking at some of this and do you draw some inspiration from what you see in other clients? And does that make development sometimes a little bit less daunting? Because a lot of this is open source. Most of it, that's fair to say. Most of the client development that's out there is open source. Maybe not all, but the vast majority.
- [52:38]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, yeah, most of it's open source. And yeah, I mean there's a lot of. There's a lot of web clients and I don't use any web clients. So maybe I'm just. I'm weird in that sense. One, but one thing I'm really excited about is Kieran's working on a native version of Zap Stream built on the same technology as Notech. He's actually using Nostradb as well. So I'm like, I'm super hyped for that because hopefully I can Integrate the Zapstream into Notech in the future.
- [53:03]
Walker
That would be super, super slick. And I'm the same way. So you're not a freak. You're not alone. I honestly prefer, I do most stuff on mobile just because that's what I like to do. I like to walk a lot and so that's more conducive to it. Although I do have my indoor walking treadmill in my standing desk, so I can still walk and use my laptop. But you know, I have noticed that there is a lot of focus on web clients generally. You mentioned that that's sometimes not as secure. Is that worth getting into at all or does that get too technical for some people? I'm just kind of curious, like, is that something that you view as an actual vulnerability in terms of like, are we talking about like, okay, you're exposing private keys if you're not using something like an extension or maybe like at a high level? Where do you see that vulnerability from a Noster client perspective?
- [53:59]
Will Kassarin
Well, that's, that's the main issue is that if you want security you have to really compromise ux. So if you go to any Noster client on the web these days, it's like you have to use a plugin or you have to use NSEC Bunker. So NSEC Bunker is like this remote signing idea. So if you're new to Nostr and you like, you're, you're presented with those two options, you're like, what the hell is this? And they just leave. So you're like, it's like you're kind of screwed if you're building a web app. That's why it's so much nicer on native because it's relatively more secure and you can just generate a key and you don't have to worry about cross site scripting attacks that are just going to. Which actually happens multiple times. It happened with Coracle, it happened with Enigma where people. Well, and Coracle wasn't a cross site scripting, but there's these analytic scripts that can send your key off. So a lot of the web apps are just removing NSEC for good reason. They're removing the NSEC input. But now you're just like, your UX is screwed. And if we want this to succeed, you really almost need an oauth or password login for web apps. And I don't know how to make that work really. That makes sense unless you're encrypting the key on a server somewhere. But still you have to do post somehow. So you got to give your key to some server that's going to sign for you. I don't know, I don't know how to solve that.
- [55:07]
Walker
Well, I noticed a lot and I think you guys do this. When I was downloading Note Deck, it had me put in my end pub and then you sent. Thomas sent a DM to me with a one time code which I then used to authenticate and download. So I never had to put my NSEC anywhere. I didn't have to use any sort of sign or anything like that. It was just that one time code. But again that's predicated on the fact that I have the mobile app and am using that and have access to it. So again, for a newer user it's like, well okay, well where do I go? Check that dm. So I suppose chicken and egg kind of thing.
- [55:45]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, we're probably not going to expose that to regular people eventually. We probably just want it so you can sign up with a credit card if you don't know anything about bitcoin. But no Deck is mainly for people who already have a purple subscription right now. But eventually you won't need to log in that way.
- [56:02]
Walker
I know you mentioned earlier just having a focus, let's say less on zaps. But at the same time I know you are like an only zaps kind of maximalist. When you say less of a focus on zaps, do you mean kind of for the general user? Like do you think that that's maybe we've leaned too hard in the direction of focusing on the fact that look, you can, you know, because it is pretty fricking incredible. Like look, you can send and receive Bitcoin. You have basically Venmo like capability built into every Noster client. You can do this seamlessly, you know, near free payments that travel instantly around the world to anyone's n pub that you want and are sent to their wallet. Do you think that that's, you know, again it comes to like, we think that's really cool, but the majority of people just don't really give a shit. Is that kind of where your head's at?
- [56:54]
Will Kassarin
Well, there's two things on this point, which is one, it's more specifically for the iOS side. We're probably gonna focus less on it just because we can't do as much like we want to do a lot of cool things, but if you can't zap a note and if you can't do any note related zap, it's like, well it just practically for us it doesn't really make sense to focus on that again. Maybe we could have some weird setup where we like Primal does, where you have to pay and have a KYC wallet, but that's just going so far away from our core pillars, our core philosophies that we don't really want to do that. And again, the second point, which is exactly what you're saying. A lot of users just don't care. They want to experience bitcoin but they don't need to hear it shoved down their throat. A lot of time that just scares people away. I always want people just to experience it and not think about what it is and then they can learn about it later if they want to dig into it. But I don't think marketing it as a bitcoin wallet is going to be helpful for us. And then the third thing is on the note deck and Android side, we're going to go heavy into it because we're not restricted there. Right. So we actually have, there's a local. It's probably like one of the last working NWC wallets. So it's a company here. I know the guy, Adam Soltes, he runs it, he's in Vancouver, North Van like right. Skip right across the street. So we're going to probably partner with him and just make that the default Domus wallet and just have. And have it automatically set up an account. So very soon we're going to have it like a built in wallet in Adamas that's powered by Coin os. That's kind of like the next steps on the, on the. Maybe we'll have that in iOS as well. It's just harder because I'm sure we'll get more scrutiny but I think we'll try pushing again, see what happens.
- [58:28]
Walker
Yeah, I'm curious because somebody asked about this in the Zap Stream chat as well. Just E cash generally and a lot of the stuff that Cali has been doing and a lot of the other devs building around it. Do you, are you guys looking at that at all? Do you think that, that, you know, there's, there's a lot of flexibility there, obviously. Yes, of course. For anybody listening there, you know, as Cali himself would tell you, there is increased rug risk, don't keep everything on a mint, pull it out periodically, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. But that being said, are you looking at ecash at all? Are you viewing this as something that's going to be integrated more, let's say natively into more clients?
- [59:12]
Will Kassarin
I think my perspective is that NWC is The interface. I don't care how you set up your mint, as long as it's lightning and it's compatible with lightning, then that's fine. I'm not going to have custom integration for Cashew just because I think the complexity or the ecash because I think the complexity gets really high because the minute you have eight different cashew nuts from different mints and now mints are going off up and down all the time and it just gets really complex. I don't know how to solve that. It's like a UX issue. Right? It's like, how do you wrangle with that complexity of having all these different tokens from different mints? And it's like they're all just like paper bitcoin that you have to go back to redeem for actual on chain lightning. I just think it adds a lot of complexity. So I say we're just kind of focusing on the NWC interface that is compatible with a lot of these mints anyway. So that's kind of what we're doing.
- [60:04]
Walker
I think that's fair. And that's the beauty of people building in and around Bitcoin Noster ecash. It's like there's somebody focusing on everything, or I should say out of everything, somebody's focusing on each little part and usually multiple people. And that's kind of like a beautiful thing because interoperability and sleeker solutions may be built out by somebody who you had no idea was even building this or focusing on it. And then all of a sudden one day it's just, they ship the code and it's there for people to use. I think that's kind of the incredible thing, especially if you're following a lot of Nostra devs or Lightning devs, E Cash devs, whatever. All of a sudden stuff just pops up and you're like, oh, wow, that's. That's really cool. I had no idea they were even working on that. And now they've just shipped it. Like it's. It's incredible. But to clarify, Zap devs, because they are actually doing a shitload of work behind the scenes, you know. Another thing I heard you mention in that Nosterdam talk was this idea of your focus with. With Thomas and also no tech and these other products that you're building out of being kind of like a social work play dynamic. Can you talk about that a little bit, how that shapes your methodology as you're building stuff?
- [61:20]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. So I think the gaming space is super untapped because I'M a gamer. I used to build like, I like to build video games. I have a game engine I built in C from scratch that I still hack on occasionally. And I've always wanted to like, what would a Nostra integration with a game look like? And so this whole 2D landscape visualization, it's really just the first step of me building this virtual shared space where imagine if you go to someone's profile and then they have this virtual room and maybe there's. What do you call it, one of those Talk clients. It's associated with the room so you can jump in and hang out with people within the room. Kind of like Habah hotel style. I don't know, I don't know what the latest ones are these days, but I always liked that idea of building these virtual shared spaces because I grew up, I used to play World of Warcraft a lot and that was literally my community where I would hop into the game and be present with people and chat with them and we would fight dragons together. And it was such this cool virtual experience and I wanted always to bring that aspect of that into Nostra somehow. So this visualization is step one. I eventually want to have places you can actually go and be within the Nostraverse. I don't know, I just think that's kind of cool. I forget what that was a long train of thought, but I forget what the question was.
- [62:36]
Walker
No, no, that actually, I mean that kind of gets in. I had people as well asking about gaming in the Zap Stream chat and I mean, I think that's kind of interesting. Somebody was asking about noster gamer ID profiles, text based noster games, BBs, door games. I don't know what that means actually. Excuse me if that makes me a total noob. But I mean I think that the gaming space, I would agree it is like incredibly kind of untapped. And I think there's multiple layers to that, right? There's the actual in game experience layer, but then there's also like the like, let's say Twitch. You know that I've never used it personally, but I know that like an insane amount of people do. Like it is wildly, wildly popular so much that they have massive conferences specifically just about Twitch streamers. Like, yeah, you have Zap Stream now you've got. Actually when I hopped on the Hive talk that you guys had last night or the night before, that was the first time I'd used Hive talk. I was actually super impressed.
- [63:38]
Will Kassarin
Really good.
- [63:39]
Walker
Like who, who built that by the way?
- [63:41]
Will Kassarin
Bitcarrot. She's I was, I was very. I didn't know she was building this, but it's amazing. So good, good job.
- [63:47]
Walker
It's.
- [63:48]
Will Kassarin
It's very impressive.
- [63:49]
Walker
I was like kind of blown away when I. I thought it was just going to be an audio only because I didn't looked into it at all. I thought it was going to be an audio only kind of space similar to Noster Nest or something. But it was like you had a lot of concurrent video running from everyone and the performance seemed to be still like.
- [64:05]
Will Kassarin
She says it was going to be blown away. She says it can go up, can go up to 100 people. So I was like, well, that's pretty good.
- [64:11]
Walker
All streaming video at the same time.
- [64:13]
Will Kassarin
I. I assume so. That would be pretty crazy.
- [64:16]
Walker
But I mean that's. That is pretty wild. But like. So I'm curious, you know where there's a huge number of gamers worldwide. I myself am a gamer. Carl is a gamer. You are a gamer. I know probably a lot of people listening to this are also gamers, but again, we're still here. A minority on Noster, in terms of the Noster verse is still fairly small. Do you think that that's kind of another potential inflow of new users that we might see is people starting to build tools around. Maybe it's around gaming itself, but also around the gaming experience. The Twitch like experience providing those kind of tools. That's a huge, huge market of people. And also there tends to be. When it comes to these streaming tools like Twitch, there tends to be a value component to it. Right. You tend to be able to tip people, things like that. Exactly. Obviously using Bitcoin over Lightning is a much more seamless way to do that. It seems like kind of a natural marriage there. Yeah, yeah.
- [65:18]
Will Kassarin
And a lot of the time these platforms, like, you have to be very careful what you say. They're like highly moderated. So if you say the wrong thing politically, like, boom, your entire business is gone. And a lot of these streamers make tons of money. Like Todd. Like they're actually so like they're kind of big, bigger than some celebrities like some of these people like XQC and asmongold. There's like all these like really big streamers. They make like tens and hundreds of millions of dollars just from people like in some sense zapping them. But they're using the platform zap. And then they. And the platform takes a huge cut. So there's a huge opportunity here of like not even just the zapstream aspect, but one example I always think about is I have my, my RuneScape character that I've been basically building since 2007. Like I'm very passionate about this because I'm like, I'm going to get to 99 mining eventually. I'm at 95 mining. So anyone knows about RuneScape?
- [66:07]
Walker
I finally got to play Runescape quite a lot.
- [66:10]
Will Kassarin
So I still have it. But I'm like, I don't actually own this character. If the admin of that server doesn't like me, they can ban it and I literally would lose 10 years of work. This has actually happened to a lot of people who are playing games. So I always like this idea. I'm like, how do we apply that idea of owning your character in cyberspace, owning your avatar and owning the items within your avatar. Like we're not a blockchain, so we're not like transferring items or anything like that. But there's still some interesting aspects. Like maybe, maybe the game I'm playing, they offer me, they can sell me stuff for Nostra notes. And if you think about the badge spec is they're really just like an item that's like a, that someone can send you and it's like a virtual item you can display on your profile. So maybe there's an aspect of that where you can get, you can get items from the game you're playing through Nostr. So there's that aspect which is huge. Like, I don't know, that's completely unexplored. So.
- [67:02]
Walker
Yeah, well no, and I think like, you know, it's so funny the whole idea of like, you know, oh, we'll just use the blockchain for everything, right? You know, like this basically every, every shitcoins, you know, pitch deck is like, well, we're going to put whatever this is on the blockchain and that's going to make it better, right? Okay, VCs give us your money, let us pump this pre sale token to you and then let's, let's dump it on retail and we all come out rich and nothing was ever really solved. But at the end of the day you don't need a blockchain for like I think basically the only real use case for blockchain that we have so far is money and that's bitcoin. Like we're good with that. And yes, you can theorize about, you know, tokenizing securities and all these other things on the blockchain, but like really still bitcoin is the only valid use case that I think we have seen for Blockchain to date and a very, very good one. But for a lot of things like, you know, you know, various in game assets and things like that, like that's all that really requires is like public private key cryptography, right? Being able to sign that, okay, this asset was transferred from, you know, X user to Y user, and now this user's private key is the only one that can sign that and transfer it elsewhere. Like, that's really kind of all you need. I mean, maybe you can make the argument that you need, you know, you'd need specialized relays, like you'd want a centralized relay running some of this, I don't know, just because like you, you'd want to have that quote, global state. But I think it's really interesting and I, I'd be very curious to see. I mean, do you know, is anybody working on something like this? I mean, probably somebody in the larger Noster community is hacking on this right now, right?
- [68:46]
Will Kassarin
I mean, we talked about, me and Semisol talked about like a transferable badge protocol, which it gets kind of complicated. But if you're transferring things, maybe Cashew would be perfect for that, right? Because you have this bear token that you can transfer. You still have that centralized mint, but a lot of the time that mint is managing the game assets or it is the game company, but once they transfer to you, you can at least have a bear proof that, hey, this is mine. But even if it's a simpler case where non transferable assets, which is fine, which is like a lot of that actually works for a lot of different things. Nostra works great for that. So, yeah, I don't think you necessarily. Yeah, you definitely don't need a blockchain or a ledger for every. And also doesn't really make sense to have a completely transparent ledger for every game item history. Sometimes you want to recover items and delete items. You want to be able to do some moderation. I don't know, it really depends on the use case. But yeah, I don't know. I think blockchain is kind of overkill for a lot of these things.
- [69:41]
Walker
Maybe just like switching gears slightly because it is speaking of blockchains that are not overkill for something. And speaking of bitcoin, I was asleep because I was in European time zone. I was asleep when bitcoin hit 100k and I woke up to texts and voicemails from Carl and I was like, God damn it, I missed it. Shucks, I missed it. But it's kind of a wild time right now. And I know, you've been in Bitcoin much longer than I have. You've also been developing in and around Bitcoin. Well, much longer than I was even aware that Bitcoin existed. So I'm kind of curious, just what are you at all still kind of paying attention to Bitcoin more broadly? Or is your focus just kind of deep in Noster right now? Where are you at? Or are you just kind of at the point where it's like, yeah, okay, Bitcoin's doing what Bitcoin's doing, but I'm hacking on other things now?
- [70:39]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, I mean, I've always been. In some sense, Bitcoin is the reason why I'm working on Ostra. In some sense, Bitcoin really opened me to this new way of thinking in terms of free software and freedom software, things that are even possible. If Bitcoin didn't exist, I probably would just be at a fiat job and depressed and just slugging away and I don't know. So it really gave me a new perspective on life and on what I should be spending my time on. Because all of a sudden we have this very unique opportunity to experience a once in a lifetime opportunity of asymmetric value and just being able to be a part of that. So I'm like, I don't know, it completely changed my life. And so I wouldn't say, in some sense I always want Bitcoin to be a part of everything I'm working on because it just makes so much sense because it's the most important technology that humanity has ever created. So it's a big part of everything. I still do, but I see it as more like a tool now that let's get this integrated into other things.
- [71:38]
Walker
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It is such an obvious integration. Like the fact that it should be self evident, the fact that Noster has this Bitcoin lightning integration and no one else really does, whether it's blue sky or. Well, I mean, okay, X, technically they've had a strike integration for a while. You can kind of zap somebody via their profile. I don't think probably the usership of that is so insanely small.
- [72:08]
Will Kassarin
I don't think I've ever used it.
- [72:10]
Walker
Yeah, most people don't even know that it still exists. Like it's still. It's still on there. I'm surprised Elon hasn't pulled it off yet at this point. Although he does seem to be talking about Bitcoin a little bit more again, just with like one word. Responses to people, people's posts about bitcoin saying stuff like wild and yeah and wow. But so I don't know. That's always been an interesting. So I am still on X. I know guys. Yes. What a centralized platform cuckold I am. But I find it interesting with Elon because clearly like we know that he has a large bag of bitcoin, we know that Tesla and SpaceX have Bitcoin in the balance sheet. He I think had a dream come true that he's now the Department of Government Efficiency, which is Doge, which is just another way to pump Doge bags. I don't, I mean it's, it's, it's a pretty hilarious troll, honestly. But like, I don't know, I'm curious. It's always been strange to me that he doesn't talk more about it or isn't more vocal about it because he's obviously a forward thinking guy and it's like if you're talking about like okay, you're trying to take humanity interplanetary like well, what's the natural, what's the natural currency? What's the natural money of a space faring species? Like it's kind of obviously bitcoin and I think you can deal with the, let's say the delays between planets pretty easily in terms of relaying that data. But I don't know, I didn't even have a question there. It's just more like it's always surprising to me that he doesn't talk about it more.
- [73:47]
Will Kassarin
So my theory is, my theory is that everything that he, and this is a purely observational thing, everything that he puts his time and energy into is things that he can have direct control over. Right? So like the Doge thing is just he was able to talk to the devs and have a meeting with the devs and he was going to plan the future or even the Doge Council. It's like, oh, he gets be involved with managing the resources of the country and he wants to have control. Whereas bitcoin, he can't have control over Bitcoin. He can't come to the devs and tell him to change this or do this or make this optimization. So maybe he just, My, my theory is that he just doesn't really care about things he can't directly control. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but.
- [74:26]
Walker
I think it's a fairly fair hypothesis. He does seem to like being in control and I mean, I guess you can't blame him. Clearly his control has worked out very well in the companies that he has worked on. It's pretty interesting to see this, the Saga with open AI2 kind of playing out in front of us where he is clearly not so happy with Sam Altman deciding to, okay, we're going to take this nonprofit, basically, you know, well, we have privatized parts of this nonprofit which are definitely for profit and we're raising a shitload of money. And by the way, it's like closed source and I don't know. Wait, by the way, speaking of AI, is, is your, is your bot. Was it Dave? Was it Dave? It was Dave. Right?
- [75:09]
Will Kassarin
Dave.
- [75:09]
Walker
I mean, Dave Dave who wrote the, who wrote the nostrils joke originally. Is he still active?
- [75:17]
Will Kassarin
He's not running right now. I could, I could turn him on, but he cost, he cost me money. So I don't like, like to.
- [75:22]
Walker
Are you. You're using, I assume, OpenAI as API?
- [75:26]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, yeah.
- [75:27]
Walker
That gets really expensive very quickly.
- [75:29]
Will Kassarin
But I realized that a lot of the open source kind of tooling, they all they have, they have compatible OpenAI APIs. So you. I'm running an AI model locally, so I could probably switch Dave over to that. It just might make my computer hot the whole day, but that's an option.
- [75:45]
Walker
Might make it explode, start on fire. But yeah, depends if Dave starts like going out on his own and deciding to answer, like absolutely everyone.
- [75:53]
Will Kassarin
I don't know exactly. I just need a. I just need a throttle on it, like if you need to zap him to talk to him or something.
- [75:59]
Walker
I mean, honestly, that's a pretty sweet idea. I'm. I'm just going to. I'm going to go ahead and say that people would like that quite a bit. Plus, it's like, okay, just like speaking of AI compute, it makes so much sense to use Bitcoin as a currency for that. Have you played around with Unleash Chat that NVK built at.
- [76:21]
Will Kassarin
No, not yet.
- [76:22]
Walker
It's pretty nice because first of all, you just pay in Bitcoin. There's no personal information to sign up. They don't store any of your data. And then you top it up with some bitcoin. Put some sats in there and you can run any number of models. So like, that's. I think that's like, that's pretty sweet. And it also just makes a lot more sense when you think about, like, okay, if you're paying for AI compute with a credit card, that can be, you know, that money is not actually paid to you yet that can be clawed back, you know, whatever, 30, 60 days down the line. Like that really doesn't make a lot of sense when you're talking about actual real world compute. Like that's a pretty dumb way to do things. Like you want final settlement so that, you know, you actually have the money paid to you that you're using to fund your computer. It's kind of shocking to me that more folks haven't done that yet. But then again it's like still like what, like 1% of the world even owns bitcoin at all. So like we're, we're still, we're still early.
- [77:14]
Will Kassarin
Oh yeah. And I want, and I want to go back briefly to the, you know, we went on a tangent but this whole like work play and yeah, that.
- [77:24]
Walker
Thank you for bringing us back again, safe space for tangents. But I appreciate you bringing it back.
- [77:30]
Will Kassarin
Because I did want to. There was one more aspect of that so we talked about. So obviously Domus, you know, we're focused on microblogging because that was the obvious use case of nostr. A lot of people associate Nostr with microblogging, but it's just like, that's just such a tiny aspect of it. You know, there's, there's long form, there's, you know, there's like close like group chat and there's like all these other things. So you know, one aspect is again that we talked about, which is gaming. So maybe we start to integrate more things into your profile. Maybe you can actually, you know, have gaming related things, attach your profile and then after that it's like, what is, what is the product? How does Nostra help productivity? How does Nostra help me in my business? So we're calling this like domestic work. Like what are the Domus work suite of tools? So a few things I'm working on right now is something called the Notebook. I'm terrible at naming, it's just note prefix with everything. But my idea of Notebook is going to be our mail client. So the idea is that if you take. Because one way I use Note Deck is all these support tickets coming in. People are like, hey, this is broken. So what I would like to do is I would like to bookmark one of those things and it gets added to my notebook. And what's cool about Notebook is kind of like just basically an email inbox. So anytime people post a new thing to the thread, it gets updated and there's like state, there's like red and unread states and being able to archive a thread when it's done. So it's like a very simple idea, but this could at least help. You can imagine one situation where if on your website, you have a little chat box and people are trying to get help on your website, those notes are getting sent to your relay, and then you have some way to manage those within your notebook and see and respond to people and give them help. So that's just one example of a tool that people can use. And then obviously the next one would be something like Slack and having a private relay for your company where you can all communicate. And the coolest thing about this is eventually, once we have enough of these tools, then it's going to be such an obvious thing for a company like, oh, wait, I can run all this on premises. And I have my own Twitter for my company. I have my own mail client that works really well. And it's all integrated. And it's all integrated with calendar stuff. I don't know. So it's like this huge untapped aspect of maybe this could be how Adamas makes money in the future is maybe selling these tools to businesses. Who knows? But those are the main three things we're looking at is the play, work, and social.
- [79:41]
Walker
I think that's a cool approach because again, there are so many things, like the focus has been on microblogging. Right. How do we build the Twitter, like, experience, basically for people? Because that's okay, let's be honest. That's what's going to attract people into the network to start with. They want to socialize, they want to play, they want to have fun, they want to be where their friends are. They want to make new friends, have conversations. But this is ultimately just. It's just an open protocol for communication. Right. Like, that's at its core. It's a really simple way to do that.
- [80:15]
Will Kassarin
Exactly. And we. And we don't have a shitcoin. So how do you attract people? It's like freedom. And freedom and memes, I guess, is kind of. So you need some way to spread the message. And a social network is an easy way to do that.
- [80:26]
Walker
You would think freedom and memes would be enough for people like that. That's enough for me, but I guess it is not enough for most people. They. Yeah, but I'm also very. I'm very glad that there isn't a shitcoin.
- [80:37]
Will Kassarin
Oh, God.
- [80:39]
Walker
Could you. Could you imagine, like, things could have. I mean, thank God that this was, like, mostly bitcoin developers building this stuff out, because otherwise, you know, somebody else coming in here. Some VC is like, you know. You know, it'd make this a lot better if there was a shitcoin that we could pump and you know, and get our own.
- [80:56]
Will Kassarin
That's how far. That's how Farcaster was made. Basically. That's the story of how Farcaster was built. Have you used it at all? No, I haven't used. I just. Because I just. I just feel like I wouldn't. Maybe this is what other people feel about but Nostra when they look in from the outside. But I just don't know if I would culturally fit in with a bunch of Ethereum people.
- [81:13]
Walker
That's a different vibe for sure. Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of curious as well. Like, okay, so you mentioned just looking outside of the microblogging kind of some of the things you guys are thinking of. Are there other aspects of the Noster protocol that you think are kind of untapped right now in terms of the potential? Like you mentioned a little bit long form as well. Long form right now, as you correctly put it out, it's like you're a little bit limited. Like you need to go to a client that supports you being able to write in long form. Are there. This is the first question, then I've got kind of a follow up. But are there any mobile clients where you can publish long form events right now or only read?
- [81:57]
Will Kassarin
So there's one called Yaki Hone, which is really good. Yeah. So I recommend that if you want to try it, there's a Habla News. I used to use that.
- [82:05]
Walker
Yep.
- [82:05]
Will Kassarin
I think those are, I think those are web clients. I don't. But there hasn't. I don't think there's like a dedicated like native writer client. And a lot of these, A lot of these long form clients, they're trying to mix in like social media and stuff. And I'm like, that's the last thing I want if I'm writing something. I just want. I almost want like this like blank white room with no distractions. It's just really nice, slick way to just compose notes and markdown. So that's something that maybe that we can look into the future for adding. As another note, tech app is like a really just focused writer app for long form and like a reader app for long form. A dedicated reader app would be pretty cool too.
- [82:39]
Walker
Didn't I want to say that Pablo was building out a dedicated like write only long form basically workspace? I could be wrong on this because he's building out so many different things at once. At Any given time, I gotta double check. But I swear I remember him mentioning, like, oh yeah, I'm building something out. That's exactly what you said. Like, just write only, like, there's no other distractions. This is just a place where you go to write. Because I think that is something that like people want. Like, you don't want to have all of the extra distractions if you're just trying to get out and write and publish.
- [83:14]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, exactly. So I want to give one. I actually want to demo something. And this is one of my other favorite protocols that I used to use. And this is maybe like for anyone who's listening, any developer who's out there, they want to try to build this vision. I would love someone to build this. So this is called Gemini. I don't know. Have you ever heard of Gemini?
- [83:35]
Walker
I do not think so.
- [83:37]
Will Kassarin
So Gemini is this. It's basically like it's a web. It's a new type of web, but it's specifically with linked markdown documents. So anytime you click any one of these things, it's kind of like a web browser, but any page you jump to just shows you another markdown. So it's like a long form web browser. Think of like a web browser that you can only read markdown documents and they're all hyperlinked together. Like, we could totally build this on nostr. Anyway, so I thought I wanted to throw that out because this is one example where it's really hyper focused for one specific use case. And yeah, I don't see why we can build this on nostr. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
- [84:16]
Walker
Is this, did you say that was its own protocol or.
- [84:20]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, it's its own protocol. So it's like it uses its own web servers, its own protocol, its own ports, its own data format. And it's really slick. And I just like, I always wanted that on Nostr. And like, that's another example of like we could be building these things that are like more focused. You don't need to put in microblogging and everything just because there's a lot of micro blogging content. Like, we can have other types of clients, other types of experiences that are just like more standalone.
- [84:42]
Walker
Well, that's, that's another question I wanted to ask you too is in terms of this, like the super app versus micro app debate, where do you fall on that?
- [84:52]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, so, and this is again another motivation why I'm, I'm, I'm taking this, this browser approach with Notech, which is I want all of These apps to. To exist in like their own tab, right? I want to be able to. So one. One actually really cool feature of, of a Nostra browser, and that's something I'm building into NoteQ, which is since you have that local relay embedded within the client, anytime you open up a new app, let's say the Notebook app or the visualization app, or the. Or like this app we were just talking about, like the Gemini app, they all can talk to the local relay. So this is already kind of like diverging from the web. The web, it's like you go in your browser, you type in a website, it loads it from some remote server. But this browser, since it has a local relay, all these different apps can all communicate with each other. So if I go into my columns app and I click Bookmark, then I can hop over to my Notebook app and I see that bookmark in my notebook and then I hop over to my visualization app. I can see all the stuff that's happening sourced from the columns because it's all talking to that local relay. So it's like a new vision for. It's kind of a super app, but it's also just a shelf or a chrome for all these other micro apps that can all talk to each other. And it'll work offline too, which is another really cool feature. So this is the vision I'm seeing. And eventually what we're going to do is with those Nostra scripts, we can actually just say you type in www.bitcoin.com or whatever, and then it loads the Nostra script for that. And maybe it'll load you. It'll load a Nostra app that's like a native Nostra app that's like not a web app, it's not a browser app, but it's like a native Nostra app that has access to a local database, that can do queries locally, has a completely different scripting language. So this is my vision of building like this. It's almost like an operating system for all these Nostra apps that can communicate with each other. And maybe we'll provide a nice, really simple scripting language like Java, something similar to JavaScript, where you can write these apps and you don't have to do all the complicated. You don't have to know about connecting to multiple relays, you don't have to know about Outbox model or relay pools, because it's really complicated to build an Ostra app these days. But imagine if you could just write 1 in 5 lines of code so that's the long term goal.
- [86:44]
Walker
What you're saying is even I could maybe write a Nostra app.
- [86:48]
Will Kassarin
That's the plan. Maybe there'll be no code solutions where it's just like drag and drop stuff and connect them together and then you have an app.
- [86:54]
Walker
I mean, that's pretty slick. I would like to be able to do that very much. And I'm curious too, just you had mentioned earlier, better tools for creators. Is that something that you guys are thinking about in Damis, or were you speaking kind of more broadly about the Noster ecosystem in general?
- [87:14]
Will Kassarin
Probably both. We wanted to get to that. It's just we're obviously very limited. I'm building a browser in like a iOS app and a relay and it's on the list and I think it's pretty important for large scale adoption and we're going to get there. But maybe it's one of those things where it's like, if I just build this browser and someone else just makes that creator app and I don't have to do it. That would be ideal.
- [87:35]
Walker
Well, and again, that's the beauty of. I assume what you're building now is.
- [87:40]
Will Kassarin
Also open source, all open source gpl.
- [87:44]
Walker
I think that's pretty incredible. And I think that it's something that for folks from the outside looking in, they may not like. It may seem kind of weird, like, what do you mean? You're building this stuff and then you're just like putting it out there for people. Like, can, what is that? And I don't mean for this to sound like a cheesy question, but like, what is, what does open source mean to you? Like, what is that? Like, why is that so important? Like, what, what are people missing about that when they see, like, what do you mean? You're just giving this away? Like, how do you view this?
- [88:12]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, imagine if someone just gave you a pill and it's like, I'm not going to tell you what's in the pill, but you should ingest it and it's going to make you faster and make you feel better. And I'm like, I'm not going to put that into my body. And I see programs as the same way. If they give you a giant binary, it's like, oh, trust me, this is definitely not going to steal your private key or steal your Bitcoin. But I think open source is pretty important. Even just from that basic aspect of trust and openness is that running a program on your computer, you need to trust the person. If they're, if they're writing it especially for native apps and I'm building native apps. So that's step one. Another thing is just sourcing help from around the world. A lot of times, a lot of times in open source someone has a specific niche, it's, they need to scratch for their particular use case and it just doesn't make sense for me to work on it. But they can take my code, fork it and prove it and then they can contribute back code. So I actually get kind of free labor from the market. It's not always the best quality, like doesn't it? But sometimes it is really good quality. And then the third thing, which is you can kind of be a little bit more innovative because one issue even like we're talking about OpenAI is like you're starting to see they're kind of faltering a bit compared to the latest open source models because you get all this knowledge from a lot of. It's actually surprisingly coming from China because they don't have IP restrictions, so they can literally just take all the data and they're not going to get sued and they train on the data. And a lot of the time you can't do that in North America because of IP law and things like that, copyright law. So you're starting to see like these open source teams who are like contributing these models and they're like starting to beat like these like closed source commercial models. So there's like, there's all these aspects where just openness actually provides a lot more benefits and then, and the perceived negatives of it are actually not a big deal. If someone able to fork like with gpl, if someone forks it, they can't close source it for their commercial application. The way that GPL works is that they, they have to open source their code. And this actually happened, I think even with Primal, because Primal was I had, they use some of our GPL code in domiciles. I'm like, I'm like, wait, make sure you open source it. And they had it. Open source. I'm like, there you go. Open source is working.
- [90:08]
Walker
I mean it's, it's, it's kind of beautiful because again it's the, that you know the old saying of like a rising tide lifts all boats, right? Like you're, you're opening these things up so that anybody around the world can hack on this, not just whoever's in your localized or you know, closed team. And how can that not. Like it's a free market approach. Basically it's saying like, look, if you can do something better on here, please go ahead and do it and we'll incorporate that into ours where you build out your own, like whatever. Build the best thing that you can and whoever builds the best thing is going to win. But we're not going to close off your ability to build just because we're trying to keep this so close to the chest and keep anyone's eyes from seeing under the hood. Like, it's kind of a beautiful thing.
- [90:52]
Will Kassarin
And like the perfect example of this is Linux. It's like Linux is in every single computing device like on the planet. In your iPhone for the most part. It's a little variation of it. On Android phones, like your macOS, it kind of like can, it infects when things are more open, things can kind of spread and it's easier to hack on them. And like, I didn't ask for permission to build zaps. I didn't ask for permission from someone to hack on bitcoin. I just did it. And like, and there's something really profound about that. Like with all these other closed systems and all these other platforms, you have to ask them. You have. Sometimes you have to pay up like $200,000 a month like on Twitter just to get API access. And it's like, you know, this free and openness is like, allows just hackers and creative people just to contribute and to this amazing, beautiful thing that's kind of, in some sense it's like blooming, it's blossoming into this thing, this organic thing that's growing and it's beautiful and I don't know, you just can't do that with closed system. You just kind of like you have to call up the CEO, like, hey, can I have access to you? Like, no, it's like, okay, spluzz off, I'm busy. I'm like, okay, whatever. So that's why I love bitcoin and Nostril, because it's like you don't have to ask permission, you just start building.
- [91:53]
Walker
Yeah. And apologize because my, my dog decided to bark at the, at the moment you were speaking. So he's, he's clearly feeling, he's hyped.
- [92:02]
Will Kassarin
He's hyped, he's hypers.
- [92:04]
Walker
He loves open source freedom tech. You know, what can I say? He's like, yeah, give me some of that. I'm curious with where we're at right now with Noster adoption. What do you think? Like for non technical people who are loving Noster, they're loving what developers are building, they're using different clients, they're experimenting, they're trying their best to, let's say, kind of functionally hack on them to whether they're throwing out bug reports. Hopefully they're doing that in a productive way and not just like, hey, Will, this is broken. But what's the best way for non technical folks to help grow Noster, slash Noster, however you would like to pronounce it.
- [92:47]
Will Kassarin
I think the biggest thing is just, you know, producing content is important, like onboarding your friends and like trying to explain like, what, like why it's important, like what, you know, what do you gain from it? Like what, like why are people doing it? That's the biggest thing right now is that, you know, the retention's so low and maybe and even just giving feedback and like, you know, asking the devs, like, what for your particular use case, what. What can you. What do you need for us to, to make this thing more successful? Like, we have some basic ideas, but you know, there's a lot of, A lot of people, a lot of people needing different things and a lot of people want to build like communities on Nostr and people are doing that, which is cool. But yeah, just like you just got to keep spreading the word because I feel like we're definitely losing that battle. It feels like, to like, to. I call it serfdomware, you know, blue sky. Like we have this amazing free software and we're losing to these, like, to these horrible solutions that's like locking people in even further and it's just sad to see. So I don't know if it's like an education issue. It's like maybe just us need to improve onboarding, but we definitely need to step up and start making a bigger effort into reaching out to different communities that might not be just bitcoin community people, maybe gamers, maybe gardening or just start to branch out a bit, I think would be really helpful.
- [93:57]
Walker
We need more Noster podcasts, is what I'm hearing true.
- [94:01]
Will Kassarin
Yes, that would be great.
- [94:03]
Walker
Luckily, titcoin is both a bitcoin and Noster podcast. So, you know, I'm doing my part, as the meme would say. I want to be conscious of your time, Will. But one other thing I wanted to just ask because you've now been traveling a lot for Damis and spreading the good word about Nostra and doing purple pilling in person. You mentioned this experience which was slightly hampered by QR code issues the other night. But I'm curious, like, for the. I think the pitch is different depending on who you're talking to. Granted, like if you're talking to a creator versus like a, I don't want to say a consumer because that sounds so legacy. But just a normal, a normal user. What's first, I guess, what's your pitch to just the, the normal social media user on why they should check out Noster and then do you have a, a different pitch that you kind of throw out towards people that are more content creators?
- [95:02]
Will Kassarin
Yeah, I mean the one thing I've been trying to lean on more recently is like, you know, especially when I've been, what I've been saying, like, oh, it's decentralized. Like no one seems to give a shit about decentralized. So I try to think of, I was trying to approach a different angle and I did a post this morning even on my, on the DOMS account on Twitter. I'm like, maybe this idea of like people like to own things, people like to collect things, people like to, you know, so maybe this idea of like owning a place in cyberspace, like some of you have control over. I mean this has always been our slogan, Thomas, which is the social network you control. But maybe just like really leaning into that and showing how that's how that's possible and explaining why that's possible. Without even talking about cryptography. Without talking about. Because before I always go on about, oh, you have your private key and you can sign things and it's super decentralized and people are just like, what the hell are you talking about? So I've been trying a little bit more subtle approach and say like something you control. Because if people ask what do you mean by control? It's like, then you can go down that road if you want to. But I think we need simpler and clearer messaging. And I don't know, I'm still working on that. As a nerd, it's hard for me to do that. But I think that's been kind of my focus lately is how to make the message simpler and more clear.
- [96:07]
Walker
I mean it is difficult because again, I think for folks who are on Nostra right now, a lot of us were attracted because this was a decentralized, censorship resistant protocol for open communication that relies on public private key cryptography and also incorporates bitcoin. Like, but boy, that pitch is not winning.
- [96:27]
Will Kassarin
It's rough.
- [96:28]
Walker
Like, yeah, that's, that's going to get, you know, the 0.001% of people. And granted, like those people are really gonna vibe with that message. But for most people that's just, that's Just not gonna work. And so I think figuring out ways to. I don't. Again, I don't want to say spin, but it is a spin. It's figuring out how does this appeal to the normie, the person who's just like. And what do they want? They want a better experience. Right. They want more flexibility, but they don't want too many choices. They want, you know, like, too many choices freak people out. But, like, you want something that just is going to work. And I think that's. Go ahead.
- [97:11]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. And I think that people are increasingly. I don't know if this is true. Maybe it's just me, but they're increasingly skeptical of kind of like authority and what do they call institutions? We see that. I feel like almost like this election was an example of that. It's like. And maybe this cautiousness about the institutions having too much control over what's getting put into our feeds, maybe people don't care about that, but that's one aspect of it. So we can at least sell it. Like, hey, it's like you have control over your feeds. But I think it's becoming increasingly harder for us, especially in the world where Elon's message is like, look, we have free speech on Twitter, so there's no problem here. And a lot of people are just like, the value proposition is like, well, I already have free speech here, so what is a theoretical free speech increase going to matter in any practical way? And that's kind of the battle we have to we face now with Nostra. It's like, okay, what's our message then? It's like, because that was our message, like, we have free speech, so we need to show value outside of that and show. So maybe this whole interconnectedness idea, like the, you know, it's like the social apps protocol that are all interoperable. Like, we need to. We need to start building those apps and show how they work together. And maybe that. And especially under one brand, like, that's what I've been trying to do. Adamas is like, it's hard for me to say, go try this one, go try this one. I don't know if it's going to nuke their contact list or, like, go try Primal. You have a different algo feed experience. I'm just trying to build a suite of tools. If you're familiar with the Domus brand, you can actually just use our really reliable suite of tools that all work together. So that's kind of our approach. But who knows? This is still. We need to figure out. I think it's been a struggle. We really need to figure out what our messages that we want to send out there.
- [98:49]
Walker
We need to work and of course, workshop it in the public square, which is Noster. I think that I would agree with you on the interoperability piece because I think that's huge. Even the experience of, like, the fact that you can now, like, you can highlight something and publish that highlight on Thomas, like really easily and if folks haven't tried that, like, it's.
- [99:07]
Will Kassarin
It's really cool.
- [99:08]
Walker
Super cool. Like, it's. That's really like that. It's those. I think that Noster enables certain experiences that feel like magic because they aren't available anywhere else. Like, they truly feel like, like, holy shit, this is like, this is incredible. Or when I, you know, I publish something, a video on highlighter and it's available on Flare and wherever else surfaces video content that feels like magic. And so I think that, that, that magic is part of that value prop of like, look, it's just a better user experience and it's going to keep getting better. That's the other thing that, like, I've tried to emphasize to people is like, especially if they got a bad taste in their mouth because they used it a year ago, however, however long ago, and they're like, well, it felt clunky. It's like that user experience from the UX just. Or the UI smoothness keeps improving rapidly and that interoperability layer of things just working together seemingly by magic, is getting better and better as well at this insanely rapid pace. And I think that's what gives me a lot of hope for the future of this network, is that the more apps that are built, the more people that are hacking on the Noster protocol, the better the experience gets for not just people using their client, but for literally everyone, because it all works together. And like, so to me, it's like, it's that like Noster has a special magic. And like, that magic is that everything works together. There is no YouTube publishing to YouTube and viewing on YouTube or publishing on Spotify and viewing on Spotify. All of that, all of that is, you know, it's everything everywhere, all at once. Right. Maybe that's the. I think that's probably, probably copyrighted because of the movie. But, you know, something similar to that is kind of the vibe that I'm going with right now.
- [100:48]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. And that's. And we really just got to get them past that, that friction at the start, which is, you know, oh, I need to put in my private key or I need to install an extension or like just get them through the door. Let's figure that out. Let's remove all those obstacles, get them into the door and then just get them to experience this thing as quickly as possible and maybe just, you know, it'll take off from there. But that's kind of been the struggle. And this is why the focus on onboarding is so important. At least at Thomas HQ is just getting them in the door, getting them to stay for more than a second is just the. Is the majority of the battle, really.
- [101:22]
Walker
Yeah. No. Amen. Will, I want to. We'll start to wrap up here a little bit, but anywhere you want to, I mean, people should go to. You can go to Thomas IO, you can search Thomas on the App Store. If you're not signed up for Damas Purple, you can do that. And you can get early access to Note Deck, which is pretty sweet and I'm looking forward to playing around with that more. Already enjoying it. And now people have got a little bit of a taste of it. Anywhere else you want to send people or anything you want to leave folks with before we close out.
- [101:54]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. I mean, so if you've listened to this and you agree with any of our vision and you want to make it a reality, obviously Damis Purple is. It's kind of like the only thing that's kind of keeping us afloat. We have one part time employee named Daniel and it kind of covers his wage almost. But if you want to see this keep growing and you want to see us build more cool stuff. Yeah, definitely get a Damas Purple subscription. I know it's not a lot right now, but we're going to add it. We're going to add more features like the Domest IO links like Primal has. So, yeah, if you want to support us, definitely Domus Purple is the way to go. And then, yeah, just thank you for supporting everyone who's been supporting us so far at this point. So thanks.
- [102:31]
Walker
Yeah, thank you for building open source Freedom Tech and I'm going to do my small part. So for anyone who has zapped this stream, I'm going to go ahead and zap these to Damas because again, you guys are not. For anyone that's listening, you guys are not VC funded in any way. You are not. No outside investment whatsoever. You're just building open source Freedom Tech and trying to figure out ways to monetize it, which I think is awesome, but also I imagine, incredibly stressful and very difficult.
- [103:03]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. And all those apps Go directly to my node. My node right here, my good old trusty node. So there's no middleman. Directly to. And this is what it should be. This is, this is the vision we're trying to build. It's like support the creators you want to support goes direct and go directly into their, you know, value for value. So that's what we want to see more of this and we're just trying to represent that as much as possible.
- [103:22]
Walker
I think that's, that's beautiful. And again, this like, this value for value ecosystem is something that is still really new to people and seems really weird and seems like, well, okay, that's a nice, cute idea. But is that ever going to actually be, you know, like, is that going to be meaningful? Is that going to replace, you know, if you're a creator, like my YouTube, you know, revenue. I mean, not for me personally because I don't make like zero on YouTube, so, like, don't give a fuck. But I think that it's important that people actually try to embrace this ethos. And like, I think what Fountain is doing is really great and has been really great and they are now a Noster client as well. Like, that's incredible. Like that, that was, I think one of the. I was really glad to see that happen because that's like that, that's what this is all about, right? Being able to turn basically any closed system, which is what they had before, into an open, become a part of an open network. That is incredible. And you know, anyone can do this too. Like you can, you can make whatever your closed system is, you know, you have some sort of closed social graph. Why not open that up to the entire world? And that's, you can basically only do that with Noster. Like, that's again, that's kind of magic.
- [104:37]
Will Kassarin
Yeah. The future is open networks. We have open payment networks, we have open communication networks. I think people not building on those are just going to eventually, you know, just go away. So open is the future.
- [104:49]
Walker
That's a, that's a perfect note to end on. Well, JB55, Wild Bill Kasserin, thank you for your time here. Thanks to everybody who joined in the live stream too. Again, this show will only be live streamed on Noster, so if you want to watch it live, as folks have done here, you have to do that on Noster. So. And shout out to Kieran for building ZAP Stream and making this possible. And Kieran, if you're listening to this, please respond to my email and come on the show soon. So we can talk about Zap Stream on Zap Stream. It will be super meta but will thanks for your time man. I'm going to kill this stream now. Thank you and thanks to everyone for listening. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoin podcast.net sponsor or send an email to helloitcoinpodcast.net if you are enjoying the Bitcoin Podcast and find it valuable, give it a boost on Fountain a five star review wherever you're listening. Or better yet, share this show with your network so more people can learn about bitcoin. Or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. You can grab links in the show Notes to watch or list this show wherever you get your podcasts. Or go to bitcoin podcast.net podcast and you'll also find the links to Follow me and the show on Noster and on X. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.