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THE Bitcoin Podcast
NOSTR vs Tech Monopolies, the Future of Social Media & Primal 2.0 - MILJAN (THE Bitcoin Podcast)
01:47:15
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- [00:00]
Milian
If you look at the legacy web where a handful of companies have monopolies in their kind of areas of expertise, so Twitter X has a monopoly in micro blogging and kind of global town Square space. YouTube has a monopoly on long form videos, you have a substack with quasi monopoly on long form content. You have Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. Imagine all of these services existing on the same network where everything is open, the entire user graph is open, but also all of the content is accessible to everyone. Once we have such a network, and we do have it now, and we're starting to see the all of these different application types popping up, the level of gravity that we're going to be able to generate, that we're already starting to generate around this will, it won't take long before it overtakes the gravity even of the biggest players with the kind of the strongest network effects. And I think what happens here is, you know, Nostr wins not necessarily because of censorship, resistance and user sovereignty features. Those are great. We bitcoiners, we care a lot about those. But you know, the majority of the people out there don't really care. We have to be realistic. I think Nostr wins because we'll have the best content and we'll have the best apps built on top of once you see those things, you can't help but obsess over it and you know, you can't help but do anything, everything you can to speed that process up. Like I want to see these things happen. I want to, I want to use these products and services that are going to be built on this open network. And the best way for me to contribute is to build them, to build the stuff that I want to use. So that's why I started Primal and that's why many, probably all Nostra developers work day and night to make this a reality.
- [02:01]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. The bitcoin time chain is 869331 and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. Today's episode is Nostr Talk where I talk with my guest about Nostr, Nostr and whatever else comes up today. That guest is Milian, creator of the Noster client Primal. Primal is releasing Primal 2.0, a massive upgrade on their mobile application. And Milian and I get into all the details of this today, including their new advanced search upgraded Explore page with new discovery features, the Feed Marketplace which is awesome. Long form content, Noster reads tab and a whole lot more. If you are already on Nostr, you're going to love this conversation. And if you're not yet on Nostr, I highly recommend you check it out. And I think that this talk today is going to give you a lot of reasons to do so, as well as give you a great introduction to why Nostr is so important and why it's honestly just a better experience than all the centralized legacy social media platforms you're used to. You can find me on nostr at@primal.net Walker and Milian atprimal.net Miljan before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin Podcast wherever you're watching or listening. Check out bitcoin podcast.net for episodes and additional resources. Head to the Show Notes to grab a discount link for Bitbox, my sponsor, or head directly to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker. Send an email to helloitcoinpodcast.net if you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast. And if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by sending a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain. Without further ado, let's get into this Noster talk with Milian. Welcome back. First of all, because I realized I was looking at our the last conversation we had on here and I think we had it in in late December or mid December 2023. I think I published it in January because my son was born shortly after we had our conversation. I think yours might have been one of the last episodes that I recorded before going into, you know, full on getting ready for the birth of a child mode. Not that I had the hard part in the birth, you know, but still. But it's wild. Like Noster time moves strange. Like it's already been a year. It feels like it's been about a decade though. I don't know, maybe. Does it feel the same to you?
- [04:44]
Milian
Hey man, good to be back. And first of all, congrats to you and Carla.
- [04:48]
Walker
Thank you.
- [04:49]
Milian
We've been kind of following along your kind of parenting there. Yeah, it's magical, isn't it? And by the way, it's the best excuse ever to publish a podcast a little bit late.
- [05:02]
Walker
Yeah, no one will fault me for that, right? Yeah. But there's a few things I want to get into with you here today. And by the time this airs, I think we said we're going to air it one day before you guys go live with this new build or Is it even fair to call it a new build? I mean, it's like a kind of a, a bit of a revamp. Like there's a lot that went into this new version of Primal. But I mean, maybe, maybe that's a good place to start given that the conversation we had was about a year ago, I think at that time you had just launched iOS primal iOS, you were just about to launch Primal Android and now you're coming out with Primal 2.0. So I mean, maybe we can start off with just kind of what has evolved in the Primal app just in this past year. Not even, you know, talking about this new build yet, because you guys have done a lot. The app, you know, it's one of my daily drivers, Primal and Damas. And it's very clean, it's very nice, it works very well. You guys have onboarded, I think, a lot of people through Primal as well, because you have a great onboarding experience. But can you maybe talk about what you guys were kind of building that was user facing this year already and then we can get into a little bit of kind of this, this launch that's slightly shrouded in mystery.
- [06:22]
Milian
All right, cool. So, yeah, Primal 2.0 is a major revamp of our entire stack. So we've kind of, we've done a lot of work on this and re engineered, re architected, reimplemented many parts of the stack. So we improved performance across the board. But we are introducing many new kind of flagship features, so maybe just go through them just to kind of set the tone. So probably the most significant one for users is the Feed Marketplace where we are tapping into the existing Noster Feed Marketplace and kind of contributing to it. Then we added the whole new Reads section. So essentially it's a top level tab on all Primal apps for long form content. So blogs, essays, articles, those types of things. We're bringing hopefully a lot more visibility to that type of content in ostr and also showing what it could look like when you integrate different types of content within the same app. And in our case this is long form content, along with the short form microblogging social media feeds and of course the built in wallet that we've had for a while now. Then we decided to attack one of the biggest problems in ostr, which is discoverability, as you just mentioned a second ago. So we've developed this whole new section of the product which we're calling Explore, with many different tabs and many different ways to kind of discover and explore content on ostr. As a part of that, we implemented the new advanced search, which I think you had a chance to try, and looking forward to your feedback regarding that. And then if all of that wasn't enough, we also added, we implemented a smoother onboarding mechanism for 2.0. We got some user feedback on our previous release and decided to do some work there to improve that as well. So that's a lot. That was a lot of work. You mentioned we spoke last December. Yeah. The Primal team has been working nonstop around the clock, really, to get to this milestone. And now we're here, we're about to ship this new release. It feels great, but it's all a blur, man. I don't think I took a single day off, including weekends, since then. And it's not just like, it's not bragging that I'm hardworking or whatever. It's just like I'm obsessed with Nostr. I can't help it. I have to, you know, wake up in the morning, have to go back to the desk and continue building. So that's what I've been up to.
- [09:21]
Walker
I love. And there's. There's a lot to. A lot to unpack there. I would ask, you know, you mentioned you are obsessed with Nostr, and I've heard that sentiment from a lot of builders and developers that started working on Nostr. And by the way, I'm going to keep calling it Nostr because that's just how my American tongue insists on pronouncing it.
- [09:42]
Milian
Good luck to you with that, man.
- [09:44]
Walker
Yeah, I know. I think I'm in like the. I think there's maybe like two other people out there who say no stir, but I'm okay with being in the, you know, the tiny minority there. You know, I'll be the weirdo, but it seems like a lot of developers have. Who maybe were working on Bitcoin, you know, a lot. That's a lot of the case. But maybe we're working on things totally unrelated, but have come on and started building on Noster. What do you think? Is that like, what is it about Noster from a developer standpoint where it's like, this is something I can obsess over. This is something that I really love to build on. What. What makes it special compared to any of the myriad other things that a talented developer could be working on?
- [10:25]
Milian
Yeah. First of all, I think you're right. I also talked to many Nostr developers and there's this kind of common theme of obsession over Noster, and also this feeling I definitely have it myself of almost getting recruited in some sort of higher sense where it's not my choice. You're doing this now. That's kind of what it felt really from day one, when I, when I started working on Primal in December of 2022. And I could feel it like, oh, here it comes. I've built stuff before, so I kind of know kind of when the inspiration hits, I know what that feels like. And I was like, ok. I told my wife, I guess I'll see you in a few years. Of course I'm always around. It's just like I'm obsessed with this. And that seeps into all kind of areas of life where every personal conversation kind of strays towards Noster. But to answer your question, why is it like that? I think many of us see the potential of Nostr and in some ways maybe if we want to be courageous. Inevitability of nostr. You no longer need to squint these days. You know, this ecosystem has been developing kind of organically for a couple years now and we are starting to see a lot of the things we were envisioning in the early days. We're starting to see them come to fruition like early days still, but they now exist. And I'm talking about the radical openness of the network, the fact that it's getting successfully bootstrapped with all these people and services kind of joining, and the fact that you can have this kind of global open social graph with a web of trust that is combined with a number of different kind of artifact types. So any sort of application that you want to build, you can create the appropriate Noster event types and publish them to this public network of relays and they become accessible to any other Nostr developer if implemented correctly. So you can think of it this way, if you, if you look at the legacy web, where a handful of companies have monopolies in their areas of expertise, so Twitter X has a monopoly in micro blogging and global town Square space. YouTube has a monopoly on long form videos. Pretty much you have a substack with quasi monopoly on long form content. You have Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. So imagine all of these services existing on the same network where everything is open, the entire user graph is open, but also all of the content is accessible to everyone. And once we have such a network, and we do have it now, and we're starting to see the all of these different application types popping up, the level of gravity that we're going to be able to generate, that we're already starting to generate around this will it won't take long before it overtakes the gravity even of the biggest players with the kind of the strongest network effects. And I think what happens here is, you know, Nostr wins not necessarily because of censorship, resistance and user sovereignty features. Those are great. We bitcoiners, we care a lot about those but you know, the majority of the people out there don't really care. We have to be realistic. I think Nostr wins because we'll have the best content and we'll have the best apps built on top of it. So that's kind of like once you see those things, you can't help but obsess over it and you know, you can't help but do anything, everything you can to speed that process up. Like I want to see these things happen. I want to use these products and services that are going to be built on this open network. And the kind of, the best way for me to contribute is to build them, to build the stuff that I want to use. So that's why I started Primal and that's why many, probably all Nostra developers work day and night to make this a reality.
- [15:08]
Walker
And I'm glad you are working day and night, hopefully getting a decent amount of rest still. But, and I think that you're spot on with what you said about, you know, like people realistically, the majority of people are not going to onboard themselves to Noster Nostr because of censorship. Resistance. Censorship resistant publishing. Right? Yeah. A lot of the people that are here right now genuinely care about that and that's why they are here right now. And a lot of the builders who are building on it, they really care about that. That's why they're building on Nostr. But realistically, the vast majority of people will trade a good user experience for censorship resistant capabilities every single day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's just the reality and that's okay. Right? But I think the beauty of Noster is that you can have all those capabilities. They don't need to care about them, but they'll still be there. But why are they really going to come? It's because you have an interoperable network of all these amazing tools that enable you to do so much more than any of these walled gardens can ever possibly allow. Because they are by definition silos of information. They are closed off, they are closed source. They are not going to play nicely with each other because they need to keep you captured. And that's kind of the incredible thing from talking with a number of people who are building on Noster. You know, I was talking with, with Vitor, the Amethyst creator, the other maybe a couple weeks ago, and he was saying, look, I fully expect to be out competed by micro apps who are going to do things like I'm just throwing everything I can into Amethyst. I expect to be out competed. I expect that and I want that. And that's just such a, it's such a novel thing to hear from somebody building a product. So I think Noster developers are kind of built different a little bit. But I want to talk about just speaking of kind of new users coming on, I want to go back to the final point that you mentioned about some of your new upgrades, which was onboarding experience, because we know from, especially if you've been around Noster for a while, onboarding experiences have improved dramatically. Still a lot of improvements to make. But we also know that that onboarding experience will be a huge determining factor in whether or not you actually stick around and keep using Noster. And if you have a bad experience right off the bat, then you become one of those, even with bitcoiners, you become one of those bitcoiners who says, well, no is too clunky. And I tried it, you know, a year ago and I didn't like it and so I've never tried it again. I'm sure you've heard plenty of those types of stories. So what have you guys changed or updated in your onboarding flow and how did you think about it? Like, what was your methodology going into updating that onboarding flow to say, you know, like, how do we make this better?
- [17:59]
Milian
Well, first of all, regarding people who had a bad experience, you know, a year ago, six months ago and so forth, that's okay, that's normal. You know, a couple years ago it was almost unusable. Three years ago you had to build your own Nostr client to participate. Pretty much. So if you look at the trajectory of the improvement of ux, it's just insane. And I think we are getting to the point where in some ways we are starting to overtake the legacy web players that have been around for a while with multibillion dollar budgets, et cetera, et cetera. But we're already in some ways starting to surpass them in terms of features and user experience. So that's extremely encouraging and I think that continues accelerating as well. So as a Nostr builder, what I consider my job to be is just to make sure that we keep improving, keep iterating keep coming back with better stuff that we ship and making sure that every subsequent touch point that users have amazes them at the level of improvement that, you know, the delta between the previous touchpoint and the latest one, similar to Bitcoin in some ways, you know, we all, unless you're, you're like a much bigger, you know, galaxy brain than me or most of us, like most of us had needed multiple touch points with Bitcoin. Most sane people's, you know, first reaction was this, this is nonsense. You know, there's no way this is going to work, right? And then the following touch point, you know, you get to kind of change your opinion a little bit. You get surprised that this thing is still around, it's bigger than before, it's more vibrant, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point you see the light. So I think a similar type of trajectory is happening now with Noster, with the early adopters, mostly bitcoiners. I think for the general audience out there, we kind of need to nail the UX kind of first try. It might take them too long to try again. So to answer your question about onboarding, so, yeah, we are trying to target the kind of the general population with our Primal client, meaning that people who are not bitcoiners, who are not a part of our, you know, Noster ecosystem yet should be able to download the app, provide, you know, basic, you know, display name, profile, photo, then provide the set of interests they, they're interested in. So they can say economics, art, you know, fashion, etc. And then click Create Account and the account is created. We also have the optional step to activate their wallet if they want to participate in the zapping economy. So during the onboarding process, they have the option to activate it right away or to do this later. But within a few taps, you're in. You're part of Nostr already. So that's been the onboarding mechanism in Primal for a while now, for a few months. The critique that we got from some of our users is that the app auto follows a number of accounts, Nostra accounts, based on the interests that the users have specified. So that's weird to a lot of people. Why am I following? I never specifically followed somebody. Why am I following them? Some people are okay with it, some people aren't. And it's, it's a reasonable question, why am I following someone? The ideal out, the ideal onboarding flow would be the exact same thing that I just described. But to understand sort of the content of the feeds that exist out there and to be able to create custom feeds based on the interests that the user create specified without explicitly following those accounts. So we are not there yet. With Primal 2.0, we are kind of rectifying the slight bit of confusion during onboarding by basically giving the choice to. After you specify your interest, we say we're about to auto follow some people based on your interests. Is that okay, do you want to proceed or do you want to see the list and specify which ones are in or out? So basically by adding that optional step, we're kind of just telling the user what's going on, what we're doing, and giving them more agency, giving them the opportunity to maybe opt out of some follows and so forth. So that's a slight improvement in the onboarding flow. It seems to work well in our tests, but we're by no means done. I think this much more sophisticated way of generating feeds which is on our roadmap, would be the way to go. This is how the big social networks do it. I mean, they. They pump their mandatory algorithm algorithms that you, you know, you like it or not, pretty much. But with. Within nostr, we have the perfect response to that, which is the Feed Marketplace, which now exists. And Primal is a part of.
- [23:37]
Walker
Yeah, and you know, I want to get into the Feed Marketplace, but I wanted to double back for a second because, you know, you mentioned that sometimes you hear the critique that maybe people don't. You know, why am I following these people? It's funny because one of I remember this was maybe March. March or April 20. Wait, 2023 or 2022. 2023, yeah, I joined in December 2022. I'm getting my years mixed up now. They're all, they're all flowing together like crazy.
- [24:07]
Milian
But, oh, we joined at the same time. Awesome.
- [24:09]
Walker
Nice.
- [24:09]
Milian
Yeah, I remember solo onboarded, I think.
- [24:13]
Walker
I was a couple days before Jack, so I. Oh, nice. Will Kassarin on board or he purple pilled me. I saw him post about the Domus beta on X or it was still called Twitter at that point. And I had actually, I had seen Noster when I was just randomly perusing Fiat Jaff's GitHub like months before, as one does. Everyone else does that too, right? You just randomly go on Fiat Joff's GitHub to see what I was looking for. Something for lightning. Yeah, perfectly normal. But I saw no stir and I. And like you said, I ignored it the first time. I said, oh, like, you know, censorship resistant, you know, decentralized, like, you know, oh, that sounds kind of neat. But like I'm looking for something else. Like maybe I'll come back to that later. But then it was in my brain and when I heard or saw JB55 post about it, I said, ah, I remember that I can now get this on test flight. Great. I'm more of a mobile first kind of guy myself, so that was perfect. But I remember trying to onboard people. I was at a conference in Jackson Hole, a bitcoin conference, and I was emceeing and Carl and I used like a break that we had to just like do a quick impromptu like, hey, you guys should check out Noster. Not as many people had heard about it at that point and started getting some people signing up. But the biggest complaint was like everybody starts it up and their feed's empty, right? And their complaint was, well, how do I find people now? And I was like sending them n pubs on telegram and stuff like that, you know, So I see both sides of that. But it's interesting, I guess people don't like. It's like when, when itunes auto downloaded that U2 album back in the day. Do you remember that? It was like if you, you got a new iPhone, like YouTube, right? Yeah. And everyone like it was, everyone was pissed. Like, I mean, I was a little pissed. I was like, I don't want this on here. So I get it. But, but I think that that initial discovery, having something where as long as when you open up that app for the first time, you see people, you see things happening, you can interact right off the bat, you don't have to go searching, I think that's huge. So. And, but of course giving people the optionality is important. But you mentioned the feeds and I want to dig into those because I think that is again, that's another part of discovery. Right here are my interests. I want to see things that are aligned with that. How are you guys going about? Because I'm looking at, you know, got like pretty nice feed things here. Like I'm. I just opened it up here on my, my bitcoin podcast account and you can look at popular on Ask Noster, trending on primal, 24 hour, you know, trending on all these things. Fluffy friends, different animals one. So how are you guys going about actually determining, you know, what goes into these feeds? Like, because obviously there's, you know, this is algorithmically determined. You guys aren't manually selecting it, of course. So how do you do that and how do you ensure that you're getting good data into those feeds? That it's not, you know, that you're not pulling in junk inadvertently.
- [27:09]
Milian
So first thing to notice, to note there is that those are not all Primal feeds. That's a Feed marketplace, and some of those feeds are third party feeds published by other developers. So Nostr has this capability already and it hasn't been widely used. So just to back up a little bit more, the spec was originally created by Pablo last year, the DVM spec, the data vending machine spec that enables creation of many things, including custom feeds. And then there's a way on Nostr to publish an event that says, I've just created a feed, and here it is for anyone to access that feed. So it took a little while, but this kind of picked up and a few developers built a few feeds. And then it was Vitor from Amethyst. I think he was the first one to integrate this into his client. And then maybe nostrudl web client was the second one. Apologies if I'm missing some Noster clients that already support DVM feeds. I'm sure there are some that I'm just not aware of. But we saw that at Primal and we always wanted to kind of participate in something like this, and this looked like a great system to kind of lean into. So what we've done in Primal 2.0 is kind of we went all in on kind of this idea of infinite feeds and kind of the open Feed Marketplace. So we've done three things in Primal. We re architected the product from the ground up to make this possible. First of all, we rebuilt all of our app shelves to enable managing basically an infinite number of feeds. So in each of the major tabs like Home or Reeds, you have a feed switcher at the top, or you can swipe left and right to kind of switch between feeds. And then that UI enables kind of having an infinite number of feeds. Then we built a UI that basically displays the Feed Marketplace in a couple of different places in the product, actually. So if you go into the new Explore section, the first tab you'll see is the Feed Marketplace. And those are all the feeds that exist on Nostr that have been published by feed developers. We actually show which of the people you're following have maybe zapped or liked those feeds. We kind of show small avatars there to give you an indication what your network thinks of this particular feed. So I think these are the early stages of kind of feed discoverability features that I'm sure are going to kind of blossom on Nostr going forward. But Essentially now we have this capability where by we, I mean Nostr developers, where anyone can publish a feed and that feed will appear in all these clients. So our product will get better. You know, while we're at dinner, somewhere someone created a feed. This actually happened back a few months ago in Riga. Pablo and I were about to give a talk about this and we were at dinner and our slides got out of date because we were going to show these feeds on nostrudle. But by the time we got to the hotel to kind of finish our slides, we realized, oh, nostril just got better. But Hazard, the developer of nostrudle, was with us at the same dinner.
- [30:41]
Walker
Amazing.
- [30:42]
Milian
So this is just the beginning of something insane, I think. So to kind of back up. So we've re architected the UI of the product to be able to support infinite, very easy switching between any number of feeds and kind of manage your kind of feeds in any of these top level tabs. We're showing the Feed Marketplace in the Explore section. And then at Primal, we build the clients, but we also run services, so we actually build a bunch of feeds as well. And we have decided that every feed that we create will also be published on the Nostr Feed Marketplace so that other people from other clients can use Primal feeds if they want to. So the feeds that you mentioned there, let's say primal 24 hour trending or any of the other feeds that we do, are available on Amethyst and Nostrudle and probably other clients as well. And we have the situation where we have Primal users that are not using the Primal apps, they're using Amethyst, but they're using our services. So we're getting so close to this kind of, we're basically there where you have this open interoperable ecosystem of apps and services where the users get to pick which media hosting service they want with which app and kind of mix and match and kind of have the ultimate level of agency and kind of sovereignty on the network. It's wild, isn't it?
- [32:13]
Walker
It is kind of mind blowing too. And it's really, you know, there's that old expression like a rising tide lifts all boats. And I think for Noster, this is genuinely true. And all of these things that are being developed, I mean, it would be very easy for you guys to say, actually we're going to keep the Primal feeds. You have to be a Primal app user to get access to these feeds because we want you in here. But you guys have gone the entirely other direction that would have been the legacy centralized model, right? You want to get these sweet feeds, sorry, but you can only get them on Primal. But instead you're saying, no, let's make the user experience of Noster better as a whole, because presumably that is going to bring more users to the network as a whole. And maybe some of them are using Primal, maybe they're not, but they're using Primal in some way if they're using these services. And I just think that that's pretty incredible. And ultimately, like everything that Noster developers are working so hard to build is in service of the users. And so as, as a user of this network, you kind of got to take a step back and realize how very fortunate you are. Because not only is everybody trying to compete to make the best application they can, the best service they can in a free market environment, but also anything that any developer builds in their client more than likely is going to somehow make the client that you're using better. And that's just kind of mind blowing to think about. I don't know, we're still so dang early because to me, and to, I think a lot of, certainly to the folks building on Noster who are dedicating their time to this, but to the users as well, it's very obvious that this is something very special. And that, yeah, of course there's plenty of improvements that can be made, maybe, you know, little fixes here and there, but already that experience, I would argue, is outstripping what a lot of these legacy platforms can offer. And I look forward to the day when more people start to realize, oh, wow, there's this weird little open social network over here that can do a lot more. But I care about it for social media, right? And holy crap, it's so much better than whatever I'm using right now. And by the way, they're not harvesting my data for sale and to sell me a bunch of stuff, but I want to, I want to make sure we get into some of the other, the other things that you guys are building for.
- [34:39]
Milian
So can you talk before we do? Can I just like, linger on top of this Feed Marketplace? Linger as long as you want, because, like, there is. We really need to drive this point home. Yes, I agree with everything you said. And it's the openness of the network that's going to bring all of these insanely good features to the user base. And I like the Feed Marketplace example because it's very easy to describe to anyone in two words. Everyone will understand what this is, and it's very easy to make a point that this doesn't exist anywhere else. Anywhere else. Twitter, their Feed Marketplace or any of the other closed systems. Bluesky, where is your Feed Marketplace? You guys are supposedly open. How come there isn't such a thing? You can make a very crisp argument around the openness of the network being so powerful by this simple comparison of Nostr and the competing networks.
- [35:46]
Walker
It is, and I'm happy to linger even longer on this because the last thing I want to do is skip over because maybe to drive that home a little bit more, when people think of this like people have been talking since very early on in Noster about, you know, a marketplace for algorithms like that. That is what this Feed Marketplace is. That is here. That is what that is what it is showing you. It is giving you as the user the option to choose, choose your own adventure. Basically. It's not the Twitter for you page, which is running some sort of algorithm that's basically designed to piss you off. It's like, I'm sure somebody's gonna make like a rage bait feed on here. That's like, if you want to get pissed off, you know, subscribe to this rage bait feed, but you don't have to, right? You can decide to just look at, you know, fluffy, fluffy animals all day long and that's great, or see what's hot and trending. The fact that as a user you have the choice though, is such a massive departure from anything else on any of these centralized platforms. There's just, yeah, sure, you can build a follow list on, you know, on X, yeah, I've put these people in there and you can do that. But this is again, you don't need to do anything. Somebody else has built this. But the difference is that you're not forced to use it. You can just decide to use what is best for your own experience. And that is going to create a completely unique experience for you when using this new social network, which I think is just again, that fact alone is already such a massive improvement on anything that exists, exists now. It's night and day.
- [37:20]
Milian
I agree. And I think that becomes obvious now with more clients like Primal leaning into this and joining like the ecosystem. And I'm sure with that we're going to bring more eyes to custom feeds, which is going to incentivize more developers to build crazier feeds, more niche feeds or like just like general purpose feeds that are just like very high signal. You could also monetize your feeds. There's a mechanism to do that. We are Launching Primal Premium as a part of our 2.0 release. And we're planning to, in the future, potentially create some feeds that might be only for premium users, so you can access them through other clients, but it's only the paid users that get these feeds potentially. Currently all the feeds that we are building and publishing are open to everyone. But the point is that this capability exists in the system to do this. And once you know and everyone has access to all the same data, so you have an open marketplace competition to create the most interesting feeds, most best curated feeds, which by the way, is another tangent. You can have algorithmic feeds and you can do a lot of interesting things there. It's fine for the user, they can retain their agency because they pick the feed. But in addition to machines creating feeds, you can also have humans curate feeds. So you can have curations of, let's say, long form articles. And this kind of process of curation where somebody is an expert in a certain area or just has a really good taste for things, can create amazing feeds that people probably would be willing to pay for. I don't know how it all plays out, but I'm sure we collectively on Noster, are going to try everything and see what happens.
- [39:17]
Walker
And that's the beautiful thing, is that again, because this is all open source, constant experimentation by anyone, anywhere in the world is possible. And that's something that is just not the case in a walled garden. You've got big teams and big budgets, sure, but you got a project manager and a whole hierarchy of people that you need to go through. There's not a whole lot of experimentation that's necessarily encouraged, especially if it's not in the service of getting more advertisers on your platform. I want to ask a little bit just about the Primal Premium. So from the beginning, people have been talking about the fact that, okay, this is great, that we're building all of these open source tools that developers are kind of, you know, putting in a lot of hours without, you know, maybe all that they're getting in return is some zaps here and there for a lot of them. But at a certain point you got to keep the lights on, you got to pay the bills, you got to feed your family. And so monetization was, was always kind of a topic that. But then it was sort of like, you know, yeah, we'll, we'll figure some of that out later. I know Damas has introduced Domus Purple. You're talking about Primal Premium. Do you think that sort of model is one that Is is kind of the best suited for this situation where, you know, you also have very like users who want to give back to. Right. They want to zap you, they want to zap the developers. But if you give them the option, they'll probably pay for a premium service, especially if it has some premium features. So do you view that as kind of the only realistic option for developers who are trying to monetize the products that they're building?
- [40:51]
Milian
Oh, I think we'll have many different options to monetize ethically. And I think that's kind of a key point. Everyone building on Oster, the current cohort of builders, we're all interested in disrupting the legacy system, not only from the censorship point of view, but also the kind of the perverse incentives point of view, where most legacy web businesses are based on advertising, which means their incentive is to collect as much data on you, the user, as they can so they can provide a better product to their real customers, who are the advertisers. That's strictly how the incentives are set up. And they can have any number of company slogans that they won't be evil or whatever, but that's how they're incentivized and they just can't help but move in a certain direction. On Nostr, we have the opportunity to reshape that. And we have a major tool which wasn't available at the time when these legacy networks were originally being built, and that is Bitcoin and the Lightning network and Ecash and all like the entire system built on top of this open monetary network, which is basically built into nostrils. So the level of experimentation that's already happening there with Zaps and other things is more than what was available to the early developers of the legacy systems. And at Primal, we definitely want to align our interests with those of our users. And to do that, one of the ways to monetize is what we're launching now with Primal 2.0 is the Primal Premium service, which basically gives you two things. It gives you the Primal name and Nostr tools that we built. So essentially the Primal name gives you the verified Nostr address friendly. So that would be Walker Primal Net friendly looking Lightning address on our custodial lightning wallet, also walkerrimal.net and a VIP profile on primal.net so that would be primal.net walker. So basically by getting the Primal name Walker, you get all those things. So that's number one. And then Nostr tools. So this whole kind of premium product is designed to kind of give you the Best possible user experience and tools for Nostr to turn you into a Nostr power user. And you can use any subset of the tools that come with the product. So we're launching with the following tools. We have media hosting where you get premium media hosting where you can upload bigger files using the Premium tier. So if you're in the free tier, you can upload files up to 100 megs. If you are on the premium tier, you can upload files up to one gig. We're looking at increasing that. But essentially there is a difference there. You get access to the premium relay premium.primal.net where that only accepts events published by premium users. And this is a high performance relay that where other users on the Nostra network can use to read content from and to kind of have a high degree of certainty that there won't be spam there, for example, because you have to pay to spam and spammers don't do that. So that's another thing. And then some of the advanced search features that you've experienced are only going to be available in the premium tier, whereas simpler searches are available for free to everyone. But some of the kind of more advanced discoverability features are for premium users only. And then we have things like Nostr account backup. So like again, useful tools for Noster users where for example, we keep the history of your contact list. So if, for example, your contact list gets wiped by a Nostr client, you can log into Primal, you can see the history, you can say, okay, two days ago I had a, you know, I was following 600 people and today I'm following zero. I'll restore the list from two days ago. And we've all, we Noster users have all gone through this many times. So we know it's kind of useful to have this. Another feature with the account backup is we'll just archive all your nodes. So currently there are, you know, no guarantees that your relays will save your nodes. You know, you just post them and relay operators can, you know, wipe the whole relay, the content of the whole relay without, theoretically without affecting the network. And people have done this with major relays before and it didn't affect the network. So it's kind of cool to see that this works. But as a user it would be nice to have some sort of guarantee that your stuff won't get deleted. And with Primal Premium you get that. And we're building tools to make it possible for you to rebroadcast some of that content or all of that content to the Relays of your choice. So this is kind of the initial set of Nostr tools that we're launching with Primal Premium. We're hoping that this is a compelling offering for people that want to go a little bit beyond the free tier, the combination of the Primal name and these tools. And we have big kind of roadmap for additional Noster tools that we want to build here. This is just the beginning. So we're hoping that there'll be users out there that will give us their vote of confidence and kind of help us continue doing this work.
- [47:07]
Walker
I love it. And I mean the note backup is actually quite a compelling one. I recently started running my own just little like private node on Umbrel because they make it pretty easy, you know, a few clicks. They've done a nice job with that. Just so I have a backup, but I haven't figured out how to get it to go all the way back in my history yet. So it's like it saved, you know, a few hundred notes and I'm like, oh, I know I've got a lot more notes than that. So it'd be nice to have the certainty that there is a full backup there.
- [47:39]
Milian
So with Primal Premium you should be able to just log into the premium section of the app, look at the full history of your notes and we're likely going to have it, I think, because we've been indexing for a while. And you can just rebroadcast those same notes to your own node or to your own relay or any relay you wish. And there now you have your own sovereign setup.
- [48:06]
Walker
And that's amazing because I know that's been one of the concerns as you mentioned, and it's happened many times, is relay operators, they're under no contractual obligation to keep all the notes you broadcast there and they can decide to wipe them. And so having that data persistence is a concern for people. Right? And I like especially if you're talking about, okay, this is a censorship resistant network. You want to be able to publish and know that your node is going to stay out there and be available for a long time to come. So that's pretty incredible. Can I ask you a little bit more about the Reads feed? Because this, you know, maybe even some newer Noster users may not be aware that long form content is very much not just long, you know, notes, but long form content with its own classification has been available for a long time, maybe just because their client doesn't have a great way to look at it. And there's other clients you can Go to, you know, Abla highlighter to be able to look at this. But you guys are building this in as an integral part. I mean, it's one of the main tabs now in the app. So can you talk about that a little bit and kind of what the goal is in terms of, Is it just to give users an easier way to access this kind of content? Does it all come down to just discoverability?
- [49:24]
Milian
I'm super bullish on long form textual content on Nostr. It's such a perfect fit for Nostr and it's a great kind of extension to the short form microblogging feeds. Nostr is ideal for becoming the kind of global town square, the place where ideas get debated. The short form feeds are appropriate for, you know, certain things, announcements, you know, the types of discussions that don't include much nuance. Perhaps they're great for discoverability, those types of things. But long form textual content is extremely powerful. And you know, in the legacy world we have products like Medium or Substack that cover the long form kind of space really well in their own, you know, closed silo kind of legacy web type of way, which is fine. But now we have Noster and there's no reason for these things to be separate. So we. Our goal with Primal 2.0 with the Reeds section was to provide the best possible consumption experience for users to be able to easily find long form content again divided into any number of feeds. There is a feed marketplace for long form content as well. We are participating in it. It's early days, but I'm sure it's going to be insane. And yeah, you'll be. If you haven't kind of taking a look at long form content on Nostr, you are missing out. There's already quite a bit of high quality content there in a number of different categories. And I think this is bound to only grow once, you know, we have more clients add these capabilities and we wanted to make a point of having the kind of long form content be like a first class citizen in Primal. So it deserves its own top level tab, but it also should integrate naturally with the short form content. And this is where we see the power of Nostr again. It's exactly the stuff we talked about a few minutes ago where, you know, you are, let's say, reading an essay by somebody you respect and you see a paragraph that really resonates with you, you highlight that paragraph. By creating that highlight, you just created a Nostr event that's accessible in the Noster network for any Nostr client to display in any way they wish. That highlight can become visible on your kind of microblogging short form feed, or you can select that highlight, you know, and say quote and type a short form note that appears in your, in your feed that says, hey, look at this incredible insight by Walker in this essay. And the short form note will have that message, it will have the highlight and it will have the full link to the article all nicely rendered within the feed. Think about discoverability of all of this. Think about the beautiful symbiosis of long form and short form content that can really only exist on Nostr in that type of way. Maybe the final point I'll make about long form content as when it comes to social media feeds and social media kind of apps, the network is the feature. So we're kind of, by bootstrapping this, we're really going like, it's really hard to bootstrap, you know, start from nothing. There's only a handful of users in the early days and you're going against massive network effects of Twitter, etc. So it's extremely hard. Like until there's a critical mass of people on the network, the network is useless regardless of all of its other features. So thankfully with Nostr, I think we're kind of getting to the point where we're overcoming that. So, which is amazing to see. So that's, that's the situation with social media feeds, but with long form content that's not the case at all. The moment the first author shows up with insightful content, there, there is value in that feature in that type of app. So you can just end up on Nostr kind of reading long form content because you are interested in one specific author. So this is going to be another way for us to bring probably large amounts of users to Nostr because they'll have high quality signal there from day one. So again, combined with the UX that we're able to implement around all of this, due to the open kind of nature of Noster, you can't help but be bullish about all these things.
- [54:46]
Walker
Amen. And I mean the highlight feature alone, I think if I'm remembering correctly, it was Gigi initially put out like an article about this purple text, orange highlights, and then Pablo I think built that out as, or built out the first implementation of that. But now this is, I mean it's again, it's an open spec, anybody can run this. And the fact that you can do that, it, it's really quite incredible. And the fact that again like on Noster, it's not like there's a, an X algorithm that's punishing you for sharing a link to something or sharing, you know, anything from the outside.
- [55:21]
Milian
How crazy is that? How crazy is that?
- [55:24]
Walker
It's insane. It's like, why? Because they, they want you to stay all within that walled garden. And sure, you know, you can see why they would do that, but it's just a beautiful thing that on Noster, that doesn't have to be the case. You don't need, you know, there's no incentive for you to keep people in one place because there is no one place. It's all the network, all the time. You know, everything everywhere, all at once. And that's beautiful. And I think again, like this highlighter feature is one that if people have not checked this out and tried it out, I would highly encourage that they do. So maybe you've seen a note displayed in whatever client you're using that is formatted a little bit differently, that is shown as a highlight, and wondered, what the heck is that? But it's really quite an incredible capability that I think just again, it makes your experience so much better because it's all integrated directly, right? You see that little highlight, you click on that, it brings you to where it was. And then if you know that's coming back to your point about curation from earlier, if you're really good at curating these highlights, people are going to zap you for those. This is just another way where that user monetization is just built right into it. It truly still blows my mind that this is even possible and that it's happening right now sometimes because it seems too good to be true. You know what I mean?
- [56:47]
Milian
I agree. I have to pinch myself too. And it's happening right now. It's actually unfolding in front of our eyes. All these artifacts that are being created like highlights, for example, and then they become their own thing where you can click on it and then have a whole thread, a whole conversation with a bunch of other people around that specific highlight. And the artifacts exist. All those Noster events kind of are published to relays, etc. They're open. But what we have now is great UX that brings this to anyone, you know, on products like Highlighter or Hobla or Primal. It's, it's wild.
- [57:30]
Walker
It, it, it's nuts. And again, I think so much of the experience comes down to discoverability. How easy is it for you to find things that you are interested in, to stay up to date with those things to find new things related to those that are even interesting to you. And one of. I don't think we got a chance to dig into this too much yet. But just the Explore 2.0 and then the advanced search, because you touched on this a little bit, but I think that's a huge part. Can you, can you walk through a little bit what that explore 2.0 and advanced search entails and how it's different from what, you know, basically all clients are offering right now from an explorer perspective in search?
- [58:10]
Milian
Right. So kind of, to frame this conversation, let's back up to one of the kind of common critiques of Nostr by people who haven't really done the work to understand what's actually going on here. So a common critique we hear is that Nostr has a discoverability problem. It's like impossible to find things on nostr. Who is going to run the indexers? And the reality is precisely the opposite from that. NOSTR is the discoverability layer. Now for the Internet and for all of these kind of event types and artifact types that we talked about, we're really going to turn that completely around. And the question is, who is going to run the index service? The answer is whoever wants to. It's an open network and there are many different actors that would want to run indexers and maybe specialize in indexing certain content types or certain subsets of the network in terms of users, or maybe limit to the last 30 days of content that's being indexed or maybe try to index everything to the best of their abilities. So we at Primal have built an indexer for Nostr. We are running an indexer that attempts to index everything, all the events. So if you want your content to be seen, it's likely being indexed by Primal. And we've open sourced our indexer under the MIT license. So it's completely free to use for anyone to pick up the code, run their own instance, do their own indexing, build a product, commercial product if they want to. On top of this, it's fully open. So this is how we're going to, I think again end up. When you play this out over years, we're going to end up with best discoverability features. Nostr's discoverability features are going to to far surpass any of the closed platforms because anyone will be able to participate in all of this. Now, in the context of our 2.0 release, we wanted to really dispel this notion that Nostr has a discoverability problem. And I'm hoping that we're able to do this with 2.0. Where first of all, we have this Explore tab and by the way, we code named this release Magellan. Kind of a little.
- [60:52]
Walker
For some exploring, right?
- [60:54]
Milian
Exactly. For some exploring to kind of emphasize the amount of focus we're putting on kind of content discovery. Right? Like the feed marketplace itself. And creation of feeds is a part of that too. But in the new Explore section beyond the feeds, we have a People tab where we and all of these algorithms are open so people can see what's going on there. But essentially we try to decipher which users have gotten the most followers lately, which is likely that they've posted something interesting or something interesting is going on around them. So we kind of give you a bunch of user profiles there that you don't follow. Right? That's, that's the key. So when you go to Primals Explorer tab and then you switch to people, you will see a bunch of Noster user accounts that you don't follow. And we sort them by kind of how popular in terms of gaining new followers within your web of trust. So filtering out all the nonsense for the bots. So how many new followers they've gained in your wider kind of web of trust is probably a pretty good signal that there's something noteworthy that this person has posted lately or has been mentioned and so forth. And it's just a point in time, but it becomes massively easier to find people that you're not following that are probably relevant. So as you kind of swipe through that tab, there's like a bunch of profiles there. Then we have the Zaps tab where you see the top zaps in your also wider network. And I've had a lot of fun kind of browsing that tab as we were developing things. You can see who is zapping and how much and who's getting zapped and kind of results in finding some high signal content and high signal users hasignal accounts. So that's useful. Then we have the Media tab, which again uses your web of trust and the wider web of trust to kind of just highlight images or videos that have been posted on the network. So you can kind of just swipe through this tab and kind of visually scan for things that might be interesting to and then you can tap into the note that contains that artifact. And then the final tab there is Topics, which is kind of which shows which hashtags have been popular lately also in the last 24 hours. So that's quite a bit of content discovery there in that kind of Top level tab. But then on top of that we have advanced search, which is kind of a topic in itself. So maybe I'll stop here and get.
- [64:00]
Walker
Yeah, just for a couple of comments on the Explore tab. I mean, so you've got, I'm looking at it right now. You got feeds, people, zaps, media topics. And one that I want to hone in on a little bit because we touched on feeds a bit earlier was just the Media tab because I think that's genuinely such a, like people enjoy visual discovery and it's also something that they're kind of accustomed to, right? Yeah, images are powerful, videos are powerful. You know, I'm looking at it right now and I'm also seeing a lot of, a lot of GIFs. And I'm like, I kind of want to, kind of want to dive in there and see what's going on, but I think that that's, that's a really nice thing to give people because again, it's something that they're kind of used to in. Like if they, if they're a user of Instagram, you know, they're used to that from their Instagram discovery page. That is something that, again, not that you need to replicate all the features of existing social media networks, but when there's a type of feature that people do really gravitate towards that they like, that proves effective for them, why not put it there? And I think that was one of the things that noster, you know, in the early, I mean, we're still early days, but in the earlier, earlier days discovery was very hard. Hard enough to just find a person, you know, or, and, or to find a list of people. But now we've just, we've come so far from that that okay, I can discover just like, oh, that's a, that's a great looking meme. I wonder who posted that. Boom. I just found a new person to follow that drops really great memes. And I did that completely visually. I didn't have to type anything. I didn't have to go out and search for it. I was just scrolling through and it gave me that option. And I'm, I'm curious if, in the same vein as this kind of media, if you guys have thought about any video specific tabs to just, is that something that could be kind of configured in the settings there where you'd be able. Because right now you've got gifs, you've got images, you got videos. Have you guys thought about anything that's kind of like similar to the TikTok type experience of, you know, and even Twitter has implemented it now. Instagram copied it with reels. You know those video being able to flip through. It's a little bit toxic when you're looking at TikTok and it's all just feeding you algorithmically driven stuff. But if you have a marketplace of feeds, is there the option for video only type feeds?
- [66:17]
Milian
Of course there is. You're going to make me reveal part of our roadmap, which I typically don't like doing.
- [66:22]
Walker
Okay, okay, it's fine.
- [66:25]
Milian
The reason is not that we have some sort of set of secrets or whatever, it's just I prefer to talk about features when they're available because the moment you start pre announcing then as a developer you get inundated with the endless questions that start with when. But you know, fine. Of course it makes sense to have a video tab as a main level tab. We are looking at the best ways to do this. I'm personally less excited about TikTok type of short kind of reels like the short videos. I more interested in long form videos. Like if, if, if we end up doing a top level video tab that would, I would like that to look more like YouTube. That should be a YouTube competitor. And the home, the home tab could potentially be competent enough to display different feed types. Not just different feeds, but different feed types. So the home tab would be, you know, your feeds tab where you can flip between not just a bunch of different feeds in terms of content, but between a bunch of different feed types where one feed could look very much like what we display now, which is like micro blogging kind of text based feed. But another feed type could be very Instagram like or TikTok like and so forth. So it's up to the user to figure out which feeds and which feed types they like and they configure it the way they want to and that's kind of self contained in that one tab. And for the, for long form videos I think to me that that makes sense to kind of dedicate like a top level tab to that. But don't hold me to this guys. No, no, I haven't implemented any of this. And who knows?
- [68:22]
Walker
And you're listening. No one is allowed to reach out to you if they're listening to this and say when is this feature coming? Reach out to me instead and tell me you shouldn't have asked about roadmap items. But I was curious because it's another one of those feature types. I think the YouTube style discovery for long form is A great idea too. Of course there's a lot of people that like just the short form TikTok stuff, but people, I think increasingly, you know, I feel like there's these pendulums when it comes to social media use and for a while it was swinging towards the really instant gratification, super short form, high energy, grab your attention in the first second. Because if you don't do that, you're going to lose the person and try to keep them hooked, you know, just for those whatever, 60, 90, you know, 120 seconds, whatever it is. But I feel that it's, you know, it's starting to swing back a little bit towards that longer form content, towards discovering a deeper conversation. And of course, you know, the nice thing about Nostra is that it's like, okay, you could very easily, maybe, I don't know if you can even filter by, you could filter by the length of the video. Like I, I want to see, I want to discover videos that are over, you know, I don't want anything that's just a 60 second video. Like I'm looking for something longer form. I want to discover that.
- [69:39]
Milian
But Walker, you can do that. Now open Primal Advanced Search. Okay, open Primal Advanced Search. And by the way, you do that by. Let's back up a little bit maybe to explain. So every section in the Primal 2.0 app, so home reads notifications, etc. Has a search command in the top right corner which is contextual. So if you're in home, it's going to search notes and it's going to give you your kind of your recent profiles that you've searched. If you're in reads, it's going to search reads. So if you're just there, type search quick search command, it's going to return reads. If you're in notifications, it's going to search your notifications, etc. But that's the simple search. The advanced search you can access by tapping that essentially top right corner twice. So you tap it once and then it turns into this kind of settings type of icon and you tap it again and there's your advanced search. So in there, Walker, you can type any search string or leave it empty. Let's leave it empty for now. Excuse me. In the first section you can say search. By default it's search notes but you want videos, so set videos there. So it's only going to search notes that have videos. Then let's do that. And then you were asking about length, right? You wanted longer videos. So go to filters, minimum duration in seconds set that. And since we're there, you may want to say orientation horizontal. Wow. And I don't know, let's see if this works.
- [71:33]
Walker
I had played around with the advanced search a little bit in advance of this call, but I had not gone deep into that filters when I was searching through some of my old notes, seeing what I could get there. But this is wild. And so you also have this content score on there as one of the filters. Can you explain what that is? Because you've got minimum interactions, likes, zaps, replies, reposts. Is the content score a combination of those or can you explain what that is a little bit?
- [72:02]
Milian
Yes, it's a combination of those. So this is what we use to determine what's trending or whatever to determine how popular a piece of content is. So we give different weightings to different types of reactions. So a like is worth less than a zap. I think repost is worth more than a zap and the reply is worth more. So kind of each of these kind of gives a note a certain number of points and then you tally up the points is the very simple kind of algorithm. But then you know, we use the web of trust to filter out the bots and then the content score there goes from 0 to 100. If you set it to 95, you're saying just give me the top 5% of content that in terms of engagement, which probably is higher. Signal doesn't necessarily have to be, but it's one of the parameters that you can use. You can say okay, give me all the videos that were zapped by this list of people. I don't know if you noticed in the section where we, where you can specify if you're searching by notes posted by a certain user, you can actually set any number of users there. So you can say search posts by Walker Carla, Emilian Odell, gg. You can keep adding people there and that becomes one of your criteria there.
- [73:37]
Walker
It, it's, it's really mind blowingly powerful and I'm, I'm actually gonna, what I should have done is had had my phone hooked up to, to show some of this live. But it's better to hopefully this, by the time this comes out, you know you will have be releasing like the next, the, the next day or that same day. So people will be able to actually play around with this live for themselves. But this, this advanced search is just super powerful. And now I, I mean the duration, duration thing is pretty amazing on there and content score as well because again that's Giving you so much more control over what you actually find. You know, granted, some of like the content score you're putting together, that's somewhat arbitrary in the sense that, okay, you guys decided this is what the weighting on each of these things is worth. Right? But at least you know what that is like, you know how it's coming to you when you do search on X. It's pretty good search and there are of course advanced search capabilities on there. But if you're just doing the kind of standard search and you've got your latest, you've got your top, you've got okay, media tab for that. It's actually really tough to find stuff on X that's not just garbage because so many people game the algorithm and you find just so much junk in that feed. And I use the search a lot and it's just, it could be so much better and I feel like that's what you guys have really enabled here.
- [75:01]
Milian
And again, yeah, I think our search is way better than what access, Way better. We're dealing with data to be fair, but sure, I think we're way beyond in terms of capabilities.
- [75:12]
Walker
Yeah, it's. I mean it's honestly night and day. And again, the fact that this is not just searching on Primal, this is searching on Noster. This is the entire network. This is not a silo, this is everyone. That is huge. And again, I think that as people start to discover Noster more, it's going to blow minds. And here I'm just sharing for anybody who's watching on the road just so that they can see. I just dropped this in here so you can see in this advanced search, you've basically got your. Include these words, exclude these words, search from notes or reads note replies, read comments, images, videos, sound. The sound one is pretty neat too. I mean that's basically. Is that filtering for just Audio only files, MP3 WAV, whatever it might be, Is it pulling RSS feeds that have been posted as well?
- [76:06]
Milian
So we only work on the NOSTR dataset. So it's looking through NOSTR notes that have references to audio files within them. So embedded note files.
- [76:18]
Walker
Okay, audio files, very cool. But and again, replying to zap by time posted this scope, do you want it global, your followers, your network followers, interactions, a bunch of other. And then those filters with the content score, interactions, likes, apps, replies, reposts. This is a ton of capability you guys are giving people right now. And I know some of the other clients have implemented, I think certain features that maybe they have parts of this. But is it safe to say? Because again, you know the landscape better than I do. Is it safe to say this is the most comprehensive advanced search that's available on Nostr to date?
- [76:58]
Milian
Well, it's tough, you know, for me to say it, but I'll go ahead and say it anyway. I think this is the most comprehensive search capability on Nostr today. And to be clear, some of these advanced search features are going to be available to premium users only. But as I've mentioned previously, our entire stack is open source and anyone can stand up their own services, and I hope they do. And with different incentives, different business models around them. We want to see many indexing services on OSTR offering their capabilities to the user base in a bunch of different kind of form factors. And let's see what happens.
- [77:45]
Walker
It's an exciting time. I have some other topics I wanted to kind of more broad topics that I wanted to ask your opinion on, but I want to make sure. Was there anything else from the upcoming release that we didn't get a chance to dig into yet that you want to highlight for people?
- [78:01]
Milian
I think we covered a lot. You know, there's, it's, it's a big release, it's a big upgrade, so it's hard to cover everything, but people should try it out, poke around. Some tutorials are going to be, you know, coming up. You know, we'll do like video walkthroughs through some of these features because it's easy to miss, you know, very powerful features sometimes when you have so many of them. So yeah, I would say just try the app and you know, decide for yourself and then ping us on Oster and will step in and help you with anything you need help with.
- [78:37]
Walker
Full service. I love it. So one of the other more broad topics, zooming out a little bit, we talked about onboarding, we talked about that user experience and how important it is. But kind of setting that aside a little bit in terms of waves of adoption, we've seen different large waves of adoption come onto Nostra at different times, generally being kind of event driven. There was the Jack Dorsey wave and the Snowden wave or those were people driven. But then we also had some kind of censorship driven. So people running away from centralized platform censorship. I don't think we've quite seen the wave of people running toward Nostr because of the features that it offers. And that's probably just a knowledge gap issue. Right? Maybe people, you know, are just simply not aware of it. But I'm curious where you sort of see you know, do you think we kind of continue these, these little somewhat isolated waves of increased adoption that are either, you know, that are kind of event driven. Do you think the next waves are going to come from like some larger content creators or you know, writers, you know, news personalities, whatever it might be, starting to post on Noster and bringing some of their followers? Do you think, do you think it's something else? How do you kind of look at this and how do you see the next, you know, couple of years playing out in terms of adoption?
- [80:03]
Milian
So I think I see all of the above happening. So these isolated events that we've had in the past that brought waves of users to the network, they're going to continue to happen as time goes by. That's pretty much guaranteed. So we have that going for us. Then you mentioned, you know, content. I think content is getting content creators to the network and getting them to, you know, publish there will bring large number of users and I have a kind of very optimistic with this kind of long form content capabilities that we're helping kind of promote within Nostr, that this will attract more long form content creators that will just start publishing on Oster as well. Because the incentive structure and kind of the pitch to creators on Oster, I think becoming better and better is becoming quite good, which is you don't, you're not building on sand. Anything you build on Nostr is yours forever. That means like your content is signed, your audience is yours. No one can take that away from you and you can monetize directly from your users. So rather than someone else, like a legacy platform deciding which percent you get, how about 100% and then you decide how it gets split. So and then if you publish your content on Nostr, it will become available in more and more clients, in more and more applications because it's all so open. So I think I kind of see that content consumption UX needs to be impeccable for, for content creators to be able to promote their Nostr presence to their users with a straight face. Like I think to me that's been kind of a stumbling block so far. It's not that kind of content creators weren't interested in Nostr, they actually are. But once you, even if you have to jump through a couple of hoops to publish that content there and content creation tools are getting better and better. I think like highlighter is getting excellent for example. So all of those things are improving. But I think for us to see a large number of or like maybe the first cohort of high Profile content creators join Nostr. We need the UX for their users to be impeccable. This includes onboarding the stuff we talked about previously, but also once they are onboarded. Consuming that content needs to be a pleasure. This is what we are focusing on at Primal, really that consumption experience of content. I hope we were able to actually get there right out of the gate with this 2.0 release for long form content. Actually, I'm quite proud of the way that turned out. So backing up again to answer your question. So we will have content creators that will start drawing their audiences to Nostr. That's certainly going to be the case. And then there will be more apps and services that just get built on top of nostr. This as we're increasing the gravity to the network. It's the incentives for developers to build on top of a network like this, where they don't need to bootstrap everything, where they can kind of develop and deliver compelling experiences by combining all these artifacts that exist on our network and maybe completely new ways. And we're seeing this by the way, like we're seeing so much developer engagement on ostr. It's off the charts basically compared to the competing networks. So all those guys, some of those guys will be successful and they'll build great apps and that will attract users. So I think all of these wheels are going to keep spinning and kind of bringing more gravity to the network and I'm sure we'll have some events where like a massive new creator shows up or a celebrity or someone like that where that kind of brings a wave of new users. Hopefully all the Noster apps and services and relays and everything else are ready for these massive spikes of users which are going to happen. So all of the above I think is going to help. And then maybe a little bitcoin pump here and there if it gets into the mainstream currently, you know, it's, it's, we're at probably early stages of the next bull market or whatnot. It's not really registering with the retail. So regular people are not really, you know, thinking much about bitcoin. But that's, it's possible that that changes over the next year or two, that we have another highly publicized kind of episode of bitcoin running away. And at that point when you can kind of market Noster with a very simple phrase, it's a bitcoin powered social network, it might be enough for a lot of people to take a look. And by that time hopefully all the apps and services are even more slick. And robust and there's better content there. So I think what actually may end up happening this was, this is actually my base case, is that we end up onboarding more users onto Bitcoin via Noster than through all other methods combined. I think this is what ends up happening because like through these casual kind of apps, like social media apps, content consumption apps, you know, everyone is familiar with those apps, everyone has a level of interest in that type of content. Whereas a lot of people, you know, like they might be turned off by Bitcoin for whatever reason, you know, they've been subjected to all kinds of propaganda over the years. But there's this example that Jack Mallers shared on stage with me a few months ago. I think it was in Riga. He basically said that his best friend's girlfriend, he was trying to orange peel her for years and she was not interested. She was like, she didn't care about inflation, she didn't care about sovereignty. And none of those things resonated with her. She just didn't bother. And imagine how resilient she must be if she's withstanding these orange peeling attacks by Jack Mellers. Right? So anyway, one day she downloaded Primal and activated her wallet and posted something on Nostr. And apparently it was a personal story, it was something health related. I don't know the details but she got a bunch of zaps from people and that's the moment that clicked for her. She was like, I can't believe this is happening. Okay, I understand everything now. So she became a full on bitcoiner. She read the bitcoin standard, etc, etc, but that was the kind of path for her to get orange pilled. And I think there might be more people like that than not. So in other words, I think we end up onboarding the majority through Nostr. That's my base case.
- [88:04]
Walker
I think it's a fair base case. And I know personally of a number of stories from talking to people who they were not into Bitcoin beforehand somehow because somebody in their network, or maybe it was Jack or Snowden posted about Noster, they found their way on and then found out, oh wait, this is using Bitcoin as kind of a core part of the value for value mechanism. And that began their journey down there. And I think that's beautiful. And that was actually a perfect transition to the next question I had for you, which is Primal kind of changed the game a little bit for Noster clients when you guys first came out, because I believe you were the first client to have sort of an Integrated Lightning Wallet, which made things massively more simple for people, especially if you were not already a bitcoiner. If you were just trying out this cool new social media network and, you know, you didn't already have a Lightning Wallet, you didn't already have SATs. You know, you guys, you know, let people buy, buy their first sats right there in the app. You know, the App Store added their extra fees because of course, you know, Apple's got to take their piece of the pie. But still, you could get sats and have a Lightning Wallet and be up and running right away. That is, I think, still a friction for a lot of people for. For other clients and maybe even for some Primal users if they're not. Because I believe at this point now you guys use Strike on the back end, right? Is that correct?
- [89:31]
Milian
That's correct, yes.
- [89:32]
Walker
Okay. And so there is a KYC process that you have to go through because Strike is a regulated company. So users do have to kyc. Now, granted, the users who are not already into Bitcoin probably don't really care about kycing as much, if we're being honest. But where do you still see the frictions in the, in the ZAP onboarding experience in terms of maybe not just Primal, but more broadly, do you think there are. That Lightning is at a place where it can support this and there are going to be better ways to do this in a, let's say, slightly more sovereign way for users who maybe don't want to kyc. Where do you kind of see the state of things right now? What can be improved in terms of that onboarding to zaps? Because I think you're spending spot on that, yes, Nostra is going to orange pill a lot of people to Bitcoin because for no other reason than they get on there and they start seeing people talking about zaps or, hey, you know, doing my introduction and somebody says, well, I can't zap you. You don't have your zap set up yet. And they say, what the heck is a zap? You know, like that's, that's an interaction I've seen so many times just looking through that introductions feed. Where do you think we're at? What. What can be improved? How can that be smoothed out? How can. How can Noster clients make that experience better for users? More seamless?
- [90:49]
Milian
Right. So just a second ago, you asked if I thought that Lightning was ready for all of this, and I think unequivocally, a lightning is ready for all of this. Obviously, this is all going through lightning. And lightning is winning in a major way. Self custodial lightning becomes more challenging from a UX point of view, as you know. So this is, you know, there are multiple great self custodial lightning wallets out there and I really appreciate the people who do that work to push that forward. But it requires a certain level of enthusiasm, let's say by the user and expertise. Right. It's not what people are typically used to in terms of onboarding. So it's. The self custodial lightning experience is in my view inappropriate for noobs who are just trying to kind of have some fun on nostr. Yes. So we decided when we built this feature, I guess a year and a half ago, we launched it in the San Francisco. Soon it's going to be one year since we launched it. It was obvious that it had to be a custodial lightning solution because anything else was adding too much friction. And the success of products like Wallet of Satoshi kind of gave a really good signal to the market of what people are looking for in terms of the trade offs. And including many bitcoiners. Right. Like there are many hardcore bitcoiners that are using Primal Wallet as their daily driver because of convenience as well. So when it comes to kyc. Yes. To be able to do custodial, bitcoin, custodial lightning and not go to jail, you need to comply with the laws. And we worked with the strike team to kind of build a product that minimizes the amount of kyc. So it's like KYC Light, just a few fields you fill out on one screen and that's it. And the reason we are able to do that is that we limit the amount of bitcoin you can hold in this wallet to 1 million SATs. So you should have no business holding more than that in any custodial service. In my view. This is like, you know, you're spending money, your casual kind of what you would carry around in your wallet. You know, a million SATs is getting to be more and more money as we, as we speak literally. But, but still, you know, there's that limit which we enforce and then we push people to self custody or kind of, we, we encourage that, you know, for our users for any bigger amounts. But when we assessed the kind of state of the art at the time we were building this, this was the only way I could come up with to have a like frictionless kind of built in wallet experience that you can use to participate in the zapping economy, but also to use it as a wallet for any kind of casual lightning or on chain payments even. It's kind of like wallet of satoshi with social media kind of and everything else built in. So your question was what can be improved? Now we have some other systems that are maturing like E Cash for example, looks very promising, especially Kashu. So it's another custodial solution, but one that offers much better privacy and is makes it also possible to get onboarded with minimal friction, almost no friction. Pablo actually came up with a way to kind of keep your E Cash talk tokens encrypted on your on the relays. So you like just by having an amp up you can have an E Cash wallet which is wild. So all of this is very interesting. I think in the long run this is probably a better solution than custodial lightning and kind of on chain wallet which is what we have now. There are some legal outstanding questions there when it related to running the E Cash mints and also running the lightning gateways which are necessary for these E Cash systems to work. We are kind of very actively looking at all of this, but don't have any immediate plans at the time to kind of change the architecture of our built in wallet. It's kind of more of on a longer term roadmap, let's put it that way.
- [95:46]
Walker
I really appreciate the explanation and I agree with you wholeheartedly about the custodial side of things. Whether or not you think custodial lightning is good or bad, you can agree because it's a fact that it is a much better user experience. Of course it is like necessarily it is going to be. And the nice thing again about no store, any noster, client or primal specifically, even though you have a built in wallet, nobody's forced, nobody's holding your head down saying you've got to use this, you can use whatever you want, you can use that non custodial option. But I think that you're exactly right that for, for new people who are getting on here, this is still a really great first introduction to Bitcoin through a social media layer. And the fact that it can be done all without switching apps, without doing any of this, that's really powerful. And again back to what we were saying at the very start. The majority of people, sadly this is just a fact. They don't care about censorship, resistance, they don't care about sell, you know, custodying things themselves. They just want something that works well. They want something that works well and something that's fun. And if you can provide that they're going to like it and then maybe down the road they become super orange pilled and get to be a full blown toxic psychopath maximalist who is, you know, keeping the bare minimum of sats in that custodial wallet and taking everything else from all of their foot picks into self custody. Great. But still, this is a very nice on ramp for people to at least get some sort of exposure to it. Because I think that that's what we want, right? We want more people to try this incredible network. And they're only going to do that if they can get onboarded and also onboarded to Bitcoin in a pretty low friction way. And I think that's what you guys have provided. So I like, I mean, I love, I love using it. I don't, I don't keep very many sats on there, I'm sure. I mean I zap more sats than I get zapped also because I'm still just trying to, trying to keep those, keep sending out some fat zaps. You know, we've got to, even though the price is going up. You know, I'll, I'll reduce my zap amounts when we get to like SAT scent parody or something. And it becomes really a financially bad decision for me to keep my zaps as high as they are. But until then, let's just keep them rolling. But yeah, it's, it's a nice experience on Primal. And again, the fact that it's still a wallet, it's not just within the app. You can use it as a wallet in the real world. You can go and you know, pay for your cup of coffee with the Lightning Network because nobody was ever going to pay for coffee on chain as many would have had you believe back in the day. But I want to ask, is there, was there anything else? Because I just realized we're, we're already over 90 minutes Noster. Time flies. But was there anything else? We didn't cover any, anything else you wanted to get into a little bit before, before we kind of get to wrapping up a little bit?
- [98:44]
Milian
Yeah, man, this was a lot of fun. I didn't realize there was. We're 90 minutes into it. That's great.
- [98:49]
Walker
Me neither.
- [98:49]
Milian
Yeah, I guess my last thought is maybe related to your previous comment where, you know, most people out there are not interested in censorship, resistance or in self sovereignty, but they will help us bootstrap censorship resistant self sovereign network regardless by just participating in it. So by adding their content, by adding their sats, basically they might be zapping you know, from a custodial wallet or whatnot. But what they're doing is making it possible for, let's say, content creators who are quite a bit into censorship, resistance and self sovereignty, to be able to run their own setups the way they want to. Because this is an open network, every user can configure it any way they like to. So by bringing the masses, bringing in the masses who might not share all of the same values as we do, we are still, in my opinion, going to be able to bootstrap the network with the values at the core that we care about. It's kind of interesting and I think the approach we're taking with Primal is going to maybe help with some of that.
- [100:09]
Walker
Come for the fun, stay for the freedom, maybe is a nice mantra there.
- [100:14]
Milian
Something like that. Yeah. Or you stay for the fun too. But the rest of us will be here for freedom and we'll be all participating in the same network.
- [100:22]
Walker
Yeah, I love. The last thing I would ask you is if you have an elevator pitch that you give to people when you're trying to onboard, because I'm sure you've had the conversations a lot. Given that you are building a Noster client, what do you say to somebody to say, why should you care about Noster? Why should you at least give it a try?
- [100:45]
Milian
I guess that depends on the circumstances, on the person I'm talking to. If it's a content creator, if. If it's, you know, somebody who might be more on the consumption side of things, there isn't one that. I'm sorry to disappoint Walker.
- [101:01]
Walker
It's okay.
- [101:02]
Milian
There isn't one that just kind of jumps a cookie cutter pitch that I use on everyone. Maybe I should have one ready at any point. I just try to riff with people, meet them where they are, and kind of take it from there.
- [101:22]
Walker
No, it was kind of an unfair question to be fair. But what I think is just so beautiful about this, and I really would encourage content creators to check this out, is just beyond getting zapped, beyond the censorship resistance, and nobody can de platform you. The experiences are just getting so much better, both for you and then for also people that are following and subscribing to your content. You guys are building out incredible discovery tools. There's so many clients that are being new clients being spun up. It feels like every couple of days more places for to meet your fans, your followers where they are. But the actual experience in terms of being a creator who publishes stuff like you can you just have to publish it once you don't have to go everywhere and put it into your. Onto your website and onto your substack and everything else. If you're a long form creator, you can just publish it and it'll be available everywhere. If you're publishing video, it'll be available on Highlighter and on Flare. And, you know, anything you do on Zap Stream is also then available for all Nostril users. Like, I cannot overstate how much of a better experience that is. And I look forward to the time, like, I'm still, you know, publishing stuff, of course on YouTube and rumble and, and, and on X and obviously my RSS feed. But that experience is like between YouTube and rumble and X, it's so bad compared to just publishing it once on Noster and knowing that it's going to be available to everybody. That's really, it's just cool. It still feels like magic every time when I publish it on Highlighter and then I can go check on Flare. And it's already right there on Flare. I didn't have to do anything, but it's available in a totally different application. That's incredible. And like, again, thank you for building tools and thanks to all the developers because it's a really exciting time to be here and I think we're still, you know, not to sound cliched, but we're still so early. There's so much incredible stuff that's going to be built that probably we haven't even. We didn't even know was possible because we were still stuck in our walled gardens.
- [103:31]
Milian
I agree. It's really, and I'll kind of paraphrase Gigi here, I really like this quote. He goes, guys, these are the good old days. What we're going through right now, these are the good old days. Let's savor it. You know, like, and to be. To have the opportunity to participate in something special at such an early stage is amazing. I'm certainly grateful.
- [104:00]
Walker
There's a quote from the Office that's basically like, I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days when you're in them. And it's like, thank you, Gigi, for reminding us that right now this is a way to know you are in the good old days. This is early. And if you're on this network right now, you are really early. We're still. What was the last stat I saw? I was looking on Primal, of course. Let me see. It was. This is saying 1,871,172 users.
- [104:30]
Milian
Are we opening that can of worms now?
- [104:32]
Walker
No, no, no, no, no. And I'm sure somebody's going to watch this and say, well, a lot of those are fake N pubs and they just spun them up to boost their own counts and everything. Either way, there's still a tiny number of users on this network, but it is growing and I think it's going to grow exponentially in the years to come here as these experiences keep getting better and better for consumption users and for creators alike. And I'd also remind people that the cool thing about Noster is that anyone can be a creator and get paid for their work, no matter how small they are. You can do it and that's pretty powerful.
- [105:09]
Milian
Amen.
- [105:11]
Walker
Well, man, we'll wrap it up there. We've been running for a while here. I highly recommend people check out Primal. Check out this new release. You can go to primal.net or just search for Primal. You can probably find it by just searching Primal. But if you really want to get it, Primal Noster, we'll definitely bring it up in your app store. And yeah, check this out and highly recommend people follow you as well because there's a lot of signal that comes out of you. So enjoy the new release and play around and send Milan all your bug reports. Send them all. Just inundate him with them.
- [105:46]
Milian
Let's go. Let's get this done.
- [105:49]
Walker
Amen. Thanks for coming on here. Appreciate it. Looking forward to hopefully seeing you in the flesh soon.
- [105:55]
Milian
Yes, it really was a pleasure, Walker. Thank you.
- [106:04]
Walker
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 bitcoinpodcast.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.