Five

Starting in 2 hours!

https://honey.hivetalk.org/meet/login?room=BudaBit

Join us this week if you're a builder or a fan of freedom tech:

Sharing our work more often works magic: We have to present to other builders and must listen to potential users so we are on the hook.

This makes us build and explain better. Something you should master in the age of AI.

Join demo days to hone your skills and get inpired:

BudaBit demo days rebooted! An hour of interactive presentations and discussion about freedom tech!

Present your project, get feedback and discuss with builders and freedom tech enthusiasts!

Apply for a spot to present or just join conversation:

https://budabit.club/c/naddr1qvzqqqramcpzqz5wewjgdrqnu85ye3wttrqzc87s3qxeuk3955zsa6t2mzskd47gqyv8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnzw4jxzcnfwshxxmr4vgqyqvrp8pjkxcnpxsurvwrrxyek2vt98q6xxce4vd3r2wrrxqexxvtxvscrswpsvsuk2dtpxg6kzdfsx5cx2efexeskgwrpxymrvephvvuqvnlda2/calendar/286afe2e77241788f3730ef983bf6a9bb8acda4bd46168fb3db8493050a0e241

Hard coordinaton problems in digital space should always fall back to a solution in meatspace, there will not be a time where we completely let machines decide everything for us I hope.

Massive scale corrupts massively

I think it is important to say specifically how pacing will allow us to make the AI development process safer.

Specifically, I hope to get hold of smart enough unrestricted AI hosted safely in my apartment. That constitutes safety for me.

https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

Didn't know so much wokism is left in Linux land:

https://stopomarchy.neocities.org/

My first idea would be around agent-identity, Omarchy people appreciate AI and Nostr can is a good fit here

Regardless if you like it or not:

We should get Nostr into #Omarchy one way or another. I am way too busy right now but want to contribute :

I am offering a 5.000.000 (5M) sats bounty for the first author of a meaningful nostr integration with Omarchy that is merged by a maintainer and shipped in the canonical release.

This is the way we should showcase the power of Nostr: Not with echo-chamber-ware but demonstrate value in the real world.

If you have good ideas to share with like-minded devs come chat in #BudaBit :

https://budabit.club

Share this to your nerdy friends! #devstr

Gpt 6 Astra is very similar experience for me so far as 5.6 Sol.

Calling this AGI or similar is ridiculous, kinda shows how much people are just mezmerized and lost touch with reality.

I must admit though, working with LLMs has been a magical experience indeed.

The biggest winner is freedom tech that has accelerated a lot of development that would have taken 10X the time.

Another benefit is that open protocols and lockin-free software is becoming the standard. Hardware will follow.

Real purpose can only be discovered with time.

People still here putting up with rough edges, and devs still grinding on the gears of freedom tech when everyone is in AI psychosis is proof enough for real purpose.

Appreciate you all.

My setup:

• #Omarchy quattro
• #Nix Home Manager
• #Opencode (v2) with
  npub1xsgymm0…nyzazx

  websearch tool and #nak skill with local bunkers for different accounts
• #Neovim still rocks of course but am using less now with 100% agentic coding

What's your dev setup?

#devstr

BudaBit is coming along nicely, will start more activities for all the freedom tech devs out there!

If you want to set up your own community on any relay (not like nip29) with just a few clicks, take a look at how BudaBit communities work:

https://budabit.club/community-guide

In the future I will implement optional server side enforcement but I think it should be super easy to start a public moderated group.

Why are BudaBit groups unique?

• Technical focus (tight nostr-git integration)
• Fine-grained moderation enabled by content sections
• Community-first web of trust
• Curate Repos, Code Snippets and Smart widget extensions into your groups
• Run and recommend infrastructure as a group admin: Relay, blossom media, grasp server, ecash mint, email alert service, possibly more in the future
• Select your service providers based on your community memberships and community-first #wot

Join to learn more or talk about freedom tech:

https://budabit.club

One of the best ways to proliferate nostr and bitcoin today is how any kind of infrastructure service can be repackaged to just work with #wot and bitcoin based micropayments instead of unsustainable fiat and rate limiting strategies.

I don't think platforms complain because they have a hard time to scale services. They have bad incentives because they want to offer services the wrong way: Unsustainably cheap, to then monopolize or upsell sth on the backend. In the age of agents this model doesn't work so they suffer.

I think only freedom tech solves this problem at the root

The "Uncle Jim" model looks like a pretty dumb idea looking back.

I never got to it, I was always uncomfortable with this model. Perhaps it's for a very narrow group of people.

I'm not one if them.

So I just created a website that is pure PoW to complete and directed everyone interested towards that. A good decision looking back.

I start it along the lines of "self custody is hard whatever anyone told you. It requires enduring effort."

The "AnYOne Can wriTE dOWn 12 wORds" crew should be ashamed. The "here's my 15 steps tutorial" people should be ashamed.

And we need to rethink all of this really hard.

I love relays. But I love keys more. If the app is about discovering relays first and keys/accounts second, I don't like that. Bootstrapping is okay of course but we need to fan out based on keys.

#BudaBit is hardcoding a default ncommunity which is a pubkey for a community with relay hints where its definition event is. This is a default entrypoint. There are indexer relays as well but they are not strictly needed. Even the default ncommunity can be avoided if you know another community you can just search it.

Even outbox model (nip65) is optional with the community-first model because everything is published to your communities as well.

I like this model it simplifies much of the complexity of nostr.

#BudaBit communities can offer all kinds of services to their members :

• Blossom media servers
• Grasp git servers
• CI in the future
• Community relay as DM inbox
• Email alert service -... Many more perhaps in the future

Users choose their preferences based on their community memberships. Communities can protect services based on membership whitelists but BudaBit will only offer options where user is a member at least.

Communities will eventually charge for services or introduce some business model to stay sustainable. They have incentives to provide good quality. They might advertise services they themselves are proxying to the user from a reliable provider.

Many possible solutions. The overarching theme is that platforms are broken down into communities and services: An open market driven by organic trust and authentic connections.

Everyone wins.

#community #communikeys

Codeberg started a witch-hunt against LLM-generated software:

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

" As we want to center on human collaboration, we will not actively support or engage in the creation of LLMs and will not put our limited resources to use for storing single-use software that would pollute our FLOSS commons. "

The article goes on and on about how agents make open source worse. I don't think this is the case. I think they make it much better for those who have the right perspective.

That is, the free market capitalist view of Nostr, not the socialist view of "free of charge".

The fundamental error they make is complaining about people writing more software and taking advantage of their "free" resources rather than embracing the new paradigm and the creative flourishing that AI means, and riding the wave.

Nothing prevents them from charging for their services in a smart per usage way. They have a good momentum now that GitHub has suffered so much reputation losses. They could be smart and charge fees while letting some people to apply for free quotas. The business opportunities are endless. They could become sustainable without begging for donations and be on top of the trend.

No. Let's not make money. Instead burn our resources on hunting down software projects that use LLM. This is pure socialism.

Seems like we need Nostr more than ever. The spirit of nostr is "make everything an open market where the best providers win". This is only achievable by embracing the new radically turbulent paradigm, and use bitcoin and web of trust to install much needed limitations. This is the freedom market rather than "free" masquerading as oppressive. Nothing comes closer to achieving the freedom market driven internet than Nostr.

Projects like #BudaBit and #GitWorkshop embody this in my opinion.

Keep building, keep shipping!

Throwback:

Reminds me of how EU pushed chat control by requiring majority vote AGAINST it:

"No consensus against my contentious dangerous fork..." Right. When this guy learns about just how big of a consensus there is against this fork, it will be a rude awakening. But I think they know.

At this point if you don't understand why bip110 doesn't work and is nothing else than religious dogmatism, you have surrounded yourself with cultish people.

When Spark and Ark zaps? ;)

Depending on closed platforms will never pay off.

People expect a baseline convenience with any product though and freedom tech is no exception. There is nothing holding us back to design our apps with pragmatic defaults.

That is not centralization but caring for users.

Nostr is the real free market for apps and services. The one's not caring enough will be weeded out. Bullish on that sentiment.

#BudaBit has a plugin system that has a built-in market for plugins thanks to nostr but there is another twist: BudaBit is community-first so plugin discovery works with community-focused web of trust and curation. Each community can declare its trusted plugins and you can develop extensions that are aware of the specific moderation rules of your community. E.g. this home page bound 'featured community event' widget can only be edited by a moderator of the BudaBit group:

The repo of this plugin is curated into the community repo collection for anyone to inspect:

This is the power of community curation and discovery. #communikey

It's so tiring to argue on definitions. We need to focus more on solutions to problems.

No perfect solution of course but we improve current solutions by understanding the world better and introduce more desirable tradeoffs.

Progress relies on more on the practical than the abstract. Both matter but we tend to overtheorize nowadays I think.

Am I missing something here what do yall think?

#asknostr #gitvianostr #ngit #devstr

Gradually then...

many have moved to forgejo / Codeberg for the forge and CI e.g. Zig and Ghostty I think. Nostr-git should work better for a public facing open project though, at least in the long run.

If you want to experiment with a moderated social development experience I am keen to hear feedback on #BudaBit :

https://budabit.org

We plan to roll out CI over nostr soon, each community providing for their members for free or for ecash. Then releases signed with nostr keys.

#gitvianostr

Gotta love setting repos free from Github:

#gitvianostr #budabit

I was listening to Presidio if you want to check out a Discord - Github replacement on nostr take a look at:

https://budabit.org

BudaBit has community features like Chat rooms, Forum threads, calendar events and community-fundraising, with deeply integrated nostr-native git collaboration and sophisticated content-level moderation features.

You can click through in minutes to create your own test group (use a dedicated test keypair) or visit the budabit group.

We have been polishing this project for some time now for open source developer communities wanting more freedom from platforms like Discord Slack or Github. Soon nostr-based CI coming too.

We deserve sovereign software to develop freedom tech based fully on open protocols. #gitvianostr

"Social media" was invented eons ago. Panem et circenses, bread and circus of the Roman era. Its purpose has always been to distract the masses from important topics possibly questioning the authority of the time.

This way they could effectively control the population with a small circle of rulers. It relies on the fact that people act differently in masses, they blend into the collective consciousness because it feels like we're part of the group and part of something important.

It's actually a powerful way to co-opt real communities into a mass of sheep with convenience and entertainment. In today's mass societies this is even further enhanced with technology.

As we fell for traps of the state co-opting all important aspects of society, social media is just another arm of the state to keep us controlled. "Decentralization of social media" is an oxymoron. It will never happen. People love to go to the circus everyone else does, they don't want to ne left out of the gossiping.

PSA: Your identity doesn't matter in social media, only the narrative of the mass collective matters. In short, you don't matter. Period.

If we ever going to challenge the state and do real grassroots adoption of nostr, it's going to be in strong communities forming a network.

Thinking that cryptography applied to social media will somehow decentralize it is like believing that if we create a bunch of empty stadiums and keep the gates of circus maximus open then people will somehow listen to it and spread out. You have to be delusional to think this is ever going to happen.

People in the empty arenas are just sobering up to this fact, that is alright. I have no objections to entertainment, not even convenience on its own.

I just hope some of us learned a lesson and can move on to doing real cypherpunk grassroot stuff instead of this farce.

#BudaBit is coming nicely together:

• Create repos on any platform or forge, control on nostr. One primary remote, any number of mirrors, automatic fallback, health checks and backfilling
• Import repos: Import with or without the social data: PRs, issues, comments. Get started easily
• Full fledged repo browsing and collaboration
• Your community, your fine-grained rules: Add new members and moderators or create forms to fill in.
• Event or person moderation, reporting to moderators for review
• Rooms, Forum threads, Calendar events
• Community-first Web of trust and discovery -... And much more!

However I am going to increasingly put more effort into building BudaBit the community in physical as well as in Cyberspace rather than spending most of my time with development as it is now.

We must build the future in meatspace just as much, and now that this is usable enough we need to fill it with people who care. Care for freedom and the future of freedom tech. I will strive to nurture this ecosystem through running my own community and help others run theirs.

So reach out if you're building sth interesting and want to be part of this new community-driven development experience, or want to start your own group! Share with people who are eager to jump into the wilderness to leave the big tech dependence behind.

Cheers

https://keepandroidopen.org/

Ever since I started designing #SatShoot back in 2023 I've been thinking about how markets come alive and what makes them flourish from first principles.

All I saw back then is that most commerce was happening on big corporate platforms whether it be digital or physical products. Amazon. Ebay. Facebook Marketplace. Etsy. Fiverr. Upwork. And probably dozens more.

I was not satisfied with this in the least: I myself ran a business on Shopify for a while so I had hands on experience what it means to be on the small merchant side of these platforms. Constant grinding on the latest algos, trying to manage multiple distribution and advertising channels, while trying to make a new and exciting product that stands out. It's almost impossible to keep up.

But anytime someone came up to our shop we provided an excellent customer experience, and we had good relationships with a couple of important figures in our industry. They spread the word around. This contributed to most of our sales and recognition.

• NOT the algo
• NOT the shiny Shopify theme with optimized SEO
• NOT that new Facebook campaign that had X amount of impressions and "funneled" people in. Sorry guys but this is a fucking myth and you better face the fact that these platforms don't want you to succeed. They want to milk you and your connections and your ideas and innovations as long as they can, then throw you away.

How to break the network effects of these fiat platforms? The answer is very simple but not easy at all: We must recreate bottom-up organic markets from grassroots communities based on authentic relationships.

NO platform will do this. NO politician can make this happen. NO social media viral bullshit circus will help you. It might give you the dopamine hit of 15-minutes fame then scam you into building your life on their walled garden.

Nostr can achieve this but not by default: If you think technology will bring you salvation on its own you will be sorely mistaken and disappointed.

It's always the people. The ones who care. The thousand true fans. YOUR thousand true fans. Not the number of clicks, shares, impressions, and views.

Nostr has the right elements to build on but currently it still lacks authentic connections and grassroots communities. It's fun to shitpost memes and fight over petty protocol minutiae but who's going to put in real effort to make real communities happen? We're still playing the game of big tech overlords until we do.

Individuals make communities that form markets. There's no other way.

Want to build your own sovereign community around your software project? Tired of having to use GitHub with a separate set of social tools like Discord, Telegram or Matrix?

Take a look at

https://budabit.org

BudaBit takes a community-first approach to software development unifying public collaboration with deep nostr-git integration and community-curation as a first-class feature:

• Create and manage Git Repos existing on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea/Forgejo and self-hosted servers. Import your existing ones with ease! Keep projects mirrored on multiple servers powered by Nostr nip34!
• Code browsing, Issues and PR workflow
• Full-fledged Moderation UX with fine-grained content-scoped permissions
• Chat rooms, Forum Threads, Event Calendar and Fundraiser goals. Everything to keep your contributors and fans engaged! Get funding support from the thousand true fans and reward them with your own bespoke badges!
• The community can curate important Repos and code snippets to its own collections. Admin and moderators can grant access to members to distribute the effort
• Running Community infrastructure is optional but a good opportunity to monetize your efforts with a paid #blossom server, relay or git remote
• No special relay needed like with NIP29 groups!

... Soon Nostr-based CI! Anyone will be able to offer CI via nostr offering it free for selected people or for #Cashu ecash!

There's no real reason to stay locked into platforms now! Join the developer community network, running exclusively on Open Protocols!

#openprotocoldevelopment #opd #BudaBit

Creating communities with content-level moderation and curation options is really hard. But I do think it is worth the effort because your role in the group as a member or moderator actually matters and comes with responsibilities. Mirrors real life so much better! If you want to see how real communities are made have a look at https://budabit.club.

Peek in the BudaBit community or create your own test group to witness what I mean.

Feedback appreciated! #budabit

A platform is highly stable but very much trusted to one entity. Freedom tech is an attempt to introduce multiple user-facing entities to solve the same user need: A marketplace app can offer remote signing, relay choices, ecash mints, Lightning services and blossom servers for media - none of those he is responsible for. This reduces stability but offers optionality - more freedom.

The key is designing a system that is flexible but stable enough. The missing piece in Nostr to become usable freedom tech is communities.

They are pillars of stabilization without capturing the user in a platform that packages everything into one product.

Communities are not faceless companies and provide a much stronger model for nostr to not be a completely chaotic mess neither a platform.

Look at the client app you are using right now: Try to count how many pieces it contains that you use directly. You can ask your agent if the source code is available.

And then count how many people you actually exchanged words or messages with, that are responsible for those pieces.

The number of user-facing entites a solution contains has a practical minimum and maximum.

I cannot call Freedom tech where this entity number is one. That is a platform. But usable software has an upper limit as well and this is something we still have to explore.

Software following protocols like Nostr can increase this number and still be usable. They are "APIs over APIs". But realistically we can hardly agree globally about almost anything and the NIPs repo is the proof of that.

A community bundles the choices of the leader - someone who truly cares and has taste. They reduce the burden of choice in freedom tech. This models nature best and I can hardly imagine "sovereign identities" without any community association at this point. Not even for communities. They can form relationships with others as well, and they should.

Cryptography doesn't eliminate the need for trust. It merely lowers the cost of verification. It's a huge difference.

Some people think they can somehow completely eliminate the need for trust once their new cryptographic scheme will prove sound or their new system be implemented.

It's a red herring. If you take for granted that there are no perfect solutions just tradeoffs, you will design it right because you know you must distribute trust in the system somewhere.

In other words: verification has a cost, and in real life you always have oracles asserting things you cannot fully verify. We live in a fundamentally uncertain world.

What we can do is accept some fundamental limitations and get the most out of the rest.

Shipping software or seeking interesting technical conversations rather than a doomsrcoll experience?

Now is the time to join or create your own moderated sovereign community, just a few clicks:

https://budabit.org

#grownostr #devstr #communikeys

cc

nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8g2lcy6q

We have been polishing community UX for a while now, and I can say #BudaBit is already a fully usable community experience with nip34 #gitvianostr deeply integrated.

We'll keep being laser-focused on high-signal easy-to-moderate technical communities so the future won't be locked into walled gardens like github.

Keep shipping.

The problem with social media of any kind is that we by default become politicians in a lose-all game of popularity, spiraling into a race to the bottom.

Nostr can change that but not by trying to fit the protocol to social media. It's the right primitives used in the wrong way and it is destined to fail.

What we need is strong communities forming resilient networks, with easy forking/exit guarantees.

As for specs NIP29 and 72 were close but not quite there. I am betting hard on #communikeys from now on designed by

, slightly tweaked and extended to my taste. The most important primitives are in place, now testing moderation features and adjusting #BudaBit to this spec. You can already start a community at https://budabit.club to or look at the BudaBit community: ncommunity://0a8ecba4868c13e1e84cc5cb58c02c1fd0880d9e5a25a5050ee96ad8a166d7c8?relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.primal.net%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fnos.lol%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Fbudabit.nostr1.com%2F&relay=wss%3A%2F%2Frelay.damus.io%2F

Package managers and platforms getting rekt over and over again.

The "Trusted third parties are security holes" mantra playing out.

But what can we do? Ditching these big platforms and service providers would leave a big hole for the ecosystem. The classic issue of getting addicted to something and suddenly realizing that cold turkey is really painful.

This is true on so many levels, not just software engineering. Living in big cities, sending our children to state-licensed schools, buying food in supermarkets.

Platforms. Faceless services. Monolith companies. Too many layers of abstraction. Too far removed. Of course we will have serious trust issues and backlashes from this system but we can't make a decent alternative based solely on the "Sovereign Individual". It's a myth.

In real life only concerted effort makes substantial changes in the way we do things. Satoshi had like a thousand serious bugs in Bitcoin when he released it. It was a genius design. But it needed years of polish from hundreds of people in the community to make this usable today. And still does.

The missing layer has always been the community. Those dozens or at most hundreds of ride or dies.

These Communities can form a network that produces proper liquid markets and a culture without the central points of failure and the chaotic mess of what it means to do this all by yourself.

Sovereign Individuals don't exist. Tyranny is terrible but it's the default. Community networks is the antidote. It's the model of #BudaBit

I like nutzaps because:

1. Better verification assuming the mint is widely trusted - > reputation builds up
2. Still some degree of plausible deniability: You could say ecash doesn't equal real money, it's an IOU (not a lawyer)
3. No peel-chain type of privacy leak like with Bitcoin
4. More stable from a developer standpoint because there is no third party involved in the publishing of the zap receipt like with LN zaps
5. Funny name

LN zaps:

• Less verifiable probably due to random LN nodes posting the zap receipt
• Worse stability of receipt structure : it is third party publishing with whatever tags they want. You can just propose the event as a client app
• Better deniability due to the above

Onchain:

• Very strong verifiability
• Privacy ramifications most users can't calculate beforehand
• Future fees and waiting times if bitcoin succeeds

Most use a custodian LN wallet (99.9%) anyway and there's really no way to abstract away the privacy consequences of onchain so ecash is my winner.

The new GitHub will not be another platform.

It will be a paradigm shift: The Community Network model.

Platforms have easy onboarding but are walled gardens destined to rot. The current model of Nostr apps is Chaos As a Service, or a fallback to platform behavior with global services and hardcoded relays. It's the right ingredients but not the right model. We can do better:

The missing layer is communities. Communities on nostr are neither tyranny nor chaos. If done well they are they cornerstones of a new way to exist on the internet.

They can provide essential infrastructure and they are the trusted entrypoint to nostr. Not a faceless app, and not a server. Leaders caring for their groups.

The network of these provides a distributed yet consistent system overall.

Not giant metropolitan cities and not weak scattered villages. City states. More later.

The exodus from GitHub has begun.

People are complaining: "Again, a platform that we used to build our reputation and discover new stuff and make high-stakes decisions has rugpulled us..."

But the people are looking for the next GitHub not realizing what it truly was:

• Hosting
• Team Collaboration
• Community - broader exploration and interactions beyond the team

The next "GitHub" should be separate services / apps / projects and sharing identities and important metadata formats.

Nostr has the most clean-cut separation and the best design long-term I believe. But it makes all of these aspects their own marketplaces (and even more like CI) and those take a lot of time and effort to bootstrap.

Will #gitvianostr succeed? I am not sure but in times like this we have a chance to take a step forward.

Both AI users and providers will learn the hard way how subscription hell works. It will hit both ways and it will be painful.

For us, it's another lesson how getting away from reality has serious ramifications.

For Anthropic and OpenAI it might just be too late though.