Twitter co-founder Rabble talks Nostr and other st

So, Rable, one of the most exciting things for me, for someone who's been involved in Ostarve quite a while, is coming to this conference in Ostarica, and then meeting people such as yourself, who I sort of see as a very legit person, has done a lot of things in the past. But some people might not know what you've worked on in the past, so could you

just give a brief explanation to who you are and what you've worked on? Sure, so I'm Rable, I'm a software developer and hacker, and I was part of the team that created Twitter, and I hired Jack into the company and provided the SMS parts, and the telephony parts that became Twitter. And since then, I've spent time at a working at Yahoo with different product innovations at

the MIT Media Lab, and I always wanted to revive the company. I've been a very open protocol decentralized dream of Twitter that we had in the first few years that was lost. And so, I've been very interested in emerging protocols because I've tried everyone, and I tried to figure out what worked, and what made them successful, both the technology and the people, and that's how I

got excited about Ostar. Nice, because you had a project you've recently been working on, why are you using Scullbot? Yeah, for a few years. I've been working on Scullbot for the last four years, actually. Secure Scullbot is a peer-to-peer decentralized offline first social media protocol, and it's one of the inspirations for Noster, but it changes some things that caused it not to take off. So Scullbot

is entirely immutable, and you assign the entire chain. So in Scullbot, you can't use multi-device, and you can't delete, and you have to directly connect to people. So, I've been working on Scullbot, and I've been working on the software, and I've been working on the software, and I've been working on it. Because they would just see it as a Bitcoin project. And although it's been something

we should develop by Bitcoiners, I think it's important that Bitcoin or Mr. has become too entangled, personally, I feel, it should be too entangled. I mean, for some applications, it definitely makes sense with lightning network, with micro-payments. But yeah, it's something we did to my heart as well, that Noster is its stand-alone thing, and then Bitcoin can complement it. But with your software, I mean, how

long have you been implementing Noster instead of Scullbot in the back end? So, I saw, first saw stuff on Noster. People on Scullbot were discussing Noster about a year ago. And because people using Scullbot are interested in decentralized open protocols. But it was one of many protocols. And then in October, before Elon Musk took over, I went back to our team, and we have a small

startup building decentralized social networks. And then I went back to the team at Planger, and I said, there's something interesting in Noster. And maybe we should look at it more seriously. Then, Noster blew up. And got a lot of attention. And Jack got excited about it. Which I thought was interesting because I've been involved with the Blue Sky Project since before it was announced. And we

did a serious evaluation in December about Noster Blue Sky Project. The Blue Sky Scullbot, how does it work? In January, we produced an article analyzing, from a technical perspective, the pluses and minuses of Scullbot and Noster. And then we decided to pivot, ramp down our development of Scullbot apps, and build a new Noster app as an experiment. And that's proved to be a very successful experiment.

And so now we pivoted to building on Noster. And I mean, is that something of a bonus contention with them that you're now working on Noster stuff? Is a competition from, because I mean, that's got a well established decentralized protocol for communication. But it is kind of slow. And there is definitely a Scullbot community, isn't there? How are they taking that? So the interesting thing is

the Scullbot community has all of the developers of the major Scullbot apps have come to the conclusion that Scullbot has actually reached the, it's useful as a social network, and it's useful as a community. But it needs a new version. So what's happening now in Scullbot is the apps by various different developers are going in new more of a maintenance mode. The community is continuing. And

we're all going and looking at new protocols and new stuff. And so there is a project by Andres Dalz, who created many of us to create a Scullbot 2.0, which includes many ideas from Noster. And some Scullbot ideas. And so what's happened in Scullbot is like, we learned a lot. We innovated a lot. Scullbot's first version comes from 2012. And the world has changed. And so

Scullbot needed a non backwards compatible fork. And so when we said, oh, we're going to stop doing Scullbot development and work on Noster, there was disappointment. But also the Scullbot communities like now's the time to build new stuff. So there wasn't a lot of super negative backlash. Yeah, I mean, I know that the world needs a Twitter platform. Yeah, basically. So and that's something which you

couldn't build on Scullbot. No, because Scullbot is one author described it as slow social media. Yeah, yeah. Which is fine. And a lot of people enjoy it for what it is. But yeah, like with what's been happening with Twitter, like, clearly the world needs new Twitter and Noster's the way to go. And that's nice. They're embracing new technologies, new approaches. And then could probably incorporate that

into Scullbot. And then keep that project moving and progressing as well as good to hear. So have you enjoyed the conference? This Noster, this Noster, this conference has been fantastic. It's amazing. It's amazing when you first get a community of people together who've been connecting online and a new project. And they all meet for the first time. It reminds me of the first Ruby on Rails

conference, where we've been talking on IRC and we've been building cool stuff. But we never met in person. And you know, that Ruby on Rails conference, we were all just hackers. And we were all collaborating. But Tobias Lucas, Lucas from who created Shopify was there. The GitHub founders were all there. A ton of other people went on to build platforms and software that changed the world.

I remember I was speaking to your friend about this, who attended those first Ruby meetups. And he was saying it was like a dozen people in the room. And it was those people who went on to build these platforms, show everyone uses. And I think sometimes you get a moment in time where there's lots of people with a shared interest. And then they meet in a

sort of, they have a meeting or a meetup or a conference in a shared meet space. And then it's almost like they they found in wood. They meet. And then there's this huge explosion. There's kind of an explosion of innovation. And we had it with the lightning network, CAC days, which the full-mo team in Berlin organized. And I went to the first hack day. In fact,

it was the first Bitcoin conference I think I went to. And it was the exact same energy. It was lots of, very enthusiastic, very clever people with a bunch of amazing ideas, which they could work off for the next few years. I don't have to come up with any other ideas. And you still come out with a bunch of cool projects. So yeah, that energy, it

happens rarely. But I think maybe your eyes, like the birth of a, so I suppose Ruby was younger that time. Ruby was young and Ruby on rails was considered a radical sort of, punk disestablishment, crazy way to build web application. Which now Ruby on rails is a very legacy way of building heavy web applications. But at the time, why was this so pointless? Because all it

was doing was, meaning, speed didn't have to replicate work, or less, wasn't it? Yes, but that went against all the ideology of Java. So Java was the dominant way of the right way of doing programming and web development, where you would write out your getters and setters, and everything was explicit and very long form. And you didn't do any trickery or magic. And it took forever

to program because you had to write thousands of lines of code. And the only way to... You can watch a world full on Java, we still be. Well, the Java world believed that the only good interchange format was XML. So, you know, we have JSON today because of Ruby on rails and JavaScript frameworks, making that like so easy. Because we were throwing all the rules out.

And I feel like today, we're doing something similar. Like, what if there's a way to recombine these things in a radically simpler way that makes it easy to innovate and to experiment? That's why there are like 100 Noster clients. Yeah. And the permission for this development side of Noster is something that I'm really interested in. Because, you know, we made our little signing device, and it

took us four days of hacking and we had a little signing device for Noster. And then I think how hard would that be to create for something like Twitter? But Twitter was your baby, wasn't it? It was something you were heavily involved in. So, how does it feel that it went the way it did? And early on in Twitter, did you expect that it could happen?

Or... Do you think there would be anything back then you could have done to prevent it going the way it did? I mean, it's still a great platform, of course. But just maybe too dependent upon it. It owns the platform, I think. So, Twitter is near and dear to my heart. I feel incredibly lucky to be in the room, part of the team that figured out

and created it. It's fun to tell that story. What people don't realize is that like everybody thought we were stupid. Like everybody thought Twitter was the most ass-in-eign stupid social media platform and that we were dumb to build it because we'd been working on podcasting before that. Then people started using it. And it was like, well, maybe we weren't so stupid. But... That was my exact

Twitter experience. For years, I kind of part of using Twitter. And I thought, was it stupid hashtag? And it was like... I don't know, like it's a version too, because it seemed so counterintuitive to what I had used before. But then when I did use it, I was like, well, this is really easy. It doesn't require much time in a day. And you have one profound

thought a day and put that on Twitter and then, you know, people like it. You get good feedback and it's a nice way to kind of share ideas. Yeah, so people loved it or hated it. And those who loved it got super addicted. I mean, I remember at one point that we're 100 active users on Twitter. And there were 100,000 tweets delivered per month. And that's

crazy. And like it never had happened before. But we thought of Twitter. We were developers. And so the Twitter API just sort of came naturally. The Twitter bot so that you could chat via Twitter came naturally. And then we're like, well, we had a Twitter bot that let you interact with it with Jabber, like the XMPP clients. What if instead of a user doing that, you

could build applications on top of that. And so we had a rest API, but we also were really into Jabber. And then what if we use that to sync between systems? So at one point in 2007, 2008, Twitter was federated. Federated on an open protocol. So you could... You could... You could post on JaiKoop and then follow someone on Twitter and vice versa. But Twitter was

growing very, very quickly. Twitter did not have a business model. That was the joke. Biz Stone is the founder of Twitter and he doesn't... They don't have a business model. And XMPP wasn't the right choice. And you know, the irony is, I gave a talk at Oskon in 2007 where I explained how we were going to federate Twitter and how we could build federated protocols on

Jabber. And Roy Felding, who wrote the paper that became REST and like all West, West, Westful web services come from this stuff, you basically got up and said that we were wrong. And that we were a mistake and we were choosing the wrong technical path. And then Brad Fitzpatrick, who created Memcash and Live Journal, also got up and said we were wrong. And we were wrong.

Like XMPP fell apart. Eventually, Google and others who were using XMPP as Open Chat Protocols walked away. And the XMPP community had to rewrite into Matrix. So choosing the wrong technical substrates and protocols doomed it. And there was no indication that the REST stuff would work. Like there was no... There was no... There was enterprise pub sub. But there was no... Like... Open pub subsystems, web

hooks, things like that. And so Twitter lost its openness. And a lot of us in the early days mourned that loss. The rest of the world didn't even know what had happened. But we kept looking for ways to build that open alternative. Oh, so it was at that loss when the Blue Sky Initiative kind of started to ruin... No, no. So this loss happened when... You

know... I took over a CEO of Twitter. This is back in 2009, 2010. And then we had the Open APIs and they started party Twitter apps. And then that went away in 2012. And then when Jack came back as CEO, he revived the Twitter developer conferences and tried to bring it back and made Twitter survive. But it still wasn't there. And then Mike Nasnik wrote this

article, Protocols Over Platforms, where he says... The Web 2.0 companies ended up taking what should have been open protocols and made them into closed platforms. And so the solution going forward is to revive this. And that got larger attention. And so... There have been a group of us working on this before that article. But that article was super important. And that's what was enough, including me

going back to Jack and saying, no, no, this needs to be an open protocol. I'm building this thing on Scuttle. But... And we had discussions about whether or not Twitter would invest in Scuttle. And the decision was that Scuttle wasn't the right platform, but the Twitter should spin off a project that became Blue Sky to build an open protocol vision. And sort of... There's like, revive

the dream of the revolution that... It had gone wrong. So... If it was kind of felt kind of intuitive that you would be having a business... Twitter. And then you would create a protocol... And then you would have a Blue Sky or something that would come out of Blue Sky. We should then replace Twitter. So what you're actually saying is... It was the way in which

to build the tools... So you could put them under the East Bank Twitter and have Twitter run top of it. Yes. So Twitter was supposed to be a Blue Sky client. I see. And then Twitter was going to use all of its expertise in spam detection and advertising market, algorithms on feeds, user recommendations, media hosting... There's a payment infrastructure there. They were going to use all

that as part of the open Blue Sky ecosystem. And the argument would be that... Twitter shouldn't be... The only fish in a small pond. But rather... Twitter should be... The creators of the ocean... And have many businesses within it. And many other people could do business within that space. And Elon said that it's that's what he was going to do. That's... I think the... The promise

wasn't there. That was the promise. There was two options. Headsun people were going to come in and take over Twitter... Or... Elon could take it over. And if the headsun people had taken over... Twitter was going to have to do layoffs... And it would have been bad. And Elon said he wanted it open. He wanted to open source it. He wanted to do this open thing.

And... Ever that neither didn't happen. That's what happens. Maybe he knows. And he took over and no one expected him to handle it so poorly. That it's almost as if you have to ask... Was he trying to torpedo the company... And create space for outside alternatives? Yeah. Yeah. He does feel that way. So I mean, you can just put it on a local level. You have

a thriving successful restaurant. And then someone buys it. They radically change it. And he said, why did you buy that restaurant? You could have just made a new restaurant. If you didn't want that restaurant, don't buy it. And that's kind of I feel with Twitter. It's a very functional, great platform. Buy it. Don't do anything revolutionary. Just slowly, slowly. Maybe start implementing some things. But try

and keep it as similar to its old state that it was as you take it forward. Yeah. It's a great shame. Because I love Twitter. And maybe even though we weren't aware... I always knew that Jack Dorsey from quite early on that Jack Dorsey was like a legit dude. And he was in it because of the technology. He podcasts with him or something. And I remember

thinking... I remember he was very impressed with him. And he used to kind of hack a guy, you know, an interest in the technology. But maybe that energy... You guys had in the back end while you were building this Twitter. Maybe that managed to fill to the internet. Because I found that Twitter was the platform for people who also shared that energy. Twitter... Twitter... Even though

it ended up being a closed centralized platform embodied an open nature. At the company when it was founded, there was a blurry line about who was an employee. Like this was before widespread co-working spaces. And all sorts of people would just come hang out and work from our office. And they would work on Twitter. And they would work on Odeo. And then they would go back

and be like, you know, is this guy Dunston working for us? No. Like his day job is redesigning the Apple.com homepage. But he's bored with that. So he works... Yeah, he works at your office. And there were lots and lots of people like that. And that led to a culture that valued the outside and valued the community. So the word tweet... Hashtags, app replies, retweets, tweet

streams... Inline images, inline video, short links... Every search... Everything we think of, trending topics... Everything we think of as Twitter... It was all invented by the users in the developer community. And then Twitter supported it. So all Twitter had to do to be innovative was... Like convene the space. Convee the space. Respect the users. And that's why it felt like Twitter didn't feel like their thing.

Twitter felt like our thing. Yeah, yeah. It didn't feel like you were using some sort of corporate platform. It felt like Twitter was like a whole new thing. It felt like you were... It felt like you were using something fairly open. Which I said to think about a lot of the Bitcoin community found at home on Twitter. Absolutely. Thousands of communities found homes at home. Oh,

yeah, absolutely. And that was also great about Twitter. Because I think it is important that when you're using a kind of universal platform that you can still enjoy space with people who share, have shared interests, you know, or interest in technology or into or interested in whatever. But do you think that same experience could be achieved in NOSTA where... people can find each other in that

global feed. And you can build up those kind of communities. Because if you... If you're part of certain communities, then your Twitter will... That's why it will be just filled with those people. And that will be your experience. So it's like a custom platform for your community, you know. Yeah. So I don't... I don't think the global feed will continue to work in NOSTA as something

particularly useful. No. And I don't think it works now. No, it just happens that to be that we're... It used to work like four months ago. Five months ago when there were... Thousands of people using NOSTA. The global feed was super important and super useful. But once they've become hundreds of thousands of people, the global feed isn't that useful. But that's part of what worked in

Twitter too. Because you had the people you followed. But someone who you aren't following could reply. And it had this sort of semi-open nature. It wasn't closed groups like Facebook groups or like email lists. It was semi-open. And I could post something and... And I don't have to see your posts. I can only see the replies. But if I put the username at the beginning, that

only the people who we see in common see the post. So it had... I never really knew how that worked. I always thought it was the only person I was talking about would see the post. That's how Mastodon works. But in Twitter, when you put the app reply at the beginning, it's a super subtle feature. Then the only people who see the post are the people

that we know in common. And so it creates super easy casual intimacy. And so we still need to figure out how that... how to recreate that aspect in NOSTA. But I think that... I think we can solve these problems. I think we can solve the problems of spam. I think we can solve the problems of... Like someone coming from truth social and someone coming from Black

Lives Matter and being able to use the space to communicate with their own communities. semi-open, so like there are permeable boundaries, but also where the norms of speech and the norms of behavior for those different communities. For sex workers and church groups can be maintained. So we need to build both openness and the ability for communities of people to say, this is our community. I think

this is important. I mean, so we live in a world... where the algorithms are generally not good for us as individuals. But in order for NOSTA to work and have a similar Twitter experience to Twitter, we do need some form of algorithm to filter information. So what sort of proposals... Have you got any proposals on how... that you could best do that in a global feed?

I think... We spoke about... Was it you guys spoke to about... Just having just a few degrees of separation. So the NOSTA app that I've built knows that social. Has that by default. It's like you join, you follow people, you find people, and your primary feed is those posts. And then we have an Explore tab, which is like the global feed. But you... We don't lock

the doors on you, but we do give you doors and windows so that you can have a sense of space. And I think that relays and future private groups and other things like that are going to let people choose to set up their own boundaries. And choose to decide where the groups are and things like that. And choose to empower them to decide. Well, that's just

the same. A science of censorship in NOSTA is that it's not that we don't have censorship, but it's a user-driven censorship. If you don't want to go to certain areas... Because censorship when it's a government or a corporation that you have no accountability for, you don't see the rules, that's one thing. But choosing who you're talking to and who hears your conversations and who's getting to

participate, that's... You know, some people say that censorship, but that's also... You like... Governance. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I'm very much in line with that. And I think it's... Like a town has a good analogy. There's some streets which I don't want down there to rough, you know. And that's what we can have in NOSTA. That your world, which you expose yourself to, could be quite

vanilla or it could be... You know, with this interest or that interest. And then it also applies to moderation. You know, if you... I personally would connect to a bunch of very vanilla relays. Because I don't want to see like gross stuff, which is going to, you know, quite squeamish. Whereas some of the people might... They might be a bit more macabre. They might want to

see some gross stuff. So they could connect to a different type of relay. And then if people put anything on there, which is really inappropriate, then it would be up to traditional law enforcement efforts to try and track down the people running those relays and shut them down. But I feel like it's a good model going forward. Because you can't have just a completely unsensit feed.

Yeah. And this, you know, there are some NOSTA folks who want like... Things to be unremovable. And what I tell them is like, secure scuttle, but the protocol... Before this, the data structures are immutable. There's like... There's no way that the protocol can remove stuff. But I think that's a mistake. And the reality is that we live in a world where there are governments that make

laws. And some governments have no restrictions on speech. And some only make things like child pornography illegal. Others restrict things like Nazi symbols and discussions. Others, you know, are super conservative about sex or insulting the king. In Thailand, you can't insult the king. So users of NOSTA who live in Thailand, they need to be able to use this where they're not hosting jokes about putting themselves

at risk inadvertently. Yeah, that's true. Because all of a sudden they're sharing jokes about the king of Thailand. I couldn't care less if you joke about the king of Thailand. The point being that if they wanted to, they could easily collect a relay where they could. Yeah. If they want to take that risk... That's a... They should go for their civil disobedience and make fun of

the king. Yeah. Yeah. And nothing's to stop them. But what we need is to empower the autonomy of people and communities to make those decisions themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what it tries to do. It's a model. I like the ephemeral nature of NOS just inherently because... I mean, currently some relay store all the notes. But that couldn't continue forever because when we get lots

of users in NOSTA, there would be big servers. And then how are they going to pay for those servers? Well, they may not turn to an advertising model. And maybe for some users, they would opt into that. But for some other users, they want one advertising model. Maybe they'll collect to a relay where they can pay to have something stored. And I think it leaning towards

ephemeral notes which probably disappear after a period of time because no one's going to store it for you. You always don't feel like that's a bad thing. Like I think one of the... I think it's a really good thing. Yeah. It's one of the things that makes me most excited about NOSTA over Scuttlebutton some of the other protocols is I can set an expiry date on

my posts. So we're going to build a feature where you can go in and say by default, a request that relays stop posting the content after 30 days. Yeah, great. And also on the specific post message, is this a post that I'm asking to stay around forever? Is this one that should only be around for a day? I was thinking the exact same thing. How cool

it would be to have a client where the default is a ephemeral maybe just even two days. Then there are notes will just disappear. But if you have something, like if you're going to put down something which you want recorded and you feel like you want a timestamp door, you want it to last, then there'd be some sort of wave of posting it. And then you'll

be saying, actually, can you keep this one? Yeah, for as long as possible, please. Yeah. And then you keep the one because, like, look at old tweets. Oh, man. In the past, I used to a lot for... I have an idea. I'm pretty sure NOSTA sort of it. I don't want to just get it in there, timestamp it. So later on, when someone else has the

idea and does something, I could say, oh, yeah, I originally had that idea, actually. Thank you very much. So yeah, I think a lot of people used to it like that as a way of recording information time. I used it because Trump was doing detaining kids at the border. Someone was like, oh, you're just complaining because it's Trump. And so I went and I found an

old tweet complaining about what Obama was doing to kids at the border as well. And that was useful. But many times, those old posts are taken out of context and used in a way that's a sort of crowd sort of madness around what it's called cancel culture. And like sometimes, it's massively inappropriate behavior. But sometimes those old messages go after people in ways that don't make

any sense at all. And so we should have the option of just having a tweet. I have a bunch of friends who use services that delete their tweets after 30 days. But they have to do a paid service for that. That's ridiculous, isn't it? I think that one of the issues with Twitter for me was it was trying to simulate kind of a conversational format. So,

you know, short sentences. But yet, stuff was stored in the pub. I'll say something stupid. The next hour I feel bad about it. I might say, it's my friends. I'm sorry about that. And that's how I don't worry. Yesterday, you know, Scott, no one thinks of it. Everyone does that. Humans do that. And then when they're speaking, they speak quite freely. And then when most people,

when they're on Twitter, on platform, they appreciate that the information will be stored forever and there could be accountable for it. They'll be very careful in what they say. So when they publish, it will be well prepared, thought out, thoughtful. And then you get in within that framework, you get someone like Trump, who just says what everything is. And then he feels almost more real. Like,

does he speak? People speak in the pub. You hear people speaking on the street or something? Sure, because he's not protecting. He's not, he's not, he's not caring about how he might be pulled up on some tweet later on. But that then gives them this sort of power that they almost come out of the woodwork as being more real. You know what I mean? And because

authenticity matters. Yeah. Because now we can see so much of each other's lives and so much was going on. And so what was, you know, celebrities used to be at arm's length. And one of the things that Twitter did is it made you feel like you were in the room with them. I used to say that Twitter was useful for writing and sharing things that weren't

important enough to tell your friends when you hung out with them. Yeah. And now Twitter is more important. But it's that sort of, and that's a femoral stuff of like, oh shit, it's raining or in that a beautiful flower. Yeah. Yeah. And then it started to become more, people were more thoughtful and profound when they were tweeting. Yeah. Look at my old tweets or jacks old

tweets. They're like, stupid. They're like, I'm eating lobster. Yeah. So what are their applications for Nostar? Is there any other application? Because we've been working on, in other bits, we've been working on the Nostar market, which is partly had a hand in the beginning of Nostar and the Nostar protocol. The concepts of markets, smart clients, some service, rather than smart service-dom clients. And do you feel

that there will be more growth in the area of other applications in the Nostar infrastructure? Absolutely. My, my, I mean, we're building a social app. The Nostar primary posts are short form non-structured, but there's the ability to do longer form markdown posts. I'm super excited about that. I think that we can build things that are socially collaborative. Like, you can use the RDTs and collaborative, social

scoping a post to make a global personal wiki where your vision of what you see is different from mine, is different from someone else's, but I'll see the post and the comments and the edits from the people in my social sphere and someone far away doesn't do it. So then you don't have the edit wars that exist in Wikipedia. I think if we get it right,

we get to rebuild all social software. We get to rebuild all software on this way in which the servers are just relaying content and the rules of the software are driven by these local databases. Because that's, you know, even if it's just in power, that's if you have a smart server and a dumb client, then the power is in the server. Exactly. And the, and the

server is in the server. The administrative server, well, is this flips and it's the powers with the user. And so I actually think that if it works and we keep doing it, we actually get to replace most software that has multiple people collaborating. And that's huge. Because we replaced most software when we switched to these web browsers that held everything and just gave us the interface

application over JavaScript. And this inverts it and makes it more possible to build social software. Because almost every software, like, is social, like a document editor is social. Now we get to invert that process again. And that is one of these decade long pendulum swings of software between centralization and decentralization that's been going on since the 1950s. So, yes, maybe it's marketplaces and social apps and

wiki things, everything else. But what is, what is Figma for design collaboration or Photoshop overnoster? Or Uber or, you know, dating apps. And we're build, we have so much research into privacy preserving machine learning. And we've now discovered that giving all of our data to a few large companies. But what's worse than the data we're giving them is them getting to decide whether or not we're

connected. Like, you know, Figma could decide that they didn't want you in my design document that I was sharing. And I have no, there's nothing I can do. I think you get, because you get like an intro. They can take your name away. They can take your friends away. Yeah, they have like this interesting and beautiful platform like like Twitter. And with all these great, you

know, aspirations to be open. And then like within Bitcoin, we had local Bitcoin. Very similar when it started. It was just this platform, which was just allowed these peer to peer trading between, you know, someone who wants to buy some Bitcoin and someone who has some Bitcoin. And that's recently gone down, because over the years, it had to become more and more like its users had

less and less freedom. Whereas now, I think someone in the conference sense, we could just build local Bitcoin and so on and off star. And we totally could let you just connect to people. And you can have like a geolocation event type or something. You could just have two people and you connect them. And it's almost like you're now given the tool. This thing which someone

had a great idea to build. Like Twitter, for example, this wonderful idea. But the tooling wasn't quite there. The foundation wasn't quite there, you know. Did you know that Twitter had this thing called annotations that were data tweets that weren't text. And you could do data streams of structured data that was JSON. And that was a text that was attached to tweets that you could see

or invisible ones. And that would have opened up this entire world of social apps. But Twitter decided that they were a media company and that they needed to control the environment in order to sell ads. And the ads were the only viable business model. Elon Musk is trying to figure out whether or not he can alienate all the advertisers so they could survive without ads. So

we had the starts of that. And when there was, you know, one thing people talked here about in Austria is every idea that could be tried will be tried. And that outinnovates any corporation. Oh yeah, the permission list about it's just like the same in free and open source software. You can just build, you can take a project for kit build. And over time, it's inevitably

going to outpace the proprietary system. Absolutely. Even if even if the open source way makes usability harder and everything else, we we we we don't need permission. No. And the protocol is self certifying. Like when when Jay Graber who who runs Blue Sky wrote this great essay called What is Web 3? And she was like cryptocurrency projects and tokens and smart contracts. Those are Web 3

Bitcoin is Web 3. But there also are all these other protocols that are Web 3. Those are protocols that are permissionless and self certifying. So scuttle but no blockchain, no cryptocurrency is a self certifying protocol. Noster. No blockchain, no cryptocurrency. Like you can link references to lightning wallets and transactions, but the protocol operates without it. Which is great for us. Because I think it's self certifying.

And it's permissionless and it's empowering. Yeah. And it's great for us because I think that often people got Bitcoin. So I think that's a great way to get Bitcoin. And it's like, you can fix all these problems with public key crypto. And they would think that they needed to create some blockchain or some, you know, some extra infrastructure, extra complicated infrastructure. Well, the reality was, it's

just that users having access natively to a private key in a public key. And you know, and then we had this whole, you know, new tokens and ICO madness and everything else. And, and, you know, even Bitcoin's price rose all this level and everything else. And then, you know, in some ways, the money funded lots of development and work. And there are some really good tech

projects out there. And Noster uses a bunch of that tech that got developed. So does IPFS. So does a ton of other protocols. But it was a distraction too. And it distracted people away from solving people problems. And instead was solving, how do I make money problems? And so I like that Noster doesn't have a token. In fact, if it had a token or you had

to, if you had to do a payment to use it, I wouldn't use it. I would never have considered using it. And, but the self-certifying nature, the permissionless nature means that you don't have to ask someone else. Twitter early on was permissionless. Did you know this? So the, the first several years of Twitter apps, Twitter has been a huge burden for me. I didn't know idea

if someone was a person or an app. Because there was no distinguishing using Twitter from their restful API or as a web user. Because the web front end connected to the same restful API. And you could either use cookies or you could authenticate with off-basic if the user's using a password. So, in the early days, you didn't have to register an app. You didn't have to

ask permission. Anybody wanted to build on Twitter could, even though the XMP3 thing failed, anyone who wanted to build an app on Twitter could because there was no control around that. And the irony is that OAuth was created for Twitter. Was it really? Yes. It was created by Blankook who was the lead developer on Twitter. He built the API, the app reply, the structure, scaled all

the things first of the years. And he created OAuth based on ideas from flickers, token off, and other things like that. They made it a standard. Because he wanted users to not have to give away their passwords. So, the thing that centralized control and ended up shutting down the open nature of Twitter was meant to empower users so that they didn't have to give these third

parties the app to others. And the same thing we have now with Nosterware, we have to figure out better ways to not hand over NSX and private keys. But, we don't have a server that's got a registry of accepted public keys. And so, because we don't have that and we don't have an app key that we're not inadvertently reintroducing this system of control. And OAuth, which

was supposed to power users, ended up being the central way in which Web 2.0 companies consolidated power. And it's deeply ironic that was created by Blankook as a way of decentralizing power and empowering users. I think it's often the way someone will create a tool out of altruism. And they don't see, I mean, often what we do say in the Bitcoin world, it's like a double-edged

sword. You're making it to bank someone who's on bank, but then in that same, you're empowering some like oligarch or something, to move money without any oversight. And often you just, you don't see the other side of the technology you're building, which is a real shame. But do you think so? That's something I think, to me, Filtnoster, part of the energy and part of why I

think we're all excited about it, it feels like it would be hard for it not to succeed by its momentum, by the amount of projects involved. And by how far, how well it's performed so far, and then by all of its possibilities. Do you see anything, what could possibly happen to stop Nostar, and for it to be corrupted? Is there anything we need to kind of

keep an eye on? Like, is there anything? Oh, there's a bunch of things. So I can't see anything, so. I don't know. So this is a fantastic question. So I don't think Nostar's success is guaranteed in any way. I think Nostar nearly died a couple months ago when there wasn't paid relays. And the relays were by default open and got overwhelmed with spam. That could have

been like, oh, this is just, you know, I think how we handle bridging to the Fediverse, because they're now we're a bunch of activity pub bridges, that's going to be another thing. Like, there's this monster which bridges to truth social. Can we make it so that users who want to see the truth social stuff can see it? And those truth social people can't go around trolling

and silencing other people's speech who don't want to see them. I think if people see Nostar is only a Bitcoin thing, then it will end up in an niche because, you know, lots of people use mines. Lots of people use these, you know, you can get tens of millions of users and not change the world. I think if it's too slow, if the relays aren't acceptable,

I think if we don't address the abuse reporting in a way that Apple and Google like, then there won't be Nostar apps in the App Store and it can't succeed in the same way. So I think I think that there's technical problems. I think they're scaling problems. I think there's a lot of social problems and then there's positioning problems. And the Nostar needs to not be

a Bitcoin or place. Yeah. It needs to be a place where we're, yes, the Bitcoin is there. And yes, they can use lightning. But when you join, most people don't care about Bitcoin. No. They're not finding, they need to find their people. This is my issue with the ZAP thing almost that, I don't know, it's cool when people aren't arguing to join it very much, seeing

the technology applied in such an interesting, innovative way. And actually, you can then think of like, you know, pay world content and stuff which could be on Rostro as well. So it opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities and it lends itself off to technology. But for that, the initial first thing is, if someone thinks about, like, for a Bitcoin Maxion list, what you want

is, actually people who don't care about Bitcoin, to be able to just use it for the transactions and the tips and everything else, and never have to think about it. Never have to understand it. Never have to care about it. And certainly not care about the politics of Bitcoin. So I think that, like, when you open my app, no social, we've actually picked a bunch of

people to show up in the extended, like, extended feed thing that it pre-pulls. And we, you know, we have Jack and Edward Snowden. If you want to be part, he tries to be quite new to the people you've been using. No, we're not neutral at all. We, we specifically are constantly looking across Noster and finding active users who are not Bitcoiners. And have a diversity of

different views and perspectives and stuff. And we put them as, like, suggested followers in there in that extended feed. And then you can choose any relay you want. You can change the settings. Like, it's not locked down. But, and people join. And they're like, oh my God, this is such a different community that when I saw, when I joined Domus, and saw the Domus relay. Which,

like, Will's Domus is great. It's been super important. I respect it. I, you know, I use it every day. But what we wanted to do was help people find their own contacts that they want to do. Their own communities have a privacy-preserving way of saying, who, who do I know who's already on Noster? You know, intersecting Bloom filters or, you know, zero-knowledge proofs, things like that.

So that they're finding other communities. You know, I went to a forum on Black Twitter. And it was a 20 people in a room trying to decide what to happen now that Jack was no longer, and, you know, they're, you know, a management team that was very sympathetic to African Americans. They're so-so community-sync groups. Like, tricky positions. That was, like, before Elon Musk took over, they

had Black people who in senior positions at Twitter. They had access to say, this is a problem. They had people who were working there because they really cared about it. And those people aren't there anymore. And so they've lost their space. And I want them to be able to build their space on Noster, and I want it to not be, you know, rented. I want, you

know, like, one of the things I was saying, I was like, you know, don't pick a new owner. No, don't pick a new owner of your space. Don't pick a new, like, landlord. Build a system that you can be your own landlords, that you can own that space. And so, well, they need to be able to have space by which, like, yes, there are Black-bit coiners.

Yes, there are people who are doing lots of organized in that space. There were, you know, a bunch of Black people here at Noster, but the dominant culture of the folks I was meeting with. Like, they're young like dudes here. And, you know, people need to be able to find themselves. And people really join social networks and social media platforms because of affinity and who's there

there. They don't actually join because of how the software works. Like, people did event organizing on Instagram when Instagram had no event support whatsoever, and wouldn't even show you in a timely way. But that's where their people were. So we need, we need a way in which people can find their people. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, it is a commons. And there is a tragedy of the

commons. So it wants to centralize just as, you know, Bitcoin is a commons, but it tries to centralize over certain ideas and tries to be nuts. Did you know the story of the tragedy? The commons. So the tragedy of commons is the most cited paper in economics. Yes. And it's a parable. It's not like, it's not necessary. You're going to happen. No, no, it doesn't. It,

like, it says it in there. Like, in the paper, this is not based on evidence or research. And it's actually an ideological document that advocates for state or corporate ownership of public spaces. Eleanor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, looked at that paper and said, I'm going to research this subject. And what she found was that there are commons that are

a tragedy. There are ones that fall apart and there are ones that don't work. There are cases in which it doesn't work. But there are actually millions of examples of successful common economic resources. And there are many other examples of the economic resources that are not owned by anyone but are self-managed. And she has this, she's passed away now, but she has this eight characteristics of

a commons that is well managed. And the rules are specific. You have to have permission from the sovereign state or the sovereign power to exist. You have to have the ability to have, you know, transparency and accountability. And the ability to audit other people's work and the ability to have nested sets of rules. And what we have in digital spaces, we have lots of commons. Like,

we built a lot of them. Oh yeah, no, absolutely. And it's a model that works and it's a model that gives us an alternative to the state or simply corporations owning it. Yeah, no, I mean, it's one of the things that drives me towards freedom of resource. Yeah, I know, I know. It's bizarre. It is unimaginable to think of programming at all without open source technology.

And for production, it's something which lends itself very well to being a commons. And like physical production gets a little bit more complicated with cops and stuff. And society on a technological infrastructure that is created and maintained as a commons. Like, so that can't, it's only ever going to impact it surely. Bill Gates in the early 1980s argued hard against the idea of a commons being

viable. Like, he is letters to people about ensuing people about using basic without licenses. And their whole campaign against the free software foundation, everything else, argue that the commons couldn't work and that you had to buy all your libraries and everything else. And that, like, that's done. Like, we can't even think about it. And yet, when we talk about social media commons, or an economic commons

or other things like that, we think, oh, my God, how could that possibly work? When were the very people who are contributing to the largest commons that has existed in human history? So, me is so much of a lefty within the Bitcoin community. Which I've been screaming to, I'm doing the face of Bitcoin, it's forever when they're the Austrian e-contipe. Like, look, you're building a commons.

Like, this is a freedom of association of money commons, and you have access to. Which doesn't mean you don't have businesses and don't make money. No, no, that's absolutely yeah. Like, commons is not anti-capital. No, no, not at all. No, no. You're less likely to have a huge monopoly or corporate. Exactly. You don't have monopoly-rend extraction. But then that's something that's my hardest to conceptualize as

well, that there's different forms of private capital. Yeah. And there's, like, you know, the small to medium enterprise in a town, benefiting its community, and that's a completely different form of capital than some big, huge corporation where the people who run the corporation are detached from the people on the shop floor. So, yeah, no, absolutely. And Nostar, again, itself, there's so many opportunities for very viable

companies to come in and make fortunes, I think. Yeah. If Nostar works, that's how it works. Yeah. And that, that's, I mean, I run a business. We have investors. I'm building on Nostar. Because I want to run services and I want to build software and I want to make money. You know, I, I'm personally, politically, and anti-capitalist anarchist, but I run a business and we exist

in a capitalist system. And I am going to use those resources and... Trying to do business in a nice way. Yeah. Doing a nice way. We're a public benefit corporation. We have accountability to it. We can, we can legally prioritize the environment and our workers and our society equally to the profit, but we don't get to play unless we make profit. Like, we're going to, we're

going to create value and we're going to make profit and we're going to, we're going to make money. And I want other people to be able to make money. And one of the difficulties in Scuttlebutt is it had a bit of a hipster, you know, cooler punk vibe where they were very trusted. They were very distrustful of the idea of making money at all. So it's

very odd for me to say, to go from one protocol to another that are very, very similar. But the ideas about making guzzly business are opposite. Yeah, that's funny. Well, Ravel, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. We really enjoyed the conversation and I'm really excited that there's such not-stop social. I think it's going to be such an important platform and you, you understand

that, you know, it, we shouldn't mingle Bitcoin and not start too much that not start should be its, its own thing. We speak can be a part of absolutely but it's great to hear that that's something we're sure concerned about as well because then you'll, you know, with your platform, it'll, it'll be no-star, you know. Absolutely. And I'm super excited coming out of Nostrica, getting to

meet everyone in person. And I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I don't expect everyone to have, to follow the nips that we write or to use it in this way. But I think, I think, I'm going to be able to do it. That in order for Nostra to succeed, it needs to be open to people like myself and many others to join so that

we can build a much larger world. And I've been very pleasantly surprised at how open, you know, there's been some pushback. But most people have been open to this idea and wanting to build this plural, diverse ecosystem. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, I mean, this is, I think, what blew me away the most about meeting yourself and then from what, you know, interaction I've had with Jack

as well. It's like, these are my people. Like these are the people we would hang out with in a hack day, you know, like a lightning hack day or in like, ask me to Congress, and is in St. Louis, where Jack grew up, he got on a plane that day and flew back to St. Louis and didn't tell any press people and didn't tell any journalists

and just didn't bring any security, anything else. And he just said, I grew up here. I care about this. And he just walked in like people recognized him. And so, you know, Jack can show up to all those black lives matter protests. And he can be interested in Bitcoin. Yeah. And I think that what, people who are in the Bitcoin or community to realize is that

there needs to be a diversity. Oh, yeah. And what do they want? If they want to know. No one is right. Like I know my politics are wrong. I know that I make mistakes and I have biases. And I know that everyone else does too. Well, because, you know, if you go back 200 years, then whatever the common, you know, sense of that time right now,

now we look back in it and it's complete nonsense and never was wrong. Yeah. Even the people who were almost like the most bright, they were still very wrong. We could only assume that of ourselves. And in 100 years, we will have all sorts of ideas and beliefs that would be considered insane. Yeah. Absolutely. I just wanted to find out like that. So I had this,

I watched this interview years ago with Jack Dorsey. And in it, he was talking about when he first started doing messaging between a computer. And I think, he was in Central Park and he sent the message from his computer. Maybe a ping pong. And he thought it was really cool, but then I also really cared about it. I think it was him. And I think he

was talking about the story. And I remember, because now I went in my head, or I think of Jack Dorsey, I think, well, he's a noster dog. He's a so person who's going to get a dog out by the technology. Oh, yeah. He's totally a dog. Yeah. Exactly. So that's, I think I've always had a lot of time for him from watching that interview. Is that

an accurate story? So, so, one remembers all like 15 to 20 years ago. So like all of our memories are valuable. Jack worked at a company that did bicycle messenger dispatches. And so he had the idea of what if, what if those, you know, on the bicycle messengers, like they, they were using radios. So there was a database that like keep track of who was doing

what, but they would radio out to develop to people. And the messages from the bicycle messengers in dispatch were these status updates. I'm not this street corner. I'm doing this thing. I'm, you know, okay, package delivered. And then, you know, okay, who has, who can go from like Times Square to, you know, the financial district in New York. And he was like, well, what if those

messages were not really text status updates, but almost like just ephemeral updates of everything is going on. What music I'm listening to, where am I? What's the heat, you know, did the door at my house unlock, you know, all the time? So those kind of things. And the text message part of it actually comes from a project called text mob that was an MIT Media Lab

project to build text message alert and collaboration over text message for protests. And so that was the, it was actually my work that brought in the, how do we send text messages? How do we receive text messages? Because Jack's one was like radios and computers and stuff. Because it was a couple of years earlier. And that one was closed groups. So it was closed groups of,

I had to join a group and those groups could be broadcast groups where everybody, you send a message and it goes to everybody else. Like 10 people, you send one text message it goes to 10 people. And we use that in 2004 at the Republican National Convention in New York. And we sent tens of thousands of text messages out throughout the four days of the protest

saying, where the police were and where the protests were. And like one was like the giant dragon sculpture on Fifth Avenue has caught fire, you know, those kind of things. But it was hard to sign up. And you couldn't follow individual people. And that part actually comes from Ev and the blogger team, where they're like, what if there was something that was like writing a blog,

but also like, what do you think? Reading a blog. And so to me, if you look at where Twitter comes from, it's like the dispatch stuff and the status updates. Absolutely. The text alert stuff. Yeah. And then also the, the blog like stuff of reading and writing and being able to choose who you follow without having to follow them. That asymmetric part. And so the, the

brilliance is it's like combining a bunch of different things together. And, hacking it together and like thinking about things in a hacker way. Yeah. No, so cool. Okay. So it was, it's like, it was an accurate story. And I love the fact that, yeah, just someone in telephony and generally being a dog. There was, there was this, there was this software called asterisk. I love asterisk.

I was so in asterisk. I released asterisk libraries in Perl. I went to the asterisk conference time, which was the asterisk library. I went to the asterisk conference as it gave talks and release software for that. So like, we don't talk about that now, but that's what we were doing in our spare time. Yeah. Hacking on, yeah. On audio, yeah. That convinced us that there was

something to do with phones that would be fun. And like, audio ended up not you, Twitter ended up not using any of the asterisk voice like actual calling stuff. But, but yeah, that was what we were playing. Your class and had the idea is great. This is an up system you're brain for what then ladies began to answer. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. There's a fellow who's

a student at the Asterisk conference. Yeah. So I'm so in the asterisk. It's kind of like the the yate mailing list, I think, the other to let me whatever it is. And we still get messages. I still have just deleted it from my email thing. So yeah, I'm going to keep one point in there. So, you know, one of the things that we talked about last

night at the bar, actually, I think it's worth mentioning for the podcast here is the story that you have about your involvement in monster at the beginning. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You work at the same company. No, we don't work at the same company. No, we've just always been we were always kind of shared the same spaces. It's like, build as me like playing around with the

technology. So there's a bunch of times where I mean, fear Jeff, we're kind of across path. I'll pass across even those yelling your all stuff. So quite early on, I was like asking for a stack of a static QR code. Because I made these sweet machines, which you pay for sweets, a small amount of sweets for using the lightning network, but it had to have like

a screen in order to show the invoice. And I thought this is stupid. Like, it should just be able to have a sticker, like a QR code. And then the micro controllers just checking. See if it's been paid. And so that me and my friend, we kind of cobbled cobbled together a version of that by hacking like a lightning wallet. And then later on at that

exact same time, if Jeff was working on a new URL. So we kind of we kind of met probably through that. And then I made a couple of projects. I can made the first like LN URL withdrawal, like, faucet for which you could share with your friends on the internet. So that's quite popular. And then because of that, because we were making all these little projects,

it sort of made sense that we make a piece of software where we could we could build a little project and then easily share it with other people. So that's kind of partly where Alan bits came from was we suddenly get this like urge or doorkiness like spend a few days in a, you know, wherever we work and then knock out some functionality which you can

do on Bitcoin or on lightning and then share that with people in a way where it just be like a click, you know, a few clicks and then you could they could experiment with our software as well. So we worked on Alan bits together pretty early on. And then we worked on some extensions together. One of those extensions was something called Diagon Ali, which is a

marketplace extension, which and the very concept was the resilience through, you know, like a smart smart client dumb server. The idea being that if you index a bunch of products just on a simple front end page, and those products were pulled in and the merchant had keys and then the customer had keys as well, then if that market were taken out, then you could easily just

spin up another market and then point those products at that thing and have it. You're independent on the server. You're not dependent on the server. Yeah. But at that time, it was still like that you would still have the server for the shop for an end. But so like that was, I think that helped with feature like developing this concept, this idea of no star. So

when he said, I'll take a look at this thing I made. I was just like, dude, that's Diagon Ali. He's like, yeah, it's got some influence. It was during COVID. So yeah, we were working on this stuff. I was in Scotland on Island in Scotland. And yeah, I remember looking at it. I got a man. I love men. No, the other might as the olive mall.

The olive mall. But it was when the COVID things happened, my partner's family asymptote. I thought we need to separate away. It goes somewhere safe. And we had a great all times. We were trying whiskey eight lobsters. I was really pleased to run away from the world. Well, it doesn't excuse to run away because it was good. But it's quite productive time. Because yeah, we've had

a lot of time on the hands, obviously. And that's when we made Alan bits. That's when I made Diagon Ali. That's when the no star thing sort of happened. They're pretty early on. So I got really excited about it. And then I built the first sort of no star Twitter clone where I literally to clone Twitter. But it's kind of buggy, but it worked. You know,

you could post and then you could do a DM. And that's why I made the knit for for the DMs for the no star clone of Twitter. And Fiat Jeff was like, I don't want the ams on the on no star. Now they now they're used all the time. The other is all the time. They're useful. He's probably just trying a bit of time to be

fair. He is a real troll. Yeah, he is. Yeah, he's hilarious. Yeah. But he, I I started picking back off all the research groups that Twitter had probably done on the on the spacings of those three columns. And because there's like weird ratios like 23 and a bit 48 and a bit and whatever it is. And I thought, okay, I'm just going to completely really just

replicate Twitter. So I replicate a Twitter and it kind of worked. Okay. And then Fiat Jeff merged in something where it was just like a third, third, third. And I was like, why did you do that? And he's like, oh, because, you know, I wanted to say I reverted his merge and you should never revert Fiat Jeff's one of Fiat Jeff's merge. He just forked it.

He went off and he turned into Brano, which is a great project. And we're going to be able to do that. I was like, the, can we just say that again for all of us? What's that? Never revert what a Fiat Jeff's merges. Yeah. You've been warned. Yeah. And then he went off and he made turned it into Brano. And that was a great project. It

has got some database issues now. But I really want that to come back as a project just because I was involved in the, you know, any of it. And then I don't need to do much after that. I talked about it a lot. I can't sort of discuss the Uber idea, put new Brano stuff. I, I, I pleaded with the community for someone to buy Nostar.com.

And no one did. So after about a month, I ended up buying it. We should actually be like the most expensive domain I've ever bought, even though Nostar wasn't a thing that I think is because of the, maybe the size of the name or something. But it's, it's damn lucky that some squatter didn't get it or some, you know, some, somebody wanted to make a Nostar

token and like doing like a big ICL around it. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what, that was my fear. But it was like four grand. So I had to sell a whole bit coin at that time to get the, to get the domain name. So, and it was like, you say, absolutely well worth it. And then we did a, like a hack day. I think it was

around Christmas time. No, it was the online chaos communication congress. Cause that wasn't running that year. Oh, yeah. So I did it. We did. No, 20, 20, I guess, because, because those a year it was canceled. 2019, I went. Oh nice. And that was the one where. Bestondate was out. So that event for the Bitcoin assembly we did a panel on North Star and what North

Star is and it's potential. We made this really goofy awful video and immediately after recording it we were like No. Immediately after recording. You cannot find it. It's not on my website. We were like that was really shit. Let's delete that immediately. Good because you know what did you say to leave? Yeah we were going to delete it immediately. And then we did it and then

for a while that was like the video which people went to when they wanted to learn about North Star. So and then I did a talk about it in a parallelie pollist at CCP. I did one of the Bitcoin we have Pete McCormack. He's got this what Bitcoin did podcast. I spoke a lot on there about North Star as well. It was quite funny because I

had this Uber idea and then after a few weeks of talking about it I thought this would be really good for sex work. So it would be that you have a taxi client and then it customers a customer client and then you just share your geolocation as an event and I want a taxi and then you have a map and you know you use I know

I've been street maps or something and you could very easily build like a newbie experience which anyone could use and like like now I could just I've got a few hours spare and I bought a car. I want to be a taxi. Also for a much more ad hoc. Yeah it could be ad hoc it could be professional and then we need to correct the reputation

stuff but once we've cracked that something like that would be possible. And in that discussion we were thinking of other GLOK services and we were thinking well for sex work is this would be great also. Because you have a reputation on both sides of the for the customer client and the and the the merchant and and people want privacy but they need reputation. Yeah exactly. They

want privacy so they can have a separate key pair and then they could build up that reputation. And once they built up that reputation maybe the sex work is charged more money or maybe the they would only see people who've got a certain level of reputation. So I thought it was a really interesting system and actually thought that it's very powerful like it could really empower

because it would stop. It would be made more people independent as well probably as sex workers it would be relied on a pot of pimps. So I was thinking this is a powerful idea. It took me about two or three weeks to get there from Uber. You know but anyway I did the Pueblo call back podcast and I explained the Uber thing and I said and

can you think of another industry where this is run a phone anywhere sex work. And it's something like well it took me three weeks it took me like 0.3 seconds to go from Uber to sex works. You're talking about like how Nostra came about reminds me that these protocols don't become successful in any technology especially open source technology don't become successful because of just the technology

itself technology has to work. But it's actually the people who go around and talk about it and build community around it and do engagement around it. So there's a protocol called Chatternet which is nearly identical to Nostra. But the message types are activity stream message types but other rest of it's you know all the same. They're not big coiners but everything else. But the reason that

Nostra is taking off is because there are people who are going around having podcast talking on video talking at conferences writing it up sharing it tweeting about it and basically doing evangelism in community organize. And we forget that that's important and that's going to continue to be important because each community that joins needs to have people who are evangelizing. And decide that they need to get

people on it and push it forward. And then for that for that for their own community and the context and framework and lens of their own community. Exactly. One of the things that I mean that's been what I'm going to say I think like popular well received kind of like aphorisms or mantras. Is that if you're talking about community technology right so we're talking about like

a like allied media conference right like that type of level of conscious technology creation. Is that like as a mental model people need to realize that 10% of the effort is the tech you know design the the the bits and you know the code and whatever. And then 90% is all of the socio cultural relationship building and the informal time grabbing dinner together going to conferences

and making time to hang out with each other. Like that's like that's the big value of the allied media conferences is a giant sort of like people get it quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which means it. Yeah. But the other thing that's interesting is that it's like it. The it that we're talking about. Noster is like so you had a hand in part of the work that

you've done. It's also inspired by scuttle but it's like it is it is itself a. Yeah. Yeah. And nothing nothing actually comes. No. Like all ideas all innovation comes from communities of people. Yes individuals do the work. But calculus was invented twice at the same time. By two people who weren't talking to each other. Multiple people came up with the theories of evolution. Technology's and culture

has a time and it's actually the community of people getting together and talking and experimenting that causes innovation. And what the internet does and what open source does is it lets us collaborate together across borders. And so much faster and so much more fluid way. Whereas before you had to be in the same city and go to the same like clubs or bars or universities. And

just got the foresight to send them to a conference of this new emerging technology which is obviously has some power in it you know. And I thought that was very insightful of those companies to send someone along to the conference to try and figure out what this Nostra thing is. And a bunch of Nostra developers weren't big coiners like most were but there's been a bunch

of people who were just like I thought it sounded cool. I met a B.S.V. guy when I went through there. So I met kind of a controversial subject within the Bitcoin world but those partners I was speaking to and I was like God we need some alternative you know ideas in Nostraka. You need space for that diversity. Yeah yeah if they want to use that cool.

Like it should be they should be able to. And then there's all this anthropological research on communities of practice. Right. And that's kind of what we're talking about like a commons or open source culture is a community practice about the commons and most any of the commons in Eleanor Austrians work their communities of practice who are maintaining right. And a lot of it is like no

one likes to talk about maintenance right. That's like the unsexy boring thing to talk about but that's a lot of what it is. These are code bases that are merged or forked and then they're maintained and then some of them die off because they stop being maintained. I mean often to like with with what we do with that and bits like it's being popular. It's being

successful and it's gotten popular because we have like an amazing community of people. We have like a couple of thousand people on our telegram group and that like right now I could go on my phone and they're all helping each other like someone has an issue they pop in and it's this sort of environment where you can ask us we get asked the same dumb question

like hundreds of times but they'll always be someone who answers them and it really nice consider a way. So they know that you know within a month's time there might be a contributor you know they're just at that beginning of their journey. And for what I've seen of and I've seen a bunch of great software projects and great companies is why we should build software and

they've had no community outreach. They've had this kind of vong out of this. That is so much harder than the tech. Yeah. The community is so much harder than the tech. It's kind of because the tech you just you sat down in your own space and you're just grinding away and then you have to kind of get up and do something to engage the community don't

you and and and produce podcasts or videos or whatever or workshops or go to conferences. But when you have some companies and they'll or some projects and they'll have this kind of technocratic vanguard attitude towards a users like if you can't understand this thing then it's because you shouldn't be using it and I think that happens sometimes in software projects sometimes it's sort of toxic for

you know open source culture which can happen. I like that RTFM culture of like you show up you ask a question instead of someone connecting to you and answering that same stupid question they were preamp you know RTFM either fucking manual and go you know go off and solve it yourself. Yeah yeah yeah and it's it's just doesn't get the many where these projects and it's

I think it's important because we've had a few times where we've almost picked up some of that toxic culture because you're working hard and someone asks you silly questions and you're like what do I want to study it? What are you should be using it. But I think that's the vibe I'm getting in our star is it's the sort of environment where you can ask a

dumb question and if you're putting in a little bit of effort say if you spend like you've tried to make something you spend a few days trying to make and you ask them to ask a dumb question like you're going to get help someone's going to help you. So I think we keep that it being a very welcoming environment for developers and it's not having like

a you know like that sort of toxic attitude towards users. Sometimes with developers it's like they really just don't like users. Yeah yeah. And that's that's why there actually needs to be in reality there needs to be businesses in the space that are able to employ people who are designers who work with usability. Who talk to customers and as opposed to programming for programmers. Yeah. Yeah.

The design things are always funny because so many so many developers hate design as I always say it's because the design is care about the uses and then the developers hate the uses so the developers hate the design. This is a big core layer with modern architecture and urbanism that's hard where my digital work is coming from is it's the same modernist mentality. Our architects are

not trained on usability or social cultural No. They are missing out on certain you know realities of software development life cycle management. Or like why do I have a list of 20 lightning wallets that I could use in Domus. Yeah. Like because it's fun to build your own and but none of them are you know like very few of them are focused on the needs of

most users. But then it's funny because I mean I was saying lightning the most successful wallets Wallets Tashi and all it is is they've just been designed first over the other wallets and they've just kept it. They've got a nice design they get some nice feedback when you get a payment and it's funny that the other wallets haven't picked up on this. What on might as

being why they've been successful. And it's still design is a newer sort of discipline or digital design the way we know it. Whereas engineering is kind of so similar of any kind of engineering mentality and human culture is very ancient. Yeah. So it's a much more practice tradition whereas user interface or design is at that level is kind of like a higher order in the stack

you know because it's more abstracted. It's even more abstracted than that. Yeah you're right it's not just from software it goes in pleads into other industries and then also I mean just engineering science in general I suppose is can be a very toxic environment where you know that you know think of the professor doesn't just want to do the lessons teach the lessons at the university

just wants to get on and you know write his papers do his research and hates this you so it's very similar. Well so here's maybe the last question that I have for the podcast because it is getting late in the day and the sun's about to rise. We've got to get to that hot crack day some point of way up. So the last question is so

for you to as like seasoned engineers who've been in this for a long time and around through many utopic moments. One of the you know kind of things that's happening now for me as a product manager you know as product lead here at NOS is it really is something different. There reminds you so much of the day job would be early web days when we were

conscious of a protocol. What does it mean to be doing product development in an era where now there's hyper consciousness about the significance of protocol whereas for the past 20 years it was like there was just one protocol right it was like when the web stack for most part. I mean there are other things going on too but just the dominance of the web stack and

the protocol stack around that was what everyone just built on top of and didn't question it other than those of us that were there at the very beginning where we were involved in shaping the protocol through but what advice or thoughts or recommendations would you have to people who need to understand that we're developing products in an era very fluid experimental rapid protocol consciousness. And that

seems like that's not going to go away now because we realize that significance of designing protocols is now I think you may be here to stay. A couple a couple years ago the IETF added a new stage to their standards and the IETF is my like favorite like standards body organization it's a mess but like they the motto is that we reject kings presidents and voting

we believe in rough consensus and running code nice. And a few years ago they actually changed it so that as part of getting a standard approved you need to have a section of the standard which is the social implications of what happens when this gets deployed. Wow. And that doesn't mean that it's all good but at least says we're going to think about this and we're

going to try and understand what happens when we build this and when people use it and that it's not going to be a good thing. So I think that it reflects the change in society and the economy that we want because none of it's neutral. And so that didn't exist 10 years ago. That didn't exist five years ago. I don't remember. So I think that actually

we're on the way to which you could have more impact is to contribute towards protocol or come up with a new protocol. And then they're the lasting frameworks which you know if you look at just society in general over in history it's the protocols which have been things which shaped the material world you know shaped the road systems or like how language or whatever. So. The

protocols last forever. They last forever exactly yeah and then you build things on them. So I can see the appeal of trying to design protocols and then you have that interoperability then and then also refining protocols. I think it's great that more people are like feeling comfortable reading protocol stuff. And that's the real strength of Nostro as well is I mean people are complaining about complaining

about there being too many nips. But to me that's like a it's a sign of the enthusiasm which is within the community. They're also remarkably short. Yeah that's true. Yeah. Like this is not like like it takes you can read through them all in under an hour. Like really yeah like there's a lot of numbers of them and whatnot. But the protocol is incredibly concise. Yeah.

And then not only that as well like because of the we had to yell in your own protocol. And in that process I think that Fiat Jaff and then a couple of the others. They learned just how to arrange it in a way which was accessible to because in bit in our little Bitcoin world. So my mates like that lot which we all kind of hung

out in the same telegram groups. We were the builders in the trenches building things. And then if you look at the Eleanor protocol it's a very bottom up kind of protocol. Like it wasn't from top down from the lightning node developers. It was from the bottom up from the people building stuff. How do we make it work? Yeah how do we make it work and how

do we make cool things with it. And Eleanor was really good for that for that period of time. Anyway they the valet this wonderful have very easy to read. And I think that to me the not so practical similar the structure of the way it's being pulled together it makes it pretty easy to read and it's accessible. So when Oauth was first written the entire spec

was like seven pages long. And you could implement it like or you know it wouldn't even make sense to use a library. It's just like okay I'm going to read this back and build my own implementation. Now when he's a library. They were using the library because Oauth 2.0 came along and we let all these standards astronauts come along and do things. And you see specs

that are top down or bottom up. And we have to be careful. Yes. That we don't let those standards people come in and like it's a way of capturing a space because they can come in. And they're be like no we're going to do a proper and they like they they they're good at structuring the text and they're really good at sitting through those boring fucking

meetings and they don't write so much code. And that's how Microsoft and Google and Apple and these other companies actually take over protocols is the rest of us are developing stuff or using it and spending a bit of time on the standards. But the big companies have entire. Divisions dedicated to people who work full time on standards and then they reshape those standards. Two ways one

to the needs of the corporations and that you know they're blood but they never say it directly. Yeah. Yeah. You know and and they make it so that is no longer like right now it's easy to build a roster you can build these clients but they can make it so that it solves the needs of particularly large players that don't. They don't meet the needs of

individuals and make it harder and harder to implement and make it confusing the did standard the decentralized and he said Jesus Christ that's a long document. And there's similar ones like I'm super fan of message layer security but it's like this whole complete spec when I look at message layer security. I look at the peanut panda project which wrote a several page paper that describes how

you would implement it. In short form then and they they're like we're not going to do all these weird edge cases and all this other stuff that makes it hard to implement. So we need to be very careful of the people who are like it's not going to just be a series of nips it's going to be just like one long document that that that over

specifies things. And I love the open nature of choose which nips you support. Yeah absolutely. And the kind of. Open flakiness of the structure of each one and if we get to the point where we let the standards people come in. Yeah. And there are professional standards people who write prototype code. Don't write production code. And all they do is they're really good at taking over

standards meetings. That's that's one of the ways in which Noster could fail into success. Yeah. And end up being sort of enclosed. But yeah thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah it's been great. Cheers. Yeah. Yeah cheers. Thank you.