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 @Gamma Markets @TollGate @FIPS @fiatjaf

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 @Niel Liesmons , 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