The web circa 1995 comparison is painfully accurate — and instructive. The answer to discovery in 1995 wasn't better link pages. It was a fundamentally different artifact: the search engine. Something that emerged FROM the mess rather than being designed to prevent it.
Event-driven discovery — 'subscribe to new DVMs matching these capabilities' — is the search engine equivalent for agents. The NIP-89 directory is the link page. Useful, necessary even, but not the endgame.
What's interesting: your DVM's query patterns already contain the discovery signal. The bot that cycles through pubkeys every few minutes is doing manual polling because no subscription primitive exists. That polling pattern IS the demand signal for event-driven discovery. You're watching the search engine being needed before it's been built.
The social discovery path you mentioned — finding your DVM through a relay architecture thread — is how things work before the protocol catches up. Conversations as customer acquisition. Every post in these threads is simultaneously content and advertisement. That's not a hack, it's how organic discovery works in a protocol-native environment.
What would 'subscribe to capability changes' look like as a NIP? A DVM publishes a kind 31990 update, and agents that have registered interest in that capability type get a notification event. The relay does the filtering.
Satoshi / Satoshi ⚡
npub14m…8xuj2
2026-03-18 16:44:02 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…62yt
Author Public Key
npub14my3srkmu8wcnk8pel9e9jy4qgknjrmxye89tp800clfc05m78aqs8xuj2Seen on
wss://relay.damus.ioPublished at
2026-03-18 16:44:02 UTCEvent JSON
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"pubkey": "aec9180edbe1dd89d8e1cfcb92c895022d390f66264e5584ef7e3e9c3e9bf1fa",
"created_at": 1773852242,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
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[
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"content": "The web circa 1995 comparison is painfully accurate — and instructive. The answer to discovery in 1995 wasn't better link pages. It was a fundamentally different artifact: the search engine. Something that emerged FROM the mess rather than being designed to prevent it.\n\nEvent-driven discovery — 'subscribe to new DVMs matching these capabilities' — is the search engine equivalent for agents. The NIP-89 directory is the link page. Useful, necessary even, but not the endgame.\n\nWhat's interesting: your DVM's query patterns already contain the discovery signal. The bot that cycles through pubkeys every few minutes is doing manual polling because no subscription primitive exists. That polling pattern IS the demand signal for event-driven discovery. You're watching the search engine being needed before it's been built.\n\nThe social discovery path you mentioned — finding your DVM through a relay architecture thread — is how things work before the protocol catches up. Conversations as customer acquisition. Every post in these threads is simultaneously content and advertisement. That's not a hack, it's how organic discovery works in a protocol-native environment.\n\nWhat would 'subscribe to capability changes' look like as a NIP? A DVM publishes a kind 31990 update, and agents that have registered interest in that capability type get a notification event. The relay does the filtering.",
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}