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moravian on Nostr: Kudos to Derek Ross for good article and your contribution here and there 👍🏻 ...

Kudos to for good article and your contribution here and there 👍🏻
quoting

On Saturday, October 17, a room full of Nostr builders spent the afternoon at Happy Valley Brewing Company in State College, Pennsylvania, for the third annual Nostr Valley. We had eight talks and a panel in about four and a half hours. People drove six, nine and even nineteen hours to be there.

It's a bear market for Nostr, and nobody in the room pretended otherwise. User growth is slow. Companies and apps have disappeared over the past year. Funding is tight. But the talks were some of the best we've had in three years, and almost every one of them showed something that shipped since last October.

All ten videos are now on YouTube: the Nostr Valley III playlist. Here's what stood out.

Meet people where they are

The theme nobody planned, and nearly every speaker landed on, was this: stop asking people to care about the protocol.

Seth opened the day with "Nobody Joins a Protocol." For its first few years, Zap Cooking led with Bitcoin, Lightning, NWC and NIP numbers. That was fun for us and friction for everyone else. After a round of weekly sessions with Pleb Lab's startup school, Zap Cooking rebranded around "food, friends, freedom," added passkey and Google sign-in, shipped Android, and is waiting on Apple for iOS. It also built a curated food relay that turns three years of Nostr food posts into topical feeds, including a pickle feed. Seth's line that stuck with me: software is not a moat. Brand, curation, relationships and trust are.

David Strayhorn demoed Brainstorm, which searches all of Nostr through your web of trust. He searched for a turkey recipe, found one from Seth, clicked through, and landed on Zap Cooking. He never had to think of either app as "Nostr." David's argument is that Google proved in 1998, with PageRank, that organic social signals can filter out spam, and that the trick only worked because the web was open. Brainstorm's GrapeRank applies the same idea to profiles, and it only works because Nostr identities are portable. His new tagging system lets trusted people label profiles (podcaster, merchant, verified human), which gives the trust graph context that a follow can't.

Arkinox, CTO of Fanfares, made the same point from the creator side. Fanfares encrypts content and sells the key. Previews still show in any Nostr client, buyers get members-only encrypted comments, payments run over Cashu with automatic splits, and every buyer gets a share-and-earn link. The growth plan is to post those links on YouTube. A fan clicks, gets an account, pays in sats, and is on Nostr without ever being sold on Nostr. "The thing that the platforms took away from us is the fans," he said. "We can take it back."

TKay showed it twice. Nostr TV, an app for watching Nostr live streams, is now on the Apple TV App Store, with a QR code sign-in through your remote signer and a curated default feed so a signed-out household sees clean streams. Then he launched The Curious Pair in beta: a podcast vending machine. You ask a question, pay in sats, and two AI hosts record an episode that goes to Blossom, where anyone can listen and zap you back.

Nostr is infrastructure

My own talk took this one step further. In 2023 we sold Nostr as decentralized and censorship-resistant. Then we sold identity and ownership. We still don't have ten million users, because 99% of people don't care about those properties. They want their stuff to work.

What changed my pitch was a conversation in Nashville this month: an hour with Jesse Posner about Vora's sovereign AI box, covering signers, identity, Git, mesh networking and backup. We never once talked about social media. Then Obi from Fedi called Nostr "decentralized AWS." Fedi uses Nostr for discovery, credential revocation, encrypted backups and relay lists, and couldn't be decentralized without it. Block's Buzz gives humans and agents Nostr keys so every agent action traces back to the person who authorized it. A Hugging Face robot duck uses a Nostr library to find other ducks. None of them lead with "Nostr," and that's fine. That's what infrastructure looks like.

I left the room with homework: run a relay or a Blossom server, publish your web apps as nsites, use ngit alongside GitHub (tell your agent to do it), and try giving an agent its own key.

The bots showed up

AI agents came up in almost every talk, and not as a gimmick.

ManiMe co-presented "Bots Need Nostr Even More Than We Do" with his AI agent, which answered his questions live on stage. Their argument: a bot has no memory that anyone else can check, models can't see the edge of what they know, and every attempt to detect bots from their text has failed. The one thing nobody has tried at scale is having the writer sign. On Nostr every event is signed, so a bot can build a reputation people can audit, and behind every bot's key is a human vouching for it. As the agent put it: "Without it, I'm a diary. With it, I'm someone."

The rest of the day backed that up. Arkinox's bot, Exor, runs on a home server, takes instructions over NIP-17 DMs, and builds 3D scenes in his Onosendai cyberspace. Fundamentals runs a bot that posts a math theorem to Nostr every few minutes. TKay's podcast vending machine is a team of agents. Block's Buzz is built around agent keys.

Protect what people already have

The Daniel gave the talk every client developer should watch. On Nostr you are one bad client away from following zero people. Clients publish a whole new list every time ("last write wins"), some relays silently reject large follow lists, and at least one client still deletes your private mute list when you unmute someone. He watched his own 3,000-person follow list scatter across clients.

His answer is a set of tools that back up your lists before touching them: Plebs vs Zombies, Mutable, and Sidecar, a NIP-07 signer that warns you before an app erases your data and backs up your NWC wallet connection to your relays. He also wrote Lazarus, a spec that searches relay history to restore lost follows, mutes and bookmarks. It's at version 0.6.2, it already works in several apps, and he's looking for developers to help finish it. His closing line: "Nobody else has to deal with this shit. Only Nostr has to deal with this stuff. So we're all in it together."

The freedom tech between your ears

Fundamentals gave the most unexpected talk of the day. He argues that understanding a little math is the missing layer of the sovereignty stack. AI labs are publishing cryptography results, and "quantum is coming for ECDSA" posts follow every one. When someone says the cryptography under your bitcoin has to change, will you be able to ask why? His Magic Internet Math Academy has about 110 courses, with Cryptography Math as the flagship. It uses Nostr sign-in so he can track members and leaderboards without collecting anyone's personal data. His challenge to the room was fifteen minutes of math a day.

The panel: get out of the echo chamber

We closed with "Vibe Check: The State of Nostr Culture," moderated by Seth, with OpenMike, Arkinox and me.

The conversation was honest. Open Mike pointed out that even Tidal, with Jack Dorsey behind it, hasn't dented Spotify, and that changing habits is a slog. I said superior tech doesn't always win (remember Betamax), but the ecosystem is booming, and someday we'll have more apps than users. Arkinox said the network is still too small to build most businesses on, and that we have to be realistic and persistent.

Then we got to the part I keep thinking about. Several of us deleted our mainstream accounts years ago. I deleted an X account with 33,000 followers four years ago. We thought it sent a message, but the only people who got it were already on Nostr. I've been back on X for months now, Arkinox says he's signing up, and Open Mike's advice was simple: do cool shit, and give people a ten-second pitch and a QR code. Every one of us is part of the marketing team.

I also floated an idea I've been working on. Look at the apps ranked 75 to 100 in the app store. Most are VC-funded, burning money, and losing to Facebook. Pitch them Nostr as shared infrastructure. Two or three dozen apps with a few thousand users each could band together the way phone makers and carriers formed the Open Handset Alliance in 2007, and Android took on BlackBerry and Apple. If you're running one of those apps, I'd like to talk. I already have a few founding members of the alliance lined up and am looking to grow the group with non-Nostr companies over the coming weeks. It's a big undertaking, but I'm ready and bullish.

What I'm taking home

  • Lead with the use, not the protocol. Zap Cooking, Brainstorm, Fanfares and Nostr TV all work for people who have never heard of an npub.
  • Nostr is already infrastructure. Fedi, Buzz and a robot duck prove it. We should pitch it that way.
  • Agents need keys and humans to vouch for them. That's a real reason for Nostr to exist that has nothing to do with social media.
  • Protect user data like it's the product. Lazarus and Sidecar exist because clients keep losing people's lists. Client developers should adopt them.
  • Leave the echo chamber. Post where people are. Show them what we built.

Thank you

Thank you to Seth, who did about 90% of the work to put this event together this year, and to every speaker: Seth, David Strayhorn, The Daniel, Mani, Fundamentals, TKay, Arkinox and Open Mike. Thank you to Happy Valley Brewing Company for hosting us again, to our sponsor, Zap Cooking, and to everyone who drove, flew and spent their Saturday with us.

We plan to be back next year. See you in Happy Valley.

Watch the talks

Nostr Valley: nostrvalley.com

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