Nostr is frustrating. The protocol is indeed pretty awesome--partition tolerant in a way that RSS isn't. I want to get to know it because that's a property that I want for an app that I want to build.

So I started using it, just to get a feel for how it all comes together. You can set up a browser extension (or hardware device) which holds your signing key and you can configure it to auto-sign on your behalf or to prompt you for each required signature. So if you leave it in prompt mode you can use the apps and see what gets signed by your key (which they don't have, supposing you're "doing it right"). It's a really neat transparency feature and I felt like it was better helping me understand what was going on as well as putting me in more fine-grained control over which code I trust to act on my behalf. It's a usage mode that I hope becomes more popular, though it's inconvenient so I have my doubts.

But the content which happens to move through nostr is on average pretty awful. Mostly it's just memes where crypto bro's convince each other that they're superior to the rest of us--despite the fact that their precious blockchains would totally fail in the kind of partitioned-internet scenario which nostr is resilient against. The mismatch between its own design principles (partition tolerance > consistency) and the enthusiasms of the people who use it (consistency > partition tolerance) makes me uneasy for the same reasons I'm uneasy about Web 2's social media: made by us, for you, but we're not you and our agenda is unclear.

I'm still probably going to use it, but until I can get an app going that I actually want to use I don't expect to be consuming much content from it.