Radio Detox back with a very special guest. I probably say that every week, but you guys,
I'm going to be on my best behavior because right now we have my boss here, MK Fain. She is on deck
today to talk about things that go on, I guess, behind the scenes at Soapbox, but we need to talk
about quite a few things. I'm happy to have her on because as you know, I want to start amplifying
a lot more women in the space that we're in, the Bitcoin Nostra space. And I'm going to just
Put it out there.
MK, thanks for being here.
You are a Nostra OG.
You're one of, like, I don't know.
Like, are you one of the first, you know,
hundred or so people who happened upon Nostra as a dev?
No?
Like, you guys are around way longer than me.
Maybe as a dev, but I don't think we've been around longer than you
because we were on the Fediverse for a long time
before we were actually building on Nostra.
By the time we came to Nostra, I would say...
I feel like the whole crew of people that are like really popular in Nostra, like Derek, you, like, I don't know, that whole gang was already there and pretty active.
I feel like we stepped in kind of in like the phase two.
Really? Okay, because you guys, like with Soapbox, so like people are like, what's Soapbox?
And Soapbox is the technology that Alex built to, I guess, bridge over from Mastodon.
Just to put it, I want to put things in like such normie language that, is that the accurate, as far as like timeline is concerned, etc.
Not quite. Soapbox was the software that started on the Fediverse, which is another decentralized protocol. And at the time, Soapbox was not a whole company. It was just one piece of software. And it was basically an alternative to if you liked the spirit of Mastodon and what they were trying to do technology wise with decentralization, but you thought that it was kind of boring and you wanted to be able to, you know, make it have your own custom colors and you wanted to be able to add your own theme to it.
it and run your own community on Mastodon, that's what Soapbox was. And then from there, Soapbox kind
of, you know, we had a lot of different types of people that were interested in this idea of what
we were doing. And so then Soapbox became a company and spread out to include many different
other forms of software. And now that original Soapbox Fediverse front end is not really something
we even work on anymore. And now Soapbox has just become the company. The bridge between the
Fetiverse and Noster was Moster, the Moster Bridge. And that was what really first brought
us on to working on Noster is when we decided to bridge the Fetiverse to Noster. And then we
decided, actually, we really like things on that side of the bridge a lot better.
We just came over to the Noster side. I think we met in an all-woman Noster chat of chicks who
were on Noster that wanted to make our own space. This was a couple of years ago. We just wanted
a chick space and to have our own little thing and i think at the i think the first thing you
had created this is probably before i met you was spinster and then there was hen house that
you worked on so like you are you're kind of quiet okay you're not the loudest person on nostr
i think alex gets a lot of attention because he's alex and then you're the quieter one i think people
don't even know like i think people probably underestimate you because you're not like this
big extroverted type person, you're like me or Derek, you're like kind of quietly working in the
background. She's always working, folks. She's always building something. She's a pretty awesome
engineer. So she made some just different feminist kind of spaces. Like Spinster was first and then
Hen House, right? Yes, that's right. Yeah. Spinster, we were running for many years before Hen House.
That started in 2019. And I've run many different spaces and contributed to spaces that I didn't
start as well. Online for Women, Over It was another one that I was a part of building. And
4W is my feminist blog that I ran for a while. And that was really where I kind of built my niche
on the internet. And then when we decided to move over to Noster, immediately, like my first natural
thought is, okay, like where are my girls at? And I was like, there aren't really a lot of us.
So there's like 24 of us, I think, in that chat group.
Right. And on Noster, it's a really anonymous kind of vibe. So you also can't necessarily tell when people are women there. And so I was really trying to find, okay, where are my people? So yes, I joined the group chat with the fellow Noster women. And that was awesome. That's kind of the first time I felt like I had a little bit of a community on Noster besides just the dev community.
And then Henhouse was part of our launch of Ditto and the first version of Ditto.
So when we brought Soapbox to Noster after we built the bridge, we were like, OK, we've made this bridge.
Now what? We want to go develop on Noster.
So our first step was let's take that software that we built, Soapbox, for the Fediverse and see if we could do that on Noster too and see if we could make it work with both.
So that is what Ditto was. And it was called Ditto because it did both. It does both Soapbox and Noster natively. You don't actually even need the bridge to use both of the platforms there.
But in the end, we found that it was a really cool space for people to build communities, but it did require a little bit too much technical knowledge for an admin to actually get started on hosting a Ditto server.
And that was the same problem that the Fediverse had.
And part of why we struggled to, you know, build communities on the Fediverse, because it's hard to build on.
And we realized we had actually brought this challenge with us from the Fediverse to Noster by trying to do it in this like Fediverse style way.
and that was a mistake and we decided no one of the best things about Noster is that you don't
need to be like tech server admin in order to participate here so we decided to change up the
way that we were doing ditto and now we're on to new ditto ditto2 ditto2 which is what we call it
internally it's still just ditto to the world yeah and I should add that like MK says Noster I say
Noster and we're both correct by the way like everybody it's either Noster like it still notes
and other stuff over relays. Noster is a protocol, not a platform. We're Soapbox, so we're like a
company, but we're not really like a company. We don't act like a company. We act like a
nonprofit that's funded by a nonprofit. We're kind of a hacktivist collective, and I'm the
non-dev. We have like two non-devs now who work at the company, Soapbox. So just for people to
kind of like get the lay of the land here. Like I get to work for the smart people like MK who
build the things. And then I try to translate with words to the normie public. Like those of
you listening to Radio Detox, what all this tech is, what it means, what it can do for you.
Translation. Ditto is actually a lot of things. And I think what we've created in Soapbox is
really an ecosystem now where we have Shakespeare. If you want truly open AI and that's going to work
with Ditto. You can go make your own Ditto with Shakespeare. Like we're open source, right? So
everything we've created is free. It's open. Just use it. We're not charging you money for this,
right? And then we also have something called Agora, which is an app for activists, which helps
activists in situations in countries like Venezuela, for example, where maybe you want to
fundraise. Maybe you want to communicate. Maybe, you know, you're in a country where Twitter has
been banned for a period of time. This is kind of the thing we're attacking here is keeping the
internet open and free. And so that you also don't have to log on and see ads. Your attention
actually matters and your creativity matters. And all of these things come together in this ecosystem
that we think is a little bit more fun. And I don't know, maybe that's the soapbox umbrella of
like we've made a whole ton of apps. There's more apps that we've made besides just those three.
But we want to talk a lot about Ditto today because there's a new and improved Ditto that
we've soft launched, you know, now that you've got the backstory and the lay of the land on
Soapbox, let's get into more of what the new Ditto does, because the new Ditto is exciting.
Yeah, the new Ditto was designed to be for everyone. And in this way, it's kind of in the
spirit of the old Ditto, right? The old Ditto was trying to bridge the Fetaverse and Nostar.
And now the new Ditto is, I think, trying to bridge Nostar to the world. And we're trying to do this
not by selling all this technical jargon about decentralization and why you need open source
and why your private key matters. Instead, we're focusing on what people actually want in online
spaces based on what we want personally and what we're hearing other people say they want. And for
us, what we've been hearing is people want a return to the good old days of the web when things were
fun, when things were customizable, when it wasn't all about corporations and algorithms and ads,
when you could actually show your personality online and make real friends. And it wasn't just
about being fed content so that you could be part of this machine. And that is what Ditto is all
about. It's about fun. It's about bringing whimsy back to the web. It's about showing your personality.
It's about being able to actually express yourself and be creative online again, you know, in the way
that you could back on your MySpace page. You could customize your profile and show the world
a little bit about you. And having this super discoverability where you can find anything on
the web in here in the way I'm going to date myself here. But if you guys remember Stumble
Upon, that was like such fun whimsy on the web. Right. Yeah. Like people loved that. And like
being able to just find new things. Yeah. Yeah. Like whimsy and just so. Yeah. New thing,
learning new things like i have a friend who sits on she's retired but she sits on tiktok for like
three hours a day she loves it she probably posts 30 videos of her own a day it's her community
outlet it's where she learned it's where she shares her knowledge it's it's super cool and
it's just like she's also terrified all the time that she's going to get banned because she's like
makes herself kind of hidden you know and she posts like she posts like witch content like she's
She's a witch and a psychic and a traditional Chinese medicine.
Like she's she's all of these things that, you know, probably stand to be banned on TikTok.
And so she kind of.
Not shrinks, but she kind of hides.
She tries to play the game where she doesn't get banned.
And it's kind of a shame because like there actually is an alternative.
You know, there's obviously Nostre and all of the aspects of the legacy social media platforms that you like are in Nostre.
Well, specifically in Ditto, you kind of choose your own adventure on Ditto.
If you want to see just video, you can see just video.
If you want to see just photos, et cetera, et cetera.
And the fact that I can trick out my profile, though, that is that's probably like we could talk about all of the features of Ditto all day.
But let's be real here.
What people care about is the fact that they can make the profile their own with a theme like MySpace.
And like I put my cat up as my theme.
I went nuts and put blankies up on my profile like a super like I don know late night he nerd um and by the way i don know how to make blinkies I don know html I can html or css anything which is where the vibe coding comes in
so you can have a ton of fun you know vibe coding your theme if you want to even with just the
blinkies like I think I stole mine from blinkies cafe because I am I am the non-dev kind of normie
person and there's this whole world out there of the indie web and people who do want to still
learn HTML and CSS and design beautiful web pages. And then they get on NeoCities and they make,
you know, they work at making these kind of like HTML, MySpace style, classic internet web pages,
where you've got your personal guest book and it's your personal page and you join a web ring.
And like, it's so cool, right? But then if you're like me and you're like, I need Shakespeare to do
that for me if it's going to happen, right? So like, ditto just, you can just do it. Like,
I can just upload a photo of my cat to Ditto and it turns into a theme like that.
And so then I have the theme that I want.
Let's say I want to make my, am I going to, I can go meta MK.
Like I can make a Ditto profile on Ditto.
Like I can take a picture of Ditto and make that my background.
Like say I wanted to make my whole mission to market Ditto with my Ditto.
I could do that.
Like the possibilities are kind of endless.
And I don't even know how to kind of encompass it into like one, you know, simple sentence, one eight second soundbite to be like, Ditto is a game changer, but it's going to take me half an hour to explain why.
I think we're still kind of in that space, even using Ditto to bridge Noster to the world right now.
What are your thoughts on kind of how do we explain like Ditto has like 27 plus features?
I'm probably wrong. You probably have added more over the weekend and I just don't know it.
But like, how do we explain this more simply to the world other than you have freedom and we're not going to ask for your ID and we're not going to verify your face and we're not going to show you ads and we're not going to charge you money like there's no premium.
Like, how do we explain this to a world that's kind of burnt out on social media, burned by it, shall I say?
Yeah, I think to go to the first part of what you were saying, I think it's like the indie web, except on modern technology.
And I think this is a barrier that a lot of people have.
You know, I participate in some indie web communities online, like on Reddit and stuff.
And I see that people are asking questions like, I want to get back to the old web.
I like this, but I don't know how to code.
Like, is there still a place for me here?
What do I do?
And so for those people, like there are answers to that within the indie web community, certainly.
Like none of us when we started out knew how to code.
I also like the first code I ever wrote was in order to change the color of my theme and like set custom fonts and make them different colors.
So I think a lot of us got into coding this way.
And so I definitely welcome people to discover the skill in this format.
I think it's one of the best ways and most fun ways to learn web dev.
But also not everyone should have to be a web developer and a coder in order to participate and have freedom online.
So I think that this is what Ditto does in the way that we're pretty used to these days, modern platforms having these drag and drop widgets, things that can make things super easy for you as the user to not have to be an engineer in order to have what you want to have.
And so Ditto gives you the freedom of the indie web, but in the like modern comforts that we've come to expect on the web.
And I don't think we should have to go back in time to find the stuff that was good about the old web because we can't in reality, we can't turn back the clock.
It's good to have communities that still enjoy that, but we can't go back.
We have to go forward.
But what we can do is we can take what was great about the past and bring that into the future with us along with modern technology.
And then modern technology includes the easy UIs that mean you don't have to be a coder to have a custom theme anymore. Also means modern technology like decentralization and Noster and things that mean you don't have to be locked into a corporation. Those things are actually legacy. Like they are old at this point. Doing things in the centralized corporate way is an old way of thinking.
But people are very locked in those systems because of the legacy that they have built and, you know, the fact that their communities are there.
And they also don't know that there can be another way.
So I think showing people actually there can be another way.
We see a lot of times some initial skepticism and pushback when we try to tell people like, no, it's free, it's open, it's decentralized.
We're not profiting off of you joining.
We're not selling anything here.
We don't gain anything by you joining besides that we want to have you in our space with us.
Like we want you to join us.
That's it.
And there's a lot of skepticism, a lot of pushback, a lot of saying, no, there must.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
I'm glad people are skeptical.
Not because of us or anything we did, but because of the way the world is where it's
people are naturally skeptical of everything now, which is probably a good, it's a good
place for things to be.
And then they come to us and they go like, what do you want?
There's got to be something they're doing.
You know, they've got to be training AI on my stuff like that.
We got that for a little while where it was like, no, we're really not.
We're actually for very open AI, which is probably harder to find as time goes on, as things change.
And we saw Anthropic made a good choice by not bowing to the Pentagon.
And the Pentagon ultimately chose, yeah, they chose Palantir, which I think surprised nobody.
You know, that that was an important moment in our culture, in our nerd culture of like, hey, somebody actually stood up to the government.
And like it is a big tech company that stood up to the government.
But yes, we're still skeptical of, you know, what's going on here.
Like how how open is AI?
How open are you know, what matters when it comes to open source AI?
Does it come down to weights?
Does it come down to because you can answer this since you're a highly more technical person than I am.
Like, how are we evaluating the openness of AI going forward?
Yeah, there's a few different metrics and it depends on what we're talking about.
So if we're talking about the models, then yes, there are two different scales that you would look at there for openness.
The first is the training data and then the second is the weights.
And between the two of those, if both of those are open, then you can say it's like a fully open model.
There's also, though, kind of a different barrier that is the ability for you to run this model on your own.
And something can be fully open and still not realistic for a normal person to run if they don't have a billion dollar data center.
So that is also a barrier to openness.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad or evil model.
It just means that it's realistically not something that people are going to find accessible.
And then there's open AI tools.
And those are tools that could use any model, whether the model is open or closed, but the tool itself is open.
So you can know what that tool is doing, how they're using the AI, and ensure that you're aligned with the usage that's happening there.
And have the freedom to choose these models that are open, including a local model, if you're able to run one yourself.
Thank you for explaining that, because I think we're still in a stage where a lot of people are still getting into AI.
I'm seeing because of what Anthropix said to the government and said, no, we've got a boundary with you guys.
Trying Claude Cowork now because of that.
I'm getting into this.
I'm now kind of open to AI where I wasn't before because I really did think it was evil before.
And it's certainly like anything.
It can be used for evil.
The U.S. dollar can be used for evil.
OK, so like anything can go on to an evil trajectory.
But I want to kind of back up for a second here because you also said something else that was important.
And it was about how a non-technical person can access this tech.
You know, I've kind of carved my path, as you know, in the Bitcoin Noster space.
Noster?
Noster.
See, the more I talk to you, I say Noster.
But I've carved this path here where I'm a non-technical person who's gotten into this
field because I'm, you know, a marketer and I want to use the tools and I want to be more
high tech.
And I've certainly in the last year, especially thanks to Vibe Coding, thanks to working at
Soapbox and your tutelage too. You've taught me a lot of things. I've become more technically
skilled, but I'm hardly a developer. Like I'm hard, I'm like well, well below like the DevRel
level, you know, that Derek has where Derek, Derek's been spinning up apps and he's always
been doing that though. But, but he's really leveled up with AI over the last year because
of Vibe coding. And he's, I think he's put a lot more dev into DevRel than, than he would have
maybe a year ago. And so at some point, though, I was kind of like, do I keep up leveling my skills
to where I become kind of like a baby software developer? Do I go down the realm of like a
boot.dev or freed code camp and start doing that? And I kind of really thought about it. I was like,
you know, maybe not, because actually, it's actually good that I'm the non-technical person.
And like, hello, what can't Shakespeare do for me? Right. Like the vibe coding can help me level
up my skills. And I've kind of gone that route to where I could have gone down the become a baby
developer route. But instead I chose, hey, I'm going to use the tool. The tools exist because I
know a lot of people in our space are like, oh, my God, I was going to learn software development,
but now I don't have to. Now I don't have to code now. I don't have to learn a programming language.
I can vibe code. I can use all of these tools that are available to me now, which we won't name
because there's like a thousand of them at this point. It's just it blows up. And, you know, we
We have Shakespeare, which works with so many things, which is probably a whole other conversation
in a whole other podcast.
But you don't have to know anything about coding now to do anything.
You don't even have to understand Nostra.
Nostra tools are getting a lot better.
And that was kind of the purpose of Ditto was to like, here, have a social profile that
pulls together every single thing that Nostra can do.
So it's like Ditto can do for you if you pull together TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, the whole
thing, pull it all together and then some and make yourself your own super app. If you're so
inclined, you don't have to. But I think once you log into Ditto for the first time and create your
own Ditto, you're going to create your own social experience. It's going to get kind of addicting
to kind of have that control again. And so like you never like made me feel small. Like you were
always like, I'll show you how to do this thing. Okay. And so I think if you can speak to kind of
the place where we're at where you can become a developer if you want to. You also don't have to
become a developer at this point in time because the tools exist. Also, you built some of these
tools. Like the problems that you saw that caused you to build these tools. And now we're in this
place where you can really, in every way, choose your own adventure. And we're actually, I think
finally, are we really meeting people where they're at now on a technical level? Depends on who the
person is for sure. Something we found really interesting is that kids are like love our stuff
and are super able to use it. They have no trouble. They understand it immediately and they're able to
figure out how to use the different menus and they able to do what they want And they often come up with really creative ways to use it that we did not anticipate which I think is really cool Upside we noticed that some generations might struggle
more to use it. And it was interesting because we thought the more experienced you are in general
with using different tools, the better you would be at figuring out how to use this one.
But that doesn't seem to always be the case. Sometimes, of course, I'm speaking in generalizations
here. But I've been really surprised and impressed by how much kids and, you know, I'm not talking
about like little, little children, but middle school to high school age kids tend to really be
resonating with it, which I find. Yeah, I just find they're really interesting. I think it says
something about the ability for young people to quickly learn things. And when, you know, when I
first started learning HTML and CSS, I was also a high school kid. And same with, I think, probably
every engineer on our team started in either middle school or high school. And there's just,
you know, when you're young, you're able to soak up and learn things so quickly. So that's just to
say about meeting people where they're at. But then in terms of right now where people are,
would I recommend going and doing code bootcamp? No, definitely not. Especially not if you're
trying to make a career out of that at this point. I realize that some people are going to need to
learn to code for the future to be able to program the things but like not that far into the future
like right now the people that are like mid-level devs they should continue working up to becoming
senior devs but we are seeing at this point that for the junior developers on our team and that we
work with there is not a whole lot of point in them doing things manually anymore because the
AI is just so much better at it than a junior developer.
And so I do think if you're interested in learning the skill for the skill itself,
for the craft of it, for the love of the process,
then absolutely.
The same reason that we still learn skills that we don't need anymore.
Like if you like knitting, we don't really need...
This is going to get me canceled.
I realize the knitters are feral online.
However, we have invented machines that make clothing and blankets and everything much more efficiently than knitting.
However, if you love knitting for the joy of the craft and it brings you pleasure to do, then absolutely learn it, do it, and maintain that craft in our society.
I think that's valuable.
But if you were just going to say, my goal is just to get a shirt.
That's all I want.
I don't care how it's made.
I just want a shirt at the end of this.
then knitting is probably not the most efficient way to get a shirt in 2026.
So that's kind of how I feel about coding.
Yeah, the path is going to be a little bit different now to where it's going to be kind of,
if you want to be a software developer when you grow up,
it's unavoidable that you're going to have to know how to do some things
and do a lot of things with AI as your assistant.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, understanding the systems that you're working in on a big picture level
is extremely important. And the AI cannot necessarily at this point replace your understanding
of that because right now the AI is very, you have to give it the right prompt still.
But you can use the AI to understand the system you're working in, in order to give it the
right prompt. So, you know, like they're even the most senior engineers on our team, they
very rarely go in and actually write code line by line by hand. But the senior engineers
on our team using the same models are able to get better results because they know the correct thing
to prompt. So that is going to be the training process moving forward, I think, is how to work
with AI rather than how to write each individual line of code by hand. That's the marked difference
where like if Heather codes something, it's going to be, I have no idea what's wrong with it. I don't
know how to find the problem with it. If there are errors or whatever, and I don't have the knowledge
to maintain it. I'm still going to need to hand it off to MK if it actually needs to go live
somewhere. And she's going to be like, cool, I can work with this. You know, thanks. Thanks for
kicking it off for me. Like, yeah, that not sometimes I don't know what to ask him. Alex
will be like, hey, you need to tell it to make you a favicon. And that was like a light turning
on for me where it was like, OK, I never built an app with a favicon before until he made me do it.
And now I'm making everybody else do it with their apps.
I'm like, oh, it has that little black box, like, in the tab.
Can you just tell it that you need a favicon?
Just that's all you need to do.
And then it's like, oh.
And then everybody else's light turns on.
And so there's still, like, these little idiosyncrasies.
Like, well, you don't know what you don't know.
So, like, yes, you can build your own app in 2026.
But you also may not build the best thing without the oversight of somebody who knows a little bit more than you to kind of critique and go, hey, maybe you should add this.
And so that's been a game changer for me.
So I want to get back to Ditto since we're launching the new Ditto and we know the backstory
of Ditto.
The future of Ditto, though, is kind of like a choose your own adventure as well.
And we are looking for feedback.
And like, what are some of the early feedback that we've gotten from our test users on Ditto?
Because this is kind of, it's familiar in a way, because if you log on to it, the first
thing I think you're going to see is that it looks like Twitter.
A lot of the Nostra apps initially, to me, look like Twitter, whether you're looking at Domus or Primal or you log into Ditto and it's going to look like Twitter.
But then you kind of get to make it into something else.
So what is something like the early, early reviews that we found from our users, MK?
Yeah, a lot of excitement.
A lot of people who are not currently like the typical Nostra user are really enjoying this.
I think that's something that's the most fun to me.
Like we have some of the women that I'm friends with in real life here who are actually excited about this and not just doing it as a favor to me.
You know, they're setting their profile themes.
They're finding all the little hidden secrets inside of this app and really making it their own, telling us the things that they want to see.
Previously, we had a list of fonts that you could choose from for your profile.
And they said, we want to be able to upload a custom font.
So we gave them custom fonts.
Stuff like that. We're also hearing, you know, feedback on just in general more, like just more features, more customization options that they love it.
And yet it's also inspiring this creativity that then is pushing them to want more and more.
And so, you know, to what we were just speaking about with the vibe coding, I think that the direction that we are seeing online software move is rather than it being where people need to ask the developer for every little thing that they want.
We are, and I don't have exactly the answer of how we're going to do this yet, but we are exploring ways that we can combine these two worlds right now of Shakespeare and Ditto to make it so that you don't need to ask us for more options, but that you actually are empowered to use these tools that exist now to create the option that you want.
So that is, I think, the direction that we are going with Ditto, where it truly is.
If you can build it on Noster, you can have it in Ditto.
And we have some kind of early drafts of what that might look like, but it's still very experimental.
And I think it's going to be really cool when we actually kind of hit the nail on the head with what it is.
So not only did you build us something that helps us take the Internet back,
you built something that the future of Ditto will mean that not only do I have control of this app,
I have control of my internet experience, but I have control of where it's going next to where if I have a good idea and I say, oh, I want custom fonts, for example, which is already implemented.
But, you know, I want custom fonts.
I don't have to bother MK or Alex anymore.
I just kind of add it in.
It's a little democratic.
We're going to give people freedom.
Right.
Freedom of choice.
Freedom to build.
And to some degree, they do already have this on Ditto.
You can right now go onto Ditto and in the bottom right, there's a button that says edit in Shakespeare.
And if you click that, then you can right now edit Ditto with AI to have any different feature that you want that we don't currently offer.
So there is already to some degree this element of that.
What we're really looking to do, I think, instead of making it just about changing Ditto, we are really seeing Noster as, you know, I think Noster kind of got pigeonholed as being a Twitter alternative.
Yes.
And even worse, a blue sky alternative.
which is my heart but if you look at the numbers like no one knows what no stir is if you say
oh it's kind of like blue sky there's a chance they've heard of blue sky and then at least could
get to understand what no stir is that is where no stir is right now unfortunately and people do
not want another twitter alternative they are sick of them that's some other feedback we've
been getting is uh blue sky was a flop like mastodon sucks like better versus like why would
we want to go to Noster? And I think that Noster has really done a disservice to itself by being
these Twitter clones over and over and over again. So many devs on Noster are building the exact same
product. Like they're all just building a Twitter alternative that has Bitcoin zaps. Like who we
don't need 17 of those. Like people are sick of it. And by the way, they're all fighting over the
same like who thousand users like no one is bringing new people into this ecosystem so that's
a problem we like we're done with that like as far as i'm concerned we are done with that so
my audience right now the people i'm looking to bring in are people who would not otherwise
be on no stir because they don't want another twitter alternative they're sick of all this
other stuff but they're also and i think this kind of applies to almost everyone to some degree
they are sick of the mainstream platforms whether they are sick for censorship whether they're sick
for political reasons on either side of the aisle everyone has their issues whether they're sick
about it for personal reasons they've seen the harm it's done to their mental health to their
child's mental health whatever everyone understands that these platforms are bad and that they are run
by psychopaths that are just using you like cattle basically yeah for our data and whatnot but they
They don't see a hope for a better future because all of these other alternatives have just been soul sucking.
Honestly, Blue Sky is just a total wasteland.
Same with the Fediverse.
You know, yeah, like there's no joy to be found in any of these places.
And I think that that is what we really need to be disrupting in this Twitter alternative ecosystem.
And so we changed up our entire landing page of Ditto.
And so on Noster, there are these Twitter notes.
That's the no or no in Noster is the notes.
And that's kind of what everyone has been building around.
The Twitter alternative is these notes.
On the Ditto landing page, we made the decision to take the notes out.
So if you go right now to ditto and you not logged in your default view does not include notes it includes only other stuff you see only the things that are video fun and creative right
so like only things that are going to actually be interesting and engaging in a different way
than twitter and i think that that is really going to help bring people in who are sick of twitter
and twitter alternatives yeah as you know i've you you and morgan encouraged me to get on tiktok
for the last couple weeks and it's it is a an interesting place there's good there's bad uh
you know but it's the one good thing about tiktok is it's it's not pushing the bachelorette
controversy on me i kid you not like really you're not we're on different algorithms then
because I am fully, fully on reality talk.
I mean, I love reality TV, though.
So, yes, my entire algorithm is Taylor Frankie Paul right now.
See, my thing was like, okay, so that's not showing up on my TikTok at all.
But Twitter is, like, force-feeding it to me.
And I'm not a reality TV person at all.
And it's, like, one way we're opposite.
So it's like Twitter was like,
you need to know about this woman throwing this chair at her family.
And I was like, you're just assuming that because I'm a woman
that I want to know about this really that's insulting to me but like TikTok I don't know
if I make any movement on TikTok that becomes the feed right so if I go look at book talk that
becomes a feed if I look at golfers that becomes the feed and then you get it's hard to get out of
it like it's just so bizarre to get back on a legacy platform I was well and especially you
know you're still yeah to be clear like the reason I suggest people to get on TikTok is not because I
think that more people should be on TikTok unless they are going there specifically to try to poach
people from TikTok to other platforms. Which is why I'm there. And I think that TikTok is, yes,
exactly. And I think that TikTok is actually a under-targeted demographic for the people that
are building alternatives. And because TikTok is so dystopian and there aren't viable alternatives
to it, people have this real love-hate relationship with it. And I'll even include myself in that.
I am an avid TikTok user because for me, it's the only place I can get the content I actually want to see actually given to me.
True. That's true.
On Twitter, I mean, again, you and I being opposites here, I would love if my Twitter would send me reality TV drama.
Instead, I get all these other startup founders who are vibe coding their way into some other dumb centralized proprietary app.
And I'm like, I don't want to see other dumb vibe coders.
I have enough of that at home.
Right?
We see enough of it in our world daily.
And it's like the content is a problem.
So it's like with Ditto, if you're getting on Ditto and you're getting on Nostra, you're creating your own adventure, right?
You're creating what you want to see.
And on TikTok, I feel like I'm kind of a victim of whatever last action I took.
And it's like, oh, well, you clicked, you touched it when it was talking about a book.
So now you're on BookTok forever, which is a nice place to be.
But one thing I noticed about TikTok is, you know, we still, the annoying thing is the lack of network effect on Nostra.
So we still kind of have to be everywhere.
Like I had an event to promote and to promote the event, I want to be on Nostra apps like
Satlantis or Derek's Plectos, right?
Because it's in the ecosystem.
Everything's interoperable.
But then I have to go and go, well, this event is in the DC market and the Luma.com app is
popular in the DC market.
So I still have to be there too.
And then I also want to be on Club Orange, which is a little more centralized, but it
also has a Nostra component to it.
So the world is imperfect right now.
You're going to have apps that are maybe vibe coded, maybe not vibe coded.
Maybe they're built on Nostra.
Maybe they have a Nostra aspect to them.
We're kind of getting into a fuzzy area now where it's like, is it a Nostra app?
Is it not a Nostra app?
Does the end user care because they still don't understand how Nostra actually helps them because Nostra makes you cease to be the product?
I think Noster should not be something that you are hearing about in the marketing.
It should only be something that you learn about.
Once you have clicked through and started asking questions, then the answers should be there available for you if you want to learn and educate yourself great.
But no one besides a very, very tiny group of kind of insane people online cares about Noster for what it is.
True.
the only reason people are going to join is because we build something that they actually
want to use regardless of the underlying tech and we know this because they're using all of
these other platforms that have built something they want to use regardless of the underlying
tech and we just we have to be playing the same game that big tech is if we want to compete
and that doesn't mean to do it evilly it means to do it cleverly yeah yeah so we're not trying
to like lie to you about Nostra for any reason. It's just that we we've been doing this for a
couple of years. We know you don't care. Yeah. We know people don't care about central centralization
versus decentralization. I think some people are actually starting to wake up to that, but not the
masses. And it's like, here's where you come. I think that they care when you if they're willing
to sit down and listen to you explain it, then they will say that they agree 90 percent of the
time that decentralized is better. But yeah, getting someone's attention in this attention
economy is very, very hard. And you were going to lose 90% of those people as soon as you start
saying tech words that don't sound like they're relevant to them. Yeah. You know, another thing
I've noticed is what we're doing is still new and foreign to a lot of people. Like I was on
Twitter the other day extolling the virtues of the GeoZap on Club Orange, which is, you know,
back to having an event in D.C. I found people to zap who were in D.C. and who were in New York
City. It's like, hey, come to my event. Here's 21 sats. And I sent. So that's like 300 people
between D.C. and New York City and the Club Orange app cost me about five bucks to send sats to 300
people. Right. 21 sats a piece. Right. So that's super simple. And I was like, wow, this is so cool.
It turns on the light for me that I can you know, I've been advertising for a couple of years now,
but I love advertising. It's a great way to pay for somebody's attention rather than farm their
attention to sell to advertisers. Like, let me use my five bucks to get to 300 people's attention.
Maybe they'll come to my event, maybe not. But at least I'm not spamming them with something that
I didn't pay for. Like I'm paying for their attention. Well, this does not translate on
Bitcoin Twitter, right? So somebody immediately said, that sounds spammy. I'm like, it's not
spammy. I'm paying for your attention. So this concept is still new. Like we still have, because
we're doing something that's high tech and it has its own jargon, it has its own language. We still
are kind of in this treading water phase of explaining the thing to people. And I think
Ditto kind of gets us beyond that, where it's like, here's an entire app that works to get me what I
want, which is a feed that I custom, you know, Taylor, I get to have a theme that reflects my
personality. I can customize it so that it looks like it's mine. And it's not like all black doom
and gloom, the way Elon's app looks. It's like, okay, so I can get in here. And then I go, okay,
well, how do I find the content? I want a Noster. I'm Heather and I love cats and I just want cat
content and I want a cat theme. And then I can make my avatar cat shapes. So my little face and
my avatar, my little profile pic has a cat shape around it, which I think that's the ultimate cat
lady app. You know, that's super fun. That's where it becomes something that's different and better
for me as a user where you want dark mode, it's dark mode. You want light mode. And I think trying
to sell Bitcoin and Zaps to people who didn't already find Bitcoin on their own for their own
reasons in their soul is like, that's a loss. So it's a losing battle. Yeah. Ditto. Right. Ditto
includes Zaps. It includes Bitcoin payments that you can make. However, what we are not doing is
we are not saying this is a Bitcoin app. Get your Bitcoin here. Do your lightning here. Do your Zaps
here. No. Instead, our plan is we wait. There are things that people, when they come to platforms,
will eventually say, I'd be willing to give money for that. That is the moment that then we introduce
apps to them. It is not when they are onboarding and now suddenly you're shoving Bitcoin down their
throat and they're like, what is this? I don't want this. No. It's the minute that someone says,
like, I wish that there was an item shop where I could get items that I can use to customize my
profile with. Great. You just asked for a shop. Now we say, here's a shop and here's how you can
zap to get items in the shop. And essentially it becomes in-game currency, something everyone is
totally fine doing. It's actually crazy. All these people are, you know, against Bitcoin or against
Lightning or whatever because they think that's a scam. But then they'll go on these games that
have in-game currencies that you give your money for and you can only use it in this game. You
You know, people are totally fine with these like fake Internet monies as long as they haven't been propagandized against it.
So I think that is our strategy that we're planning to take with Zaps and Bitcoin integration in Ditto is we're not pushing it as a Bitcoin app.
Instead, we are waiting until there's something you want to buy.
And then we say, here's the tool to buy it.
Same as any other online thing does.
We're meeting people where they're at.
We're not driving it down their throat.
They need to up level their skills to do that.
Like we're just meeting people where they are with what they know.
Amazing.
Like people will buy these roses and unicorns in TikTok to gift to creators.
That is basically a shit coin.
Like what you've just done.
You have just bought a rose to give a rose to a creator.
And what you can't do though is once you buy that rose,
you can't then sell that rose to get your money back as the person that bought it.
So there is no exchange of value besides you're just giving value
to TikTok and maybe to the creator if they get some portion of that. But with Zaps, it's like we
are giving you this tool you can use. And by the way, you're also not locked into our platform with
this quote unquote in-game currency or platform currency because it's actually just real money
that you can take off platform to do anything else within the real world. Yes. And I think that once
people start to get that, I really hope it creates this like wake up call of, wait a minute, in this
game that I'm playing. I can't take this currency with me to another game. I would love to see
games being forced to adopt sats as their in-game currency because people get so frustrated that
they can't take their currency across different platforms because they get used to doing that
online on Noster. We're still, I think, pretty far away from that happening, but that is the
vision I think we can be working towards. MK is bringing the vision and MK and I have to jump off
now. But MK is going to be back on the podcast at some point because one, she's nice enough to let
me do this to her and force interrogate her from time to time. You let me do it every once in a
while. So I appreciate that for you. And there's our tease of another thing coming from Soapbox
soon. Ditto.pub. Get it. Mess with it. Let us know how you like it, how you want to fix it up,
because it's your ditto, really. It's not our ditto. We made it for the world. Thank you, MK.
Thank you, Heather. This was fun.